Regarded as ‘The First Lady of Urdu Poetry’, Ada Jafri was a poet far ahead of her times, whose contribution to Urdu literature can never be forgotten. One of the earliest poets to introduce feminist themes in her art, she usually wrote ghazals, though she experimented with nazm as well. 

Here are some of her finest couplets that beautifully express the haunting pain of solitude: 

We might think that loneliness is a curse of the millennial generation, but solitude has kept poets and artists company for far longer than we can imagine. And there is no finer proof of that than Ada Jafri’s poetry. 

Design credits: Shubham Gupta