Father Shahid Hosain Kidwai, Mother Begum Nisar, and older sisters Zakia and Razia, ca. 1915
  I wanted to write about that agonizing heart break when we were all split up and a brother could not see a brother and a mother could not be with her dying son and families that had been proud to always collect together when there were weddings or deaths or births or anything, can not be together.

And I couldn't write it. And I wrote this book [Phoenix Fled] and was dissatisfied with it. But I handed it in to the agent and she was delighted and said that the person who was editing it and looking after it was Cecil Day Lewis [later poet-laureate of England].

Well, I mean I couldn't have dreamt of such a thing happening. I, who had read his poems, and been, as I told you that girl in my school reading all these people and wanting so much later on when I grew older and went to the university to meet poets and writers, that it should be Cecil Day Lewis involved with this?

She said, he's actually said that it is very autobiographical.

 



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