One shouldn’t compare anyone in Pakistan to a summer’s day or to a summer whose lease is unendingly long. But at least the darling buds of May are here even if rough winds refuse to leave them alone.

The first thing that strikes me on reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is the problem of translation across geographies. How does one indigenise And summer’s lease hath all too short a date without substituting spring for summer? Which is what I did, crafting the following lines:

jaan-e jaaN, bahaar bhi tujh si kahaaN hai
abhi aa’ii, aur ab ravaaN hai

Spring is no match for you dearest
It’s here today and gone tomorrow

One would think flowers would be simpler than seasons and they feature a lot in poetry as in Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a Cloud:

A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Some of my favourite lines from school are from Rupert Brooke’s The Old Vicarage, Grantchester written in Berlin in 1912 as he imagines his home:

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . ..

…

Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;

Aside from the rose which is universal in its appeal and for which we have the equally appealing equivalent gul, none of the others lend themselves easily to translation.

One can see this even more starkly going the other way. Here is this lovely Faiz line from rung hai dil ka mire:

champa’ii rung kabhii raahat-e diidaar ka rung

I have come across this translated as

Magnolia, the colour of joy when the beloved appears

which makes me distinctly unhappy because nowhere in English poetry have I found magnolia, let alone associated with the beloved in this way. I don’t know what an English reader would make of it except to gain an intercultural insight which is surely not the purpose of poetry.

In case you are still not convinced, consider this scenario we have been living with for seventy-five years:

har shaKh pe ulluu baitha hai
anjaam-e gulistaaN kya ho ga

An owl is perched on every twig
What will the fate of the garden be

Give this translation to English high-schoolers and they would be filled with envy, the owl to them being emblematic of infinite wisdom. I guess that is why our ulluus wear three-piece suits.1

Our June issue is ready for reading. Harbans Mukhia remembers his days at Kirori Mal College where he found the legendary K. M. Ashraf as a mentor. Kabir Altaf has another translation from Bilal Hasan Minto’s collection of evocative short stories capturing a child’s view of the world.

We are excited to offer two new features. Tehreem Mela shares a digital collage from her art residency about places of grief in Karachi. It should resonate with those who feel permanently surveilled in a place of grief. And Shan E Ahmed recites Anjum Altaf’s transcreation of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, one which Claire Chambers christened Prufrock in Pakistan.

We value your feedback and contributions to TPR.

Click HERE to access the current issue

In our announcement of the April issue, we had alerted readers to Professor Claire Chambers’ column (Prufrock in Pakistan) on Anjum Altaf’s transcreation of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Shan E Ahmed has produced a reading of the transcreation:

Here is the original poem in the Eliot’s voice:

Here is a spliced, section-by-section, reading with the Urdu alternating with the English.

(The text of the transcreation can be accessed in nastaleeq and Roman script). The original poem is accessible in English.)

Anjum Altaf is the author of Transgressions and More Transgressions, two volumes of poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and (with Amit Basole) of Thinking with Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation. His most recent book is A Modern Introduction to Indian Music and Other Essays.

Shan E Ahmed is an agricultural development practitioner with a love of poetry and the spoken word.

Hasan Abbas produced the audio files. The Eliot recording is extracted from YouTube.

It was a frost-laden evening in December when our Happy stopped eating. Naveed Bhai went into the garden, where Happy was sitting quietly tied to his post, to cover him with a coat. Happy looked at Naveed Bhai with barely opened eyes, and smiled. Then he moved his tail weakly from left to right. That was it. This was unlike him. He didn’t stand up and wag his tail vigorously, or play around with Naveed Bhai. Naveed Bhai was worried.

“Happy, Happy,” he cajoled.

Happy didn’t even open his eyes and just moved his tail from right to left. It was clear even that was not easy for him and he did it only out of love for Naveed Bhai. Naveed Bhai’s eye fell on his bowl. Happy’s afternoon meal was sitting there untouched,flies buzzing around it.

That night at the dining table, Naveed Bhai told Abba about Happy’s condition and said with concern it seemed he was ill because he hadn’t touched his afternoon meal. Abba said maybe he hadn’t liked it.

“But he gets this food every day,” I said, “and he always eats it.”

“Perhaps that’s why. If you got the same thing every day you would get tired one day too, wouldn’t you?” Abba said.

“Oh! So now I have to prepare a new feast for him every day!” Ammi said angrily. She hated Happy.

“Anyway, let’s see if he eats anything tonight,” Abba said, wanting to end the conversation.

“But why didn’t he move? I even had to put on his coat while he was lying down,” Naveed Bhai said anxiously.

“Maybe he has a cold. It’s freezing. If he doesn’t eat at night or is the same tomorrow, take him to Dr Walter,” Abba said.

That evening, Naveed Bhai and I took Happy his meal. Naveed Bhai had asked Ismail to make qeema and soft rotis. The rotis had been crumbled and mixed with the qeema,everything topped with yogurt. We had prepared a very delicious meal for our beloved Happy — Naveed Bhai had even given it a name: ‘Happy mix.’ I had garnished it with some cilantro so that the elegant presentation and the cilantro’s freshness, smell, and color would attract Happy’s attention.

