Umeed e Wafa By Anabiya Khan

About this novel

Umeed e Wafa (Urdu: امیدِ وفا) by Anabiya Khan is an Urdu novel about a woman abandoned with her little son in a foreign country. Her husband Sajid divorces her on the spot, keeps her passport and shuts the gate on her and the child.

She begs him not to send her away. In this country she has no one, and where would she go? Sajid doesn’t want to hear it. He leaves for the office telling her she’d better be gone when he gets back. Alone, she cries to Allah that He knows she has no one but Him here, and searches the whole house for her passport, cupboard by cupboard, so she can at least get back to her own people. It isn’t there.

پردیس میں تنہا ایک ماں، اور دل میں وفا کی ایک امید۔

Her small son can’t understand why his mother is crying. When Sajid returns, he says the word talaq, drags her out by the arm and bolts the gate behind them. She pounds on it until her voice gives out. When the elderly neighbour, Amma, looks out and asks what’s wrong, she lies and says she was only going to the market. Walking away with her son, Rania steps into the road, and a speeding car hits her.

The last thing in that opening is the boy running to her, crying for his mama. Anabiya Khan doesn’t soften any of it: the cruelty of the husband, the loneliness of being in pardes with no one to call, and the small lies a mother tells to keep her dignity in front of the neighbours.

Anabiya Khan writes it in long, emotional paragraphs, and the first pages ask the question in the title: is there still any hope of wafa for a woman left with nothing? At 100 pages it’s short and intense.

You can read Umeed e Wafa online here or download the complete PDF for free. More by Anabiya Khan: Chahat, Khula, Haq, on the Anabiya Khan novels page.