attention for her short-story Lihaaf (The Quilt), which appeared in a 1942 issue of Adab-i-Latif, a Lahore-based literary journal. Inspired by the rumoured affair of a begum and her masseuse in Aligarh, the story chronicles the sexual awakening of Begum Jan following her unhappy marriage with a nawab. Upon release, Lihaaf attracted criticism for its suggestion of female homosexuality and a subsequent trial, with Chughtai being summoned by the Lahore High Court to defend herself against the charges of "obscenity". Fellow writer and member of the Progressive Writers' Movement Sadat Hassan Manto was also charged with similar allegations for his short-story Bu (Odour) and accompanied Chughtai to Lahore. The charges notwithstanding, both Chughtai and Manto were exonerated. The trial, which took place in 1945, itself drew much media and public attention and brought notoriety to the duo. Chughtai fared better in the public eye, having garnered support from such fellow members of the Progressive Writers' Movement as Majnun Gorakhpuri and Krishan Chander. Regardless, she detested the media coverage of the whole incident, which in her view weighted heavily upon her subsequent work; "[Lihaaf] brought me so much notoriety that I got sick of life. It became the proverbial stick to beat me with and whatever I wrote afterwards got crushed under its weight." Chughtai, however, is known to have made her peace with the whole fiasco, having met the woman who had inspired Begum Jan a few years after the publication of Lihaaf. The woman told Chughtai that she had since divorced her husband, remarried and was raising a child with her second husband. Chughtai's biographers recall the meeting between the two women in Ismat: Her life, Her times: "[Chughtai] felt greatly rewarded when the begum told [her that Lihaaf] had changed her life and it is because of her story now she was blessed with a child". Chughtai, who had been apprehensive about the meeting at first, later expressed her delight in a memoir, writing, "flowers can be made to bloom among rocks. The only condition is that one has to water the plant with one's heart's blood". Chughtai's quasi-autobiographical novel Tedhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line) was released in 1943. She was pregnant with her daughter during the time. She recalled the difficult circumstances facing her during her work on the novel, in a 1972 interview with Mahfil: Journal of South Asian Literature: "[It was] during the war that