Happy was not generally fed late because then he would sleep through the night. Although he didn’t do much anyway, it was still reassuring that Happy was awake while we were fast asleep. Aside from this false comfort, there wasn’t any point in keeping him up all night. Naveed Bhai thought it was cruel to do that and allow him only two meals while we had three and could take fruits and drinks from the fridge whenever we wanted besides. But Abba had consulted some reference book to decide the rules for Happy’s living and eating so Naveed Bhai had to obey this regimen of two meals a day.

Happy didn’t bark much. Sometimes,he would if there was a special reason,and we would be thrilled. We could never figure out what motivated it — the impetus seemed mysterious. He wouldn’t bark at any passing stranger nor at any cat or mouse. He did bark at cars speeding away from him but not at those approaching. He would run after the departing cars, barking all the while, and if they stopped, he would immediately do so as well,stop barking, and turn around to run inside the house. Abba had told us Happy thought departing cars were running away because they were afraid of him. He felt brave thinking they were afraid and pursued them,relishing their fear. So when they stopped,he turned around quietly,disappointed they weren’t scared anymore.

It was not just Ammi who disliked Happy. Happy also disliked Ammi but despite the fact that she was always scolding him, he never barked at her.

“Don’t sit in the verandah,” Ammi would say for no reason although the verandah was an open space with only two or three chairs. And it wasn’t even as if Happy would sit on those chairs.

“Get out of here,” Ammi would often say. She said that even when Happy was sitting alone on the lawn or in some other place.

“Don’t you dare come near me” — as if he were really fond of coming near her.

When Ammi would scold him he had to do as she said,but he would look at her and make a face. That made Ammi even angrier. Abba would always remark that there was no reason for anger. Just as she didn’t like Happy, he didn’t like her. Ammi would say at least she didn’t make a face and that making a face at your elders was extremely rude. Then to prove the point, she would say to me: “Listen, you! If I ever catch you making a face at your elders, I will skin you alive and hand you the skin” which was an obvious impossibility because human skin is very fine and cannot be removed like a bear’s or stag’s and even if that were possible there isn’t a man with fortitude enough that his skin could be removed and he would hold it quietly in his hand. The depiction of such a person cannot be found in any book of history, true or false.

“You can speak and scold him. He can’t talk, so he makes faces,” Abba had said once.

But Ammi’s question was how Happy knew she didn’t like him. Abba had responded that dogs could even smell people’s emotions and she actually screamed at Happy. Both Naveed Bhai and I had really liked this bit about ‘smelling emotions.’ Often, when guests scared of dogs came to our house and Happy would sniff their shoes and clothes, we would smugly reassure them and say “Don’t worry, he’s only smelling your emotions.” Some would relax on hearing that and some would be surprised.

Some others would become agitated as if Happy were a spy and after smelling their hidden emotions would report them to us. When such people were flustered, they might do something strange. Women would start screaming and men would begin speaking rapidly or they would walk quickly towards the door to get inside fast — leaving us, whose house it was, behind. This would sometimes, but very rarely, cause Happy to bark at them and it would appear as if he were mocking them. At such times we would be delighted to hear him bark, forgetting that our laughter would upset our guest.

Once, when such a frightened guest dashed out of the house, Happy bit him by mistake. Perhaps, he bit him out of confusion, seeing this human behaving so strangely without any reason — he had just arrived and now he was running out. The man whom Happy accidentally bit died after a few days, not from Happy’s bite but from a fatal heart attack, of the kind that frequently occurs.

The afternoon meal was still untouched in Happy’s bowl. Maybe there aren’t flies at night. Maybe they go somewhere or go to sleep, because at this time, there were none on the food. Ismail picked up the bowl and went out of the gate. He emptied it on the trash heap and brought it back. Naveed Bhai and I just stood there,looking at Happy. Naveed Bhai would call to him from time to time: “Happy Happy, puch puch.” But now he did not wag his tail or open his eyes. We would have thought he was dead if his stomach were not rising and falling with his breath.

On the wall between our house and Apa Sughra’s, a cat appeared. Naveed Bhai immediately made a sound to rouse Happy, the kind one makes with dogs, making a clicking sound and then saying “Ush.” “Happy... look there... karak, uuush.”

I was irritated and asked why he was going through this pointless exercise. Happy was hungry and still wasn’t even looking at his food. Had he ever in his life said anything to a cat or a mouse? Does he look like he’s going to start chasing the cat just because of your karak and ush? Naveed Bhai didn’t reply. He was worried.

When Ismail brought the bowl back, Naveed Bhai put the “Happy mix” in it and put it right in front of Happy’s nose so the smell would make him hungry. Happy didn’t move. Naveed Bhai picked up a piece of roti and touched it to Happy’s nose but there was no effect.

“Try feeding him by hand,” I suggested.

“How?” Naveed Bhai asked.

“You pull his mouth open and Ismail will put the food in it,” I said.

“And you? You will just watch?” Naveed Bhai asked,laughing.

