Pigeons) that made use of her knowledge of the Hindi film industry, which she had been a part of for the last couple of decades. Jangli Kabootar, which was first published in 1970, follows the life of an actress and was partially inspired from a real-life incident that had occurred at the time. Chughtai's grandson, filmmaker Aijaz Khan had expressed his interest in a making a feature film based on story in a 2015 interview with the Mumbai Mirror: "would like to make one of her stories, Jangli Kabootar [as the story has] always fascinated me." Ajeeb Aadmi similarly narrates the life of Dharam Dev, a popular leading man in Bollywood and the impact that his extra-marital affair with Zareen Jamal, a fellow actress has on the lives of the people involved. The novel was said to have been based on the affair between frequent co-stars Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman; Dutt was married to playback singer Geeta Dutt and the couple had three children at the time. While there are several allusions to real-life figures including Meena Kumari, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mohammed Rafi, members of the Dutt family and Rehman are never explicitly named. Chughtai said of Ajeeb Aadmi: "[In the novel], I go into [...] why girls run after him and producers like him, and the hell they make for these men and for their wives. The novel, which was released in the early 1970s, was praised for its bold nature and candour." Mumbai-based writer and journalist, Jerry Pinto noted the impact of Ajeeb Aadmis initial release saying, "There hadn't been a more dramatic and candid account of the tangled emotional lives of Bollywood before this." Writing for the Khaleej Times in 2019, Khalid Mohamed echoed the sentiment. He called the book a first of a kind tell-all book about the Hindi film industry, one that was "an eye-opener even for the know-alls of Bollywood". Mohamed also made a detailed note of Chughtai's candid style of writing, saying that she had an "instinctive gift for relating stories frankly and fearlessly". Later years, critical reappraisals and subsequent acclaim (1990s and beyond) Chughtai was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in the late 1980s, which limited her work thereafter. She died at her house in Mumbai on 24 October 1991, following the prolonged illness. Chughtai was known to have been averse of getting a burial, the common funeral practice in Islam. Rakhshanda