Hyder had a strong self-belief, which even encouraged her to translate her works into English. It led to some rather incongruous moments and, sometimes, clumsy dialogue. But, no doubt, during her lifetime there would be very few who could have corrected her as the stern Annie Apa or the supercilious Pom Pom Darling would have scuttled all attempts to edit her.

This delightful collection of stories has to be read bearing in mind the author’s eclectic tastes. They are amusing as well as wide ranging. The only story to which the word “traditional” can be applied is “Honour”. In this we meet the redoubtable, honour-bound Shamshad Begum who waits, like Miss Havisham, for her fiancé to return. When he finally does, with a “tawaif” in tow, Shamshad Begum rejects all his overtures and allows her wealth and estates to fall into ruin rather than succumb. As an elderly spinster, she is persuaded to become a teacher-cum-housekeeper. She retains her innocent hauteur and, in an ironical twist, unknown to her, her last job is in a brothel.

While other women fall, similarly, on bad times — as in the novella “Street Singers of Lucknow” and “A Night on Pali Hill” — the theme of women betrayed by no-good lovers is handled differently, every time. “A Night on Pali Hill”, for instance, is written like a play in which two eccentric Parsi spinsters scare away their accidental visitors, when they haul out a dead fiancé. But the most interesting stories are those with a time machine and an H.G. Wells-like twist — “Beyond the Speed of Light” where a rocket takes Padma into the past, and “Confessions of Saint Flora of Georgia that catapults two verbose skeletons into the future.

... contd.