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In 1947, a broken-hearted Saliha Abid Husain — an Urdu writer — wrote ‘Niras Mein Aas’. Everything that she had built — home, books and possessions — had been lost in communal riots. The book was dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, a man she believed personified hope. “The hungama began,” she writes. “I wrote and wrote. My husband thought hungami adab was journalism, not literature… but if I had not written it, the veins of my brain would have burst.” Almost 80 years later, her stories have been translated into English as ‘7 from 1947 — First-Hand Stories’ by Syeda S Hameed. The stories will keep you up at night, as they should.