Ms. Hyder is not a new writer. On the contrary, she is well established in Urdu literary field and has several fine novels and collections of stories to her credit. She has also been a focus of controversy more than once. In the early 'fifties when the "Progressives" were eager to set up inquisitions, Ms. Hyder was accused of being a reactionary, a prisoner of morbid nostalgia, employing a style that was brittle if not flippant. Her real crime was that she preferred to write only about what she knew well. Yes, she did mostly write about the upper-crest people she came from. No, she did not denounce her characters the way the party-line demanded. But her detractors were utterly wrong to suggest that she wished for the old days to return. She is too wise to indulge in such naivete. Her situation was that she wished to celebrate life as she felt it, and if she lived at 21 Fyzabad Road in Lucknow, it was foolish of her critics to demand that she should celebrate the vitality of life in the slums of Bombay. Those who demanded from her coarse class-consciousness, had no feeling for the immensity of the pain—genuine, private as well as social—that she felt as life around her changed. It was not that she was unaware of the economic ties that existed between people as well as between classes of people. She was merely more concerned with human ties, the ties that are not quite defensible, when you come down to it, except in terms of those old-fashioned values: loyalty, trust, humility, sacrifice. Does that make her work fraudulent? Not in the least. Not unless one insists on formulaic literature, which must divide its characters into good and evil in order to meet some external standard of social justice. Such formulaic literature, for example, was produced by the reams by the so-called "Progressive" writers of Urdu on the terrible events of the partition of the country. Ms. Hyder's novels are also concerned with those social and political upheavals, those sea-changes, that transformed the face of India, but she writes not like an outsider who is writing about other 'victims' and thus must also point a finger at someone 'guilty'. Her voice is that of a victim who chooses not to accuse anyone —for who is there but another victim? This position does not take anything away from the felt emotion, from the intensity of the grief. It does,however, allow for a piece of writing that grows on you with time, its unshrill tone allowing you to discover underlying subtler modulations. Ms. Hyder is concerned with Time, that faceless force which transforms all faces, which is linear as well as spiral, which we can ignore only at our peril, and which is as easily accessible as the most ordinary wristwatch and as boundless as the universe itself. Though the inevitability of change is the only reality, Ms. Hyder urges us to recognize that it has one face of hope as well as another of loss. A linearly progressing time brings change, and change can be a harbinger of grief or joy. Should we then take sides? Should we say that change is progress? That change is destructive? Progressive? Reactionary? That, Ms. Hyder confides, would be too easy, too simplistic, for these issues cannot be settled by referring to the material world alone. What counts for her is the human spirit and the relationships that blossom forth. That is where the linearity of time curves into a spiral, forcing us to recognize the past that never dies. This, of course, has its tragic side -106-