This is a collection of short stories written in the 1940s by an author who is an acknowledged critic of Urdu fiction. Based mainly in British Calcutta and depicting life in the city, these stories, dealing mostly with family life, reveal a strand of realism which is far more natural than the ideologically introduced Realism of the Progressive Writers Association. These stories have a haunting appeal, and their quiet effectiveness is almost unique in the corpus of Urdu literature.