Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu short story Lihaf (1942) is firmly part of the queer canon. Considered a seminal 20th century text about same-sex desire in South Asia, it is widely anthologised and makes a regular appearance in the English academy in university course modules such as ‘Queer Literature’, ‘Gender and Writing,’ and ‘Literature and Sexuality’. Here, it has been read by generations of students and faculty, almost always only in the English translation, rather than in a comparative framework in both languages.