Mr Sethi's behaviour was "an even bigger case of hypocrisy than my experience with the feudal system." "Mr Sethi continued to take all the earnings from my life story while I brought up five children without any financial support from their father," she went on. His "blatant injustice" caused her "mental torture", she said. The man had stolen her royalties, she said he had insisted that the book was his he had thrown away pages of the original contract and forged new ones in order to cheat her on foreign rights.
There followed a long, rambling denunciation by Durrani of her former friend and publisher, Najam Sethi a long list of crimes. Even the cameras of PTV, the state-controlled television network, were present. The scene: Tehmina Durrani had called a press conference. The book was an instant sensation in Pakistan.Ī happy ending? Fast-forward eight years, to in Lahore. I am indebted to them all." They included Sethi and Mohsin. I cannot take the responsibility of naming them. It was a happy, fruitful collaboration in a coded acknowledgment in the first edition, Durrani thanked "four people without whom could not have seen the light of print. As a legal precaution, the publisher's name appeared nowhere in the book, and in the contract Jugnu Mohsin was named as publisher (Sethi says that all three of them felt that Mustafa Khar would hesitate to take two women to court).ĭurrani vested all foreign rights with Sethi and Mohsin, in exchange for a 50 per cent royalty on foreign sales. Amid much trepidation and fear of lawsuits or worse, the book came out in Pakistan in June 1991. With her politically explosive story to tell, Tehmina Durrani was in need of a publisher with guts, and a mutual friend introduced her to Sethi.