Wohi Kahani Phir Se by Hashmi Hashmi

About this novel

Wohi Kahani Phir Se (Urdu: وہی کہانی پھر سے) by Hashmi Hashmi is an emotional Urdu family novel about a baby girl stolen on the night she is born. She is raised by a poor couple far from her real parents, and the title means the same story, once again.

It opens in a hospital corridor. Ahmed Shah waits anxiously outside a room while his beloved wife Hareem gives birth. The doctor comes out with good news: “Mubarak ho, it’s a girl.” But there’s sad news too: Hareem can never be a mother again. Ahmed is shaken for a moment, then accepts it as Allah’s will. Holding the tiny baby, he calls her his “doll”, and when Hareem wakes, she says she has got her wish, a daughter for Ahmed and for their son Bilal. Ahmed goes to tell the family, and Hareem falls asleep.

ایک ہی رات میں ماں کی گود خالی، اور ایک غریب گھر میں رحمت۔

When she wakes, the baby is gone. Someone crept into the room in the night and took her. The kidnapper ran towards a slum, but on the road a car hit him, and the baby tumbled into a rubbish bin by the roadside. At dawn, Abdullah, a labourer walking home from Fajr prayers in that slum, hears a baby crying, finds her in the bin and rushes her to a hospital because she is struggling to breathe. A few days later he brings her home. Abdullah and his wife, who sews clothes for a living, have everything they need except one thing: Allah has never given them children.

Hashmi Hashmi tells a story of loss on one side and blessing on the other, and the reader already knows what the two families don’t. It’s a moving read about fate, family and how the truth finds its way home.

You can read Wohi Kahani Phir Se online here or download the complete PDF for free. For more family stories, browse our Romantic Urdu novels.