“When he tastes the cilantro and yogurt,he might feel like eating,” I changed the subject sheepishly.

With much effort, Naveed Bhai opened Happy’s mouth a little — very little, hardly half an inch — and Ismail picked up a small piece of roti and tried to force it in. Naveed Bhai also kept calling “puch puch, Happy Happy, hoot hoot.”

“Puch puch,Happy Happy, hoot hoot.”

“Hurry up! I can’t keep his mouth open very long,” he said.

Happy’s mouth began to close by itself and Naveed Bhai quickly pulled his hand away. His finger scraped against one of Happy’s sharp teeth and a drop of blood appeared on it — just as these days diabetes patients take a drop of blood from their fingers to test their blood sugar. Naveed Bhai wiped off the blood on Happy’s dog coat.

“We’ll have to take him to Dr Walter tomorrow,” he said.

The next day, we had to lug Happy to the car so we could take him to Dr Walter. In the past, whenever we had to take him there, it had been difficult. Happy knew very well it meant getting needles stuck in his legs, having a thermometer pushed up his bottom, or being forced to swallow bitter medicine. In better times, when we attached a chain to his collar and took him to Dr. Walter’s house for his annual shots, he would begin growling even before reaching the gate and strive to turn back. He would suddenly become very strong and I had to pull him by the chain while Naveed Bhai pushed from behind to propel him forward. Pulling and pushing, we would get him inside Dr Walter’s gate.

Then, as dogs do in fear, he would put his tail between his legs and clasp it to his stomach. All dogs do this when afraid. It wasn’t only Happy who used his tail to cover his bottom so the thermometer couldn’t be inserted. Dogs just know to do that with their tails when they are scared. From the same fear, his urine would start to dribble out slowly and his tail would get wet from being between his legs. When we were done with the doctor, Happy would run towards home so eagerly that Naveed Bhai would often let go of his chain so he could run ahead and arrive before us.

But today the poor thing didn’t resist at all. He was just a little heavy for us because he had let himself go completely limp as if he had given up.

Dr Walter didn’t give Happy much of an examination. He took his temperature with the thermometer and barely felt around his jaw. We could tell that he did all this just for form’s sake and that he knew what the problem was with just one look.

“I’m sorry, he won’t survive,” he said.

We fell silent as if we couldn’t understand what to do or say. It had never occurred to us before that Happy could die. Today, we had to hear it for the first time and had to figure out right away how to respond.

“What has happened to him?” Naveed Bhai asked, which, under the circumstances, was the right response and appropriate question.

Dr Walter told us that Happy had an illness that was called rabies.

“Rabies?” Naveed Bhai said,scared. Maybe he knew a lot about this illness.

“Oh!” I said, echoing his fear. “That rabbit illness?” I was trying to be clever, pretending I also knew about rabies even though I only said that because the word “rabbit” sounds a bit like rabies.

“But this disease causes dogs to go mad and bite people,” Naveed Bhai said. He thought perhaps Dr Walter had made a mistake and he might change his diagnosis.

Dr Walter told us that Happy had “dumb rabies,” which was the type that was silent and couldn’t cause much panic. The dangerous kind — in which dogs bite everyone, making people go around saying “move away, move away, the dog is crazy and will bite” or “bring the gun and shoot it” — is called “furious rabies.” He said we ought to be thankful that Happy didn’t have “furious rabies.”

Naveed Bhai asked how Happy could have contracted the disease — he had had his anti-rabies shots. He still thought Dr Walter might have made a mistake and the diagnosis might change. But Dr Walter had spent a lifetime with dogs and cats. He just said that Happy had had his shots at the right intervals according to the prescribed protocol but in medicine nothing was a hundred percent and the injections don’t stand a chance before God’s will.

“Nothing is one hundred percent and especially not in medicine,” he said decisively in English.

Then he said had it been “furious rabies,” Happy would have had to be put to sleep immediately so he wouldn’t bite anyone and give it to them. But now that he didn’t have any strength and was also becoming paralyzed,there was no need. He wouldn’t say anything to anyone and would die in a few days on his own. Dr Walter specifically said it would be best to stay away from him. “He will die soon,poor thing.”

I thought that Dr. Walter had wanted to say that, from a medical point of view, Happy should be put to sleep but,seeing how sad we were, maybe he thought that instead of ending his life immediately we could let him die slowly instead.

“Happy bit Naveed Bhai yesterday,” I couldn’t keep myself from saying.

“No, no, he didn’t bite me. His tooth grazed me accidentally. It was my fault. I was force-feeding him,” Naveed Bhai spoke quickly as if he were afraid that Dr Walter might use this as an excuse to order Happy’s death.

Dr Walter raised his eyebrows.

“Did you bleed?”

“Yes, he bled,” I said.

“You must see a doctor at once,” Dr Walter said in English, which made it clear that this was an important and serious matter. He also said in English that he would call our father and tell him to take us to the doctor. He used the expressions “your dad” and “very dangerous.”

He added that if a human contracts rabies, death is certain. Anyway, what Naveed Bhai was afraid of didn’t come to pass and Dr Walter didn’t order that Happy be put to sleep.

