Water is indeed Man’s greatest friend, as great a friend as fire…yes, yes, fire, electricity, water, all these are friends of Man if they are managed….enemies if treated with carelessness.

What is now a reality was once a dream of people. Could it have been done without my mother who raised the foundation of the education of new generations all her life, and now put me at my place?

Could it have happened without my grandmother who believed in my grandfather’s dreams? My mother and my grandmother who waited…who planted another har-singhar upon the wilting away of the first one.

Ecofeminism in Urdu literature is not a new phenomenon. In the Indian subcontinent, Razia Sajjad Zaheer (1917-79) inaugurated this trend in Urdu literature in the 20^th Century with her masterpiece, the neglected novel Allah Megh De (Lord Give Us Clouds), which looks at the issues of water preservation as well as man-made disasters like floods when the natural balance is disturbed because of human greed. The heroines of the novel Nita, Deeba and Kamla not only negotiate their relationships with the opposite gender as women, but as activists working to save the community from the consequences of natural disasters in the backdrop of Indian’s independence. Zaheer’s progressive approach also anticipated contemporary ecological concerns in South Asia like whether dam-building is the best solution to water scarcity. Based on first-time original translations into English from Zaheer’s novel, this study argues that the novel and its central question of the drying up and decline of rivers leading to the collapse of the modern way of life has found a new relevance in our own time, given the perils of global warming (with an added human dimension), the new-found fad of dam-building and the fact that Pakistan is one of the most water-scarce countries with a rapidly growing population. Women remain central to these concerns in the 21^st Century.