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Altaf Fatima. The One Who Did Not Ask. Rukhsana Ahmad, tr. Portsmouth, N.H. Heinemann. 1993. xiv + 334 pages. $10.95/L6.99.
The One Who Did Not Ask echoes the themes and ideological viewpoint of many other Urdu writers of the time. Like the latter, Altaf Fatima (who moved to Pakistan after the Partition, taught for many years at Islamia College for Women in Lahore, and currently resides in that city) subscribes to the ideology of nostalgia for a more glorious past in a United India where Muslims and Hindus had managed to coexist for centuries. This ideological leaning makes her create a novel in which the political turmoil sweeping India in the pre-Partition years and the growing Hindu-Muslim antipathy and strife assume peripheral status; what matters is the coming of age of the heroine, Gaythi Ara Jahangir, and the delineation of a centuries-old way of life drawing to a close.
Like Attia Hosain in Sunlight on a Broken Column, Fatima here chronicles the life of an upper-class Muslim household that...