We brought Happy home. I began to tie him up but Naveed Bhai stopped me saying “the poor thing doesn’t move anyway and is paralyzed, let him be. Let him die free.” We put him in a flowerbed along with his dog coat.

Dr Walter had called Abba and must have spoken to him in a serious manner because both Ammi and Abba looked very frightened. Abba immediately took Naveed Bhai to a hospital and they did not return for a long time. Naveed Bhai had had a massive and painful injection in his stomach. He would need thirteen more,one every day.

Naveed Bhai had heard many things about rabies or perhaps he had read them somewhere. He said that there is a microscopic insect — invisible to the naked eye. When a rabid dog bites someone, the insect gets into the person through the dog’s saliva and then travels wriggling through the body till it lodges in the brain. Then, when it multiplies, a number of strange things happen. The person goes insane. He begins to be afraid of water. He has to be tied up. He starts to bark like a dog and runs around biting people. I found this last fact extremely strange: Is it an insect or is there some little dog that gets inside a person and captures his spirit and then makes him bark and bite other people for no reason? How could this be?

I was very surprised and frightened by these revelations. For the next thirteen days — until Naveed Bhai had gotten all his injections — I watched him closely. Had he become afraid of water? Did he hide alone somewhere and bark? After he had taken a shower, I would go into the bathroom to see if he had really bathed or had only pretended. Was the floor wet or not? Were there any drops of water anywhere? And when he lay down to sleep at night, I would listen at his door to hear if he was barking softly. I should have realized that even if he had rabies, it had come from Happy. So first it was “dumb rabies,” and also, Happy didn’t bark, so why would Naveed Bhai?

Later, I found out that nothing like this happened. Some vile person had spread this rumor that if you get rabies, you turn into a dog. This was untrue. A person infected with rabies doesn’t become a dog. Yes, it is true that he becomes afraid of water. But it is not so strange that humans become scared of some things. One of the best known Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, even wrote in his thick book of poems that because he had been bitten by human beings he became frightened even by his own reflection in the mirror — just as someone who is bitten by a dog becomes afraid of water. But a person bitten by a dog does not actually fear his own reflection in the water. Because he has contracted rabies, something happens to his throat that makes drinking extremely painful. When he sees water, he begins trembling, scared that he might have to drink it.

***

We had left Happy alone to do whatever he wished, roam wherever he wanted. We continued giving him food — three times instead of twice a day. But now none of these things mattered. He neither moved nor ate anything. He was just wasting away from one day to the next. Sometimes, he would open his eyes and look off into the distance as if death were slowly approaching him, dancing a frightful dance, relaxed, on its own volition, enjoying it.

Naveed Bhai did not become afraid of water; he did not bark. He continued to bathe and drink water. Dr Walter had said that Happy would die within ten days but that didn’t happen. He lived for fourteen days because nothing is one hundred percent as Dr Walter had said in English.

On the fourteenth day, just when Naveed Bhai had returned home after getting the last injection in his stomach, Ismail came running.

“Happy is dying,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“It just looks like it,” he said.

The three of us went running to the backyard, where Happy was lying in the flowerbed.

“Stay away. Don’t get close,” Ammi yelled from behind us as if along with Happy’s soul, his rabies germs would also emerge from his body and attach themselves to us.

Happy was breathing heavily and his eyes were closed. After every little while, his body shuddered. We stood watching him.

“He’s close to the end,” Ismail said in a whisper.

I didn’t know what to do. Tears welled up in my eyes and I covered my face with my hands. From between my fingers,I saw Naveed Bhai helplessly petting Happy’s head. Suddenly,Happy trembled. Ismail quickly stepped forward and pulled Naveed Bhai back. Still peeking through my fingers, I saw that Happy had raised his head. His neck stiffened, and his mouth fell open. From his open mouth, a thick green mucus dribbled out.

Then Happy fell still and his breathing stopped.

“He’s gone,” Ismail whispered.

***

Dinner that night began in silence. I couldn’t eat. Partly out of sorrow and partly because of that green saliva that kept reappearing in my imagination. It was a disgusting green saliva and certainly contained many rabies germs.

While eating dinner, whenever I thought of Happy’s saliva, I would stop chewing. Naveed Bhai was eating silently, but slowly. Ammi looked pleased but it seemed to me that even Abba was not too bothered and he was only quiet out of respect for our grief. When I looked once or twice at Abba, I was surprised to see him glance at Ammi, smile, and signal towards us with his eyes as if he found it very amusing that Naveed Bhai and I were mourning Happy’s death, silent and uninterested in our dinner.

Ismail would go back and forth from the kitchen, bringing hot rotis. When Ammi saw that Naveed Bhai and I were disinterested in our dinner, she told Ismail to stop making roti for us and to just make it for himself. Ismail said that he wasn’t hungry. I looked at him and so did Naveed Bhai. He looked back at us and after a moment asked, “When is the funeral, Naveed Sahib?”

