“One day when she looked at the portrait, she considered how blessed she had been in life. She contemplated her good fortune in finding an upright man like Akbar Ahmad as her life partner and felt grateful for his bounteous legacy, which released her from all financial cares. Akbar Ahmad looked back at her, his face cast in an expression of long suffering. Mona’s eyes welled up with tears.”–from The Story of a Widow

After the death of her husband Akbar Ahmad, Mona finds herself settling ambivalently into a new life. But the calm rhythm of her days–gardening, cooking, time with her neighbours and family in Karachi–is upset by the appearance of Salamat Ali, the new tenant in her friend Mrs. Baig’s house. Vivacious, friendly, and at times almost impertinent, Salamat Ali is both a breath of fresh air and a disconcerting new presence in Mona’s life, and their awkward meetings always seem to end in embarrassment or misunderstanding. When Salamat Ali, encouraged by Mrs. Baig, presents Mona with a marriage proposal, she is forced to consider what kind of future she wishes to make for herself–and what her past with Akbar Ahmad really means.

The possibility of Mona marrying Salamat Ali shocks her grown daughters Tanya and Amber, and scandalizes her extended family, according to whom Mona’s happiness comes second to what people say about widows who remarry. As Mona negotiates the complex web of tradition-bound in-laws and gossiping, interfering relatives, she finds Salamat Ali waking her to the pleasures of life that thirty years with her dour first husband all but smothered. But if Salamat Ali helps her discover something essential, he also exposes her to new risks, and new dangers.

The Story of a Widow is a beautifully observant novel, one that pays careful attention to the delicate movements of the heart in romantic and family life. But it is equally concerned with the mores of a society in which traditional roles both support and constrain men and–particularly–women. Gently humorous and profoundly perceptive, The Story of a Widow is the moving tale of a woman’s discovery of her voice, and herself.

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“Tender, heartwarming and unabashedly sentimental, in Mona, Farooqi has created everyone’s ideal woman: she can make you laugh and cry on the same page. The Story of A Widow is an ultra-realistic miniature in which Farooqi has evoked the tribulations of extended families and mid-life with sparse prose. If Jane Austen had grown up in a Karachi suburb, this is what she would have written.”
— Mohammed Hanif, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes

“I loved The Story of a Widow! It is a novel full of charm and humour, and Farooqi writes about Mona Ahmad and her attempts to negotiate a world full of interfering if well-meaning relatives with a warm understanding of human frailties.”
— Anita Rau Badami, author or Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

“Readers are not so much transported to suburban Karachi as they are transplanted into the heart of an Indian family. And families are . . . well, families, it seems, are the same world over. . . . [The Story of a Widow is a] charming and insightful novel . . . [A] life-affirming work.”
— The Edmonton Journal

“It is not a novel of nuance and subtlety but one of instruction and encouragement.”
— Winnipeg Free Press

“Readers are not so much transported to suburban Karachi as they are transplanted into the heart of an Indian family. And families are … well, families, it seems, are the same the world over…. Charming and insightful.”
— The Gazette

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Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author and translator. His critically acclaimed translation of the Indo-Islamic epic, The Adventures of Amir Hamza, was published by the Modern Library in 2007. He has also translated the works of contemporary Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed.

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