Bees Sau Gyaara (2011) was the first book of renowned author Mohammad Khalid Akhtar, who is celebrating his birth centenary this year. This novel was first published in 1950, 70 years ago this month under the arrangement of Maktaba-e-Jadeed in Lahore. The distinguished Urdu satirist Kanhaiya Lal Kapoor deemed it the first social and political satire in Urdu and had expressed the wish to be the novel’s writer.
The novel is dedicated to Akhtar’s fellow-maverick Fahmida Riaz ‘because apart from being a cheerful poetess and storyteller, she is also a sympathetic friend and we are both companions together. Also, in that fourteen or fifteen years after the publication of this book when she was an adolescent girl, she amazed and pleased the middle-aged writer of this book, his dreams broken by writing in her playful and witty letter that 2011 is her favourite book in the Urdu language and she has read it many times. And this at a time when everyone had forgotten my first book which I had written in my days of youth in a narrow and dark upper storey of Kharadar in Karachi with non-labour and ease (and I think that in a way this had flown out of me.)
So I now give this book to my friend who liked it in that this is her book. By beauty of coincidence I am merely its copywriter, not more than that.’