Hearing this, Abba and Ammi burst out laughing. Naveed Bhai, Ismail, and I were shocked. There had been a death in the family, the death of our beloved Happy who had been with us for so long.Was this anything to laugh at? It’s true that Ammi didn’t like Happy, but was it necessary to laugh like this at his death? And Abba? Why was he laughing? He didn’t dislike Happy.

Ammi, half laughing and half scolding, told Ismail not to say stupid things — funerals were for humans and not for animals. I looked at Naveed Bhai to see if he would say something but he just kept chewing quietly. Perhaps he didn’t want them to think that he didn’t know about these adult things — that funerals were only for humans. Maybe he kept quiet so that Ammi and Abba wouldn’t laugh at him. But just a moment earlier, he had been looking at them with as much astonishment as Ismail and I.

Mustering up the courage, I said that there would be a funeral and it would be tomorrow. In the afternoon. We would bury Happy in the back lawn. We would dig a grave there and burn incense.

Now Ammi became furious.

“Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t even think about it. Tomorrow Grace and mali1 will get rid of the dog far away, near China Basti.”

I couldn’t take anymore. My eyes filled with huge tears and I began to cry.

“I will hold his funeral! I will! I will! I will! Try and stop me!” Saying something like this, I got up and ran into my room.

“I will break your hands! I forbid anyone from doing anything like this!” Ammi shouted after me.

I sat crying in my room. After a while, Naveed Bhai came in. He stood there watching me cry, and then said: “Even humans are not buried at home so how can we bury Happy here?”

I said that there were huge and elegant graveyards for humans to be buried in. “Has anyone made a graveyard for dogs?” I asked.

“You are right. Nobody has made one,” he said.

“Why is Ammi talking about China Basti? Why is she talking about dumping Happy there?”

“Who? Ammi? Did she say to leave him near China Basti?”

“Why? Why near China Basti? Why not outside near our house?”

“The China Basti people will bury him somewhere or throw him somewhere far away.”

“Why would they do it? Because they are sweepers?”

“Yes. They know how to do this work.”

“Disposing of dogs’ bodies? They are Christians. Christians love their dogs and cats a lot.”

“Christians love their pets a lot? What makes you think that?” Naveed Bhai asked in surprise.

“English people are Christians. Haven’t you seen in movies how well they treat their dogs? They even let them lick their faces. And when Happy licked your face that time, remember how Ammi screamed?”

“Hunh,” Naveed Bhai said, “it seems the important thing is being English, not being Christian.”

“Maybe. But listen. Dr Walter is an animal doctor. He chose to treat animals, not humans.”

Naveed Bhai heard this and laughed a little.

“You are laughing? You’re laughing at a time like this? These people were also laughing. Did Happy not mean anything to them?”

“These people?”

“Your mother and father,” I said with anger.

Naveed Bhai smiled. Then he said: “Let’s decide in the morning what to do with Happy. We’ll leave him in the flowerbed tonight and put a cloth over him.” Hearing that Happy’s body would remain on the lawn all night made me tremble but I nodded.

The next day was a school day so there was not much time for debating Happy’s funeral arrangements. I felt this was very important but Ammi and Abba — and even Naveed Bhai — were entirely so involved with their own affairs as if there wasn’t anything left to discuss. I was surprised that Naveed Bhai was brushing me off when he was not like this and had seemed to be on my side last night.

I continued having my breakfast, getting up every little while to look outside to see if mali had come. Ammi and Abba told me to get ready quickly and not to be late. I said: “Tell me first what we are going to do with Happy.”

“What do you mean what are we going to do?” Ammi said.

“The funeral and everything, the burial.”

“Now stop this foolishness. Dogs and cats don’t have funerals. The joke has gone too far.”

“Joke? Joke?” I screamed. “Someone’s death is a joke? Are you people human or… or...”

“Or what?” Ammi asked angrily.

“Or… or...” I stepped back a little. “Or dogs!” I said, which was considered a huge insult in our family. Uttering it, I ran outside.

But I had said “dogs” looking at Naveed Bhai, eating his egg, because, for one, I was angry at him for not saying anything in my support and second because cursing at him was a lesser offense then cursing at Ammi and Abba.

Ammi leapt after me. I ran quickly through the kitchen door into the back yard. Unconsciously, I ran towards that flowerbed where we had left dear Happy’s body. But as soon as I saw that place — where dear Happy’s body should have been — my feet stopped. Happy’s body was missing. There had been no funeral and Happy’s body was missing. How did our beloved Happy’s lifeless body disappear?

I was frozen in place when Ammi grabbed my ear and twisted it roughly.

“Come inside! Brat! You dare to curse at me! Shameless!”

As Ammi pulled me around, I saw mali and Grace walking in. There was a cord in mali’s hand.

“Did you get rid of it?” Ammi asked.

“Yes ma’am, We’ve dumped Happy,” mali said.

“Why have you brought this cord, mali? Are you out of your mind? Throw that dirty cord away.”

The wretched mali laughed embarrassedly and glanced here and there as if he were looking for a trash heap on our lawn on which to throw the cord. Then, when Ammi turned her attention to me, he stuffed the cord into his pocket.

