Mera Maula By Hamna Tanveer

About this novel

Mere Maula by Hamna Tanveer is a social Urdu novel about a divorced young mother and the cruel gossip of her neighbours. Her family refuses to stay silent against the injustice she faces.

The story opens in an ordinary, middle-class home on a hot day. Maryam has just bathed little Hassan, and Jannat offers to get Rania ready too and warm up the khichri for her. Then the power goes out, just thirty seconds after it came back, and Jannat groans. She sits on a charpai in the courtyard, while in the drawing room across the way her mother, Shehnaz Begum, is talking with a neighbour.

The neighbour soon gets to the point. “Maryam ka rishta nahin dekha phir kahin?” Unmarried girls hardly find rishtay, she sighs, so where will a divorced woman find one? She claims that making a marriage work is a girl’s job, that Maryam left her husband after only two years, and that if she had kept him happy for four or five years, her home would have been settled.

Jannat, listening from the side, cannot stay quiet. She asks the neighbour how she can accuse her sister so confidently: does she have any proof? Why has this society decided that every fault belongs on a woman’s head? Everyone says Hammad divorced Maryam, so it must have been Maryam’s fault. “Mard chahe jootiyan khilane ke qabil ho, qusoorwar hamesha aurat hi hai,” she says, her face red with anger.

The neighbour storms off, taunting that at least her own daughter is sitting in her husband’s home, unlike Maryam. Shehnaz Begum warns Jannat that people already talk about her sharp tongue, and Jannat replies that she will always speak the truth and raise her voice against wrong. Maryam gently asks her sister not to wear herself out over others, but Jannat says that no one’s words can change the truth, because Allah knows who is right. Hamna Tanveer writes a strong story about dignity, injustice and trust in Allah.

دنیا کچھ بھی کہے، میرا مولا جانتا ہے کہ حق پر کون ہے۔

Read more by Hamna Tanveer: Tum Bin Jeena Mumkin Nahi, Shab e Chiragh and Sulagti Rahein, or see all Hamna Tanveer novels.