Like the writings of James Joyce before them, or Salman Rushdie much later on, the early stories of Zaheer and Ali (though not those of Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar, which are written in a much more straightforward style) are so experimental with regard to form that it would take a seasoned (and hyper-sensitive) literary critic to find the blasphemy woven therein. It can safely be imputed, therefore, that these writings were damned through hearsay and rumor, and that just as very few people actually bother to make it all the way through The Satanic Verses to find out what the fuss is about (and interestingly, some of the fuss is actually about the ‘Satanic Verses’ of legend in one of Zaheer’s stories), far fewer ever laid eyes on the allegedly incendiary stories of Angaare. In fact, the possibly blasphemous materials are far outnumbered by the stories that deal with the theme of sexism and sexual violence against women. Did Rashid Jahan’s very accessible one-act play, a dialogue between two women about the dangers of having too many children, particularly uterine prolapse, offend patriarchal sensibilities with its clear challenge to the authority of a husband over a wife’s body and its nearly clinical descriptions of gynaecological ailments offend some male readers? Perhaps it was so, as Rashid Jahan, a gynaecologist, was the only woman in the collective, and came in for the most abuse following the publication of Angare, according to the Penguin edition’s translator, Snehal Shingavi, in his introduction.