I started crying loudly. Ismail and Naveed Bhai were standing outside the kitchen door. Ismail’s eyes also welled up with tears. I continued crying and wailing loudly: “Traitors, liars, cruel people!

“Shut up!” Ammi said.

One advantage of crying was that Ammi didn’t hit me. She led me inside by the ear, then let me go. Still crying, I went into my room to get ready for school.

***

That day, after coming home from school and having lunch, I went to see Mazhar and Talat and told them this sad story. Mazhar had never liked Happy so he didn’t express any sorrow but said that we should do a postmortem on him.

“Postmortem?”

“Yes, when someone dies, a postmortem is required.”

“Why?”

“It just is.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Black Hand told me.” As usual, he referred to that terrible, unseen force that told him all the hidden secrets of the universe. He constantly mentioned him to impress and scare us.

“Tell Black Hand to tell me this himself,” I said. “Where’s Black Hand? Bring him here.”

“How do you do a postmortem?” Talat asked, nervously, because he was scared that my disrespectful comments would annoy Black Hand.

“I’ll tell you. First let’s go find Happy,” Mazhar said.

I didn’t object further, thinking that OK, even if there had been no funeral, no burial, at least there would be some type of ceremony for dear Happy’s death. Why not a postmortem? That would do.

I had just a vague idea of where Happy’s body would be — near China Basti, on some trash heap. It wasn’t very difficult to quickly find that trash heap — at the furthest edge of China Basti, very near Grace’s house. Obviously, Grace had had Happy’s body placed there so that she could take it after returning from work in the evening. I didn’t know what she might want with the body but I knew that many people in the world found different uses for animal parts — bear paws, rhino horns, elephant tusks. I didn’t know what parts of dogs were used and for what purpose. There must have been some — the tail or the ear or something. That is why Grace had Happy thrown on a trash heap right near her house.

Flies were buzzing around Happy — especially over his open mouth. Regular flies and huge loud fat ones as well. There was no dead animal smell because it was winter and Happy had not been dead for long so his body had not yet decomposed. However, the smell of the trash itself, wet and dense, rose around us like steam.

“Tsk, tsk,” Mazhar said, “Poor thing, his eyes are still open.”

“Even people’s eyes often remain open and have to be closed by hand,” I said, stung, because I sensed that Mazhar’s remark reflected contempt and I saw no reason for Happy to be given a lower status than a human or any other creature.

“It’s possible that even Black Hand’s eyes will remain open when he dies,” I got back at Mazhar.

“Black Hand will never die!” Mazhar said angrily.

“Should we go ahead with the postmortem?” The coward Talat immediately interjected and changed the subject.

“Wait a minute,” Mazhar said. He moved Happy’s tail with his hand.

“That’s gross!” Talat whispered, “he’s touching it.”

I didn’t think Mazhar should do that either. “At least, don’t touch him,” I said.

Mazhar ignored us and continued staring at Happy as if he were really enjoying looking at his body.

“What’s a postmortem anyway? How will you do it?” I asked, exasperated.

Mazhar signaled us to remain silent, stood up straight, and closed his eyes. He was talking to Black Hand. Whenever he spoke to Black Hand he would close his eyes and become silent like this. We stood watching him. After a while, he opened his eyes and walked slowly once around Happy’s body — that is, around the trash heap. Then he touched Happy’s tail once more and lightly pulled one of his ears.

“OK,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Aren’t you going to do the postmortem?” I asked, surprised.

“It’s done,” Mazhar said.

“That’s how it’s done?” I asked, “that’s it?”

“That’s how it is for dogs.”

“And humans? And other animals — tigers, or camels?”

“That’s different. You have to rip the stomach open with a knife,” Mazhar snapped. “Let’s go now.”

I screamed that he was lying. He had used this postmortem as a ruse to make me bring him to Happy so that he could play this weird game with his body. He was lying that dogs’ postmortems were conducted by moving their tails and walking around their bodies. Although, after hearing that the postmortem of humans and other animals required cutting the stomach open with a knife, I no longer wanted dear Happy’s to be like that but I was still disappointed that Happy’s postmortem ceremony was as insignificant as what Mazhar had done.

“Let’s get out of here. This is how dogs’ postmortems are done. Black Hand has told me,” Mazhar said again.

“Come on, come on,” Talat said quickly.

***

At home, everything was as usual. Ammi and Abba were resting and Naveed Bhai was out enjoying himself with his friends. Only Ismail was still sad. I told him that I had seen Happy’s body and also that I was suspicious that Grace would cut him into pieces and use them.

Ismail agreed. He said that many people use dead animals for magic purposes and it’s possible that that’s what Grace intended.

“Bitch!” I said. “Does she have no heart? Christians are supposed to love animals.”

The next morning, when I came outside for school, the mali was working in the flowerbeds. Yesterday, this man, with Grace’s help, had tied beloved Happy’s body with a filthy cord and dragged him along the dirty tar road and thrown him on a trash heap near China Basti, close to Grace’s house. Now she would be cooking Happy’s tail or paws to eat them or do some terrible magic.

The mali looked at me and grinned with his big yellow teeth. I wanted to stuff his face with that same green mucus that had spilled from Happy’s mouth.

