Hijab Imtiaz Ali (1908-1999) was known as the Queen of Romanticism in twentieth century Urdu literary circles. She was born in Hyderabad, India and moved to Lahore (which later became a part of Pakistan) after her marriage. In her seven-decade-long writing career, she wrote several short stories, novels, and plays. Her horror stories play with genre conventions, and can perhaps be best described as tongue-in-cheek gothic, with characters seemingly more concerned with the breaches of etiquette caused by supernatural phenomena, rather than their own fear. Throughout her life, Hijab populated all her writings - whether a romance novel or a terrifying short story - with a similar cast of characters, all of whom inhabit an imaginary universe of her own creation; a subtly feminist world that culturally resembles an amalgam of the Middle East and South Asia.