Mera Ye Bharam Tha By Sadiya Tayyab

About this novel

Mera Ye Bharam Tha by Sadiya Tayyab is an emotional Urdu romance about a sudden meeting with someone from the past. It explores the illusions that love can leave behind, as the title, this was my illusion, suggests.

The novel opens in an office. “Madam, aap se koi milne aaya hai,” the peon informs her. Her hands stop working for a moment and she looks up, then calmly tells him to have the visitor wait in the waiting room while she finishes her work. She goes straight back to her file, completely composed.

Exactly twenty minutes later she walks into the waiting room. “Ji farmaiye, kya kehna hai aap ko?” she asks the man sitting there with his head bowed. When he raises his head and looks at her, his eyes are full of longing, like someone gazing at the girl in front of him after a long time. For a moment her eyes freeze. She is seeing this man after two years, and her heart is pounding as if it will jump out of her chest. Her calm, professional manner hides a storm, and Sadiya Tayyab leaves us wondering what happened between them.

Then the story moves to a different time and a happier scene. A man comes home tired from the office and calls, “Maira, zara ek glass paani to pila do.” She appears in a flash, “jaise botal ka jinn,” ready and dressed up in his favourite colour, red lipstick on, and his tiredness melts away. He jokes that she seems to be in the mood to take his life today, and she laughs, pushes him away and tells him to change while she brings dinner. The contrast between this loving home and the tense office meeting makes the reader curious about how these lives connect.

The title says it all: what someone believed was true love may have been only a bharam, an illusion.

کچھ رشتے سچ لگتے ہیں، مگر وقت بتاتا ہے کہ وہ صرف ایک بھرم تھے۔

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