“Mali, I pray to Allah that you die as well!” I screamed loudly and ran towards the gate to go to school. But this wasn’t enough. I wasn’t satisfied. I turned, before the gate, and screamed again.

“And when you die, I will rip open your stomach myself and postmortem you!”

***

Bilal Hasan Minto is a lawyer, teacher, filmmaker, and writer. He is the author of Model Town, a collection of Urdu short stories and of a short play Glad Tidings. He has also written and directed four films.

Kabir Altaf is a musician and musicologist. His book A New Explanation for the Decline of Hindustani Music in Pakistan was published from Lahore in 2024 and from Delhi in 2026 with the title The Decline of Hindustani Music in Pakistan: A Social History. Kabir holds a degree in Dramatic Literature from George Washington University. His book reviews can be read on his SubStack “Thoughts of a Bibliophile”.

The year, 1956. Kirori Mal College (KMC) had moved from the infamous GB Road (Red Light Area) to Delhi University (DU)’s celebrated North Campus. I had cleared the Intermediate level — between the 10^th class called Matric and Undergraduate — from Benares Hindu University (BHU) and came for admission to a college in DU. It was already mid-July and the admission process in most colleges had been completed. Then someone told me I had a chance at KM because it was new and not in high demand with students partly because of its tongue-twister of a name which invited much ridicule! Desperate, I walked straight into the Principal Mr. Hardwari Lal’s office and sought admission to the second year of BA (Hons) in History (to which my Intermediate degree entitled me) as well as residence in the hostel. Without much scrutiny he signed my application for both and asked me to go see Dr. Ashraf in the College Staff Room. It was that easy even though my Intermediate grades were just about average, a few points above 50 per cent.

That casual decision of the Principal was to shape my life, especially by the involvement of Dr. Ashraf in it. Even as the College was graded at the lower rungs in popular estimation, its faculty had some formidable figures: Dr. K. M. Ashraf was both a pathbreaking historian who was the first to research and write a history of the life and conditions of the people in medieval India, especially during the period of the Delhi Sultanate, but was also a highly respected freedom fighter; Frank Thakur Das was a tall, very gentle, suave teacher of Political Science but was to acquire a great reputation for initiating and nurturing theatre on the campus — among his early trainees who went over to films were Amitabh Bachchan and comedian Satish Kaushik; Arun Bose, who headed the Economics Department was a renowned scholar, as was Nand Lal Gupta of Political Science. There were others like D. R. Goyal, once an RSS volunteer, later the author of a book sharply critical of the Sangh. All of them were known to be committed to the Left ideology although to varying degrees. Their eminence gave the College a Leftist reputation, especially during the tenure of its second Principal, the visionary Dr. Sarup Singh who was no committed Leftist himself.

I stayed at KMC and its hostel from 1956 to 1960 for BA and MA, and these were clearly the best years of my life. I had enrolled for History following the popular lore that the discipline gave you the best entry point to the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) but forgot all about it once I started to study it under Dr. Ashraf’s guidance, although I never, ever talked to him about it.

It happened that I got so engrossed in it that in the end it turned me into a sort of historian. Dr. Ashraf trained us into not accepting received knowledge about history, including that received from him as a “given.” Once I attached myself to him on his evening walk and we talked about something in history and as an undergrad lad, I said “No, Sir, I don’t agree with you.” He actually embraced me and said some very kind words, that he was proud of me for differing with him. There were numerous legends afloat about him although he never uttered a word about himself, at least to students. In life one has many teachers but only one Guru; Dr. Ashraf was/is my Guru.

Of the hostel residents everyone was new to everyone else. Therefore, new friendships were being formed. While we had been allotted rooms, we had to get our own bulbs to light them up. As I was passing by one unlit room, I just asked its allottee casually, “Kamre me andhera kar rakha hai?” He answered quickly, “O Pyare Lal, apni to zindagi meiN hii andhera hai!” That was Satya Prakash, and it was the beginning of a friendship that lasted a whole lifetime until his demise a few years ago, having scored many a success including the setting up of the first co-educational school in his township in Punjab. Many such friendships evolved amongst strangers.

The hostel mess was another venue for getting to know one another. The food was routine, but nothing was more routine than custard as the dessert every second night. “There is more custard flowing in my veins than blood” became the popular saying. Among the mess waiters everyone’s favourite was Ganga Singh, a handsome and pleasant young guy from the hills. Waiters received the princely salary of Rs. 25 per month and an annual increment of 50 paise. The students’ average monthly expenditure was Rs. 125 including college fees, hostel room rent, mess, Char Minar cigarettes, and an occasional movie which probably cost 50 paise that we sometimes borrowed from Ganga Singh. Once my classmate and close friend K. Bikram Singh, who later made some offbeat films and wrote the most authentic biography of the star among Indian painters, M. F. Husain, had received his money order from home and had paid off all the debts he owed to the college canteen, friends, and Ganga Singh. He came to the Library and sat beside me on the bench or chair but was fidgety all the time. He then said, “After paying off the debts I have one rupee left in my pocket and it is not letting me rest. Come, let’s finish it off so we can sit back here quietly and study.” That was the manifestation of an aristocratic attitude minus the resources required for it!

