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 The autobiography was published in Urdu under the title ‘Buri Aurat ki Katha' in 1994. Now the Oxford University Press has brought out an English translation of the volume titled ‘A Bad Woman's Story', done by Durdana Soomro, an avid golfer who lives in Karachi and has already won admiration for her translations of Pakistani writers, some included in the anthology Fault Lines (2008).
Kishwar Naheed gives many reasons for her being a different type of woman. Her love marriage at the age of 19 was perhaps the first step. She writes that her romance was still at the embryonic stage when her brother got wind of it. The result was "a hasty engagement and wedding was arranged. It all happened in such a hurry that neither the family nor the friends of the bridegroom knew about it."
Title: A Bad Woman's Story
Author: Kishwar Naheed
Translator: Durdana Soomro
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Pakistan
Price: PKR 595
Pages: 350
ISBN: 978-0-19-547737-5
The bride was turned out of her parents' house with half a kilo of ladoos, a sack of books and a box full of the trophies she had won as prizes as a poet and debater. The couple got into a tonga and arrived at a house on Abbott Road, Lahore where each room was occupied by a different tenant. "Our wedding night," she says, "was also strange. We both felt like thieves and were a little scared."
The marriage soon turned sour. Kishwar has given an account of her unhappy matrimonial life and the hardships she faced in bringing up her two sons to whom her autobiography is dedicated. She has also written about the hard work that she undertook in order to keep her body and soul together.
A Bad Woman's Story is not the story of one "bad" woman. It tells the tale of countless Pakistani women who had the audacity to say "yes" to life during the middle years of the past century. If Kishwar Naheed is most prominent among them, it is because she did not only stand up against social, cultural and political oppression, but also propelled others to stand-up against incumbent traditions through her own example and through her powerful poetry.
In ‘Buri Aurat Ki Katha' (A Bad Woman's Story), she has let her wounds remain opened and unhealed. The wounds inflicted by the world around her for being born a woman in the middle of the twentieth century, a liberal woman in an orthodox religious society and a sensitive woman who decides to side with those who fight with tyranny and political oppression in the chequered political history of her country.
The story of Kishwar Naheed is unique in some parts because every individual is unique, specially an artist like her. But it is quite universal for most part because this is the story of a sensitive, emancipated woman from any society.
She rejoices in the change that has already taken place from the times of her own mother and herself to that of her daughters-in-law and granddaughters. She describes the lifestyles they pursue, aspirations they cherish and convey, and possibilities that are available to them as the newer generations of women around the world. There is a sense of achievement for the struggle put up by her predecessors and her own generation. In this struggle, there are moments to be cherished in the form of small pleasures of life, whether with family and friends or the time spent in the vibrant literary circles of Lahore when she lived there. A small collection of her photographs and those of friends, family and literary colleagues enrich the book. 
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