Whirlwind of the Heart: A Memoir

Writing in the wake of her parents' deaths, and her own heart attack--that most painfully embodied of life experiences--Mehr Farooqi finds herself turning to the great 19th century Urdu poets, Ghalib and Mir, to make sense of her heart's longing, and its complex choreographies of pain.

As poems unspool memory, she recalls the beauty and anxieties of her unique childhood in the literary city then known as Allahabad, where her father, the renowned Urdu scholar and writer Shamsur Rahman Farooqi edited the modernist Urdu journal Shabkhoon, and her mother Jamila, a fierce advocate for girls' education, founded and ran a school for impoverished children.

Weaving together fragments of poetry, personal experience, family histories, and literary criticism, this intimate and compelling memoir explores ruptures and continuities of modernity and tradition across partitions, borders, and diasporas.