On one rare and precious occasion the legendary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz came to the college to visit his comrade and friend Dr. Ashraf and some of us, Arjun Dev, Zahoor Siddiqi, and I came to know of it. We parked ourselves on the steps at the entrance and saw an aristocratic gentleman, immaculately dressed in what must have been a very expensive suit and necktie emerging from a high-end limousine of the Pakistan embassy and we all shook hands with him; I didn’t wash my hand for three days. We also noticed in his hand a tin of 50 cigarettes of the 555 brand which we imagined was the ultimate in luxury. We learnt that 50 cigarettes was his daily quota. The cost of one such cigarette would have brought us a month’s stock of Char Minar!!!

Friendship between boys and girls was almost unheard of, so no expense on that account. Life was truly uncomplicated!

In 1960 I had earned the Master’s degree and later in the year I was appointed Lecturer in the very post that Dr. Ashraf had vacated on accepting a Visiting Professorship at Humboldt University, Berlin, then in the Communist East Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic, where he passed away in 1962. A most momentous part of this appointment as lecturer was that of the two candidates for the post — the other was Iqtidar Alam Khan, a promising scholar from the venerable Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, who was to become in time a major voice among historians of medieval India. So, we met as competitors. He was a 6’ 4” tall genuinely Pathan looking young man, son of the celebrated Urdu poet, Ghulam Rabbani Taabaan. I got the job most likely because I was the local boy. But that competition created a deep friendship, extended to our families including the next generation and is still alive and strong although Bhai Khan (as he is universally known) has recently been left alone by his partner after six decades of togetherness.

1962 was the year of India-China armed conflict and the humiliation India had to suffer created a wave of dismay as well as indignation. Perhaps towards the end of the year or early next year, Field Marshal Gen. Cariappa, who had acquired the status of a legend, visited the college and gave a rousing speech in the Auditorium concluding it with the call to students to identify Left-leaning teachers and thrash them. Immediately, Dr. Sarup Singh, who was chairing the function, went up to the mic and much to his credit, declared that no student would touch any faculty member in K M College and that the General’s call would divide the nation when the need was to unite it. It showed the difference between an academician’s larger vision and a soldier’s quick response. The students paid heed to their Principal’s word rather than to the Field-Marshal’s.

In 1963, the post I had temporarily held as Lecturer was advertised and a very highly qualified candidate, Dr. J. S. Grewal, with a freshly minted PhD from London University, had applied for it. I, with a modest MA and with no research experience, didn’t stand a chance. Dr. Grewal accepted the offer and I devoted the whole of the next year of unemployment to research, getting the taste for creating one’s own ideas. I felt grateful to Dr. Grewal for facilitating the development of this taste in me. I could perhaps say that the taste has stayed with me even as the time for sustaining it has nearly run out. Today, when I see in the newspapers that KMC is among the most sought after by students for admission among DU colleges, my nostalgia for it gets more poignant.

For a detailed biographical account of the life and work of Dr. K. M. Ashraf, see this two-part article by Dr. Kamran Asdar (here and here).

Harbans Mukhia, an acclaimed historian of medieval India and the author of a number of books on the Mughals, was Rector at Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1999 to 2002. His essay, “Was There Feudalism in Indian History?” led to an international debate in the Journal of Peasant Studies between 1985 and 1993. His collection of Urdu poems (kuch udaas nazmeiN) was published in 2025.

Tehreem Mela is an artist and educator based out of Lahore, Pakistan. After studying Politics and Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College (MHC), Mela moved to Pakistan to create art and work at Harsukh School. Her work has been exhibited in France, Germany, Nepal, Turkey and the United States and acquired by MHC as well as private collectors from MHC and Yale University. She can be contacted at tehreemmela@gmail.com.

Contra Emily Dickinson, for us April has relieved some of the cruelty of March. Recall how annoyed she is with April in Dear March—Come in—:

Who knocks? That April—
Lock the Door—
I will not be pursued—
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied—

Before ending with:

That blame is just as dear as Praise
And Praise as mere as Blame—

March madness brought us immense tragedy but made us think of the loss of our humanity. April showers brought temporary relief and with it the insensitive return to the trifles of our lives.

What a spectacle this has been. Were it not for the very real pain inflicted on innocent beings, one would die laughing. Mad King George was, well, mad, because he was unwell; Nero and Caligula were cruel but certainly not stupid. This strutting and fretting on the stage, a tale told by an idiot [in ALL CAPS], full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—has never been witnessed before at this level of power. (So much for democracy, but that’s another matter.) Hats off to Shakespeare for anticipating the phenomenon almost a half century ago.

We crave the catharsis of laughter because we have seen much worse at home without being allowed as much as a smile. Smile, and you are in the slammer on multiple counts along with a back-breaking fine in millions. The only consolation is that almost no one beyond the confederacy of dunces is hurt by or cares about the perpetual clowning, own goals, befitting responses, and Pyrrhic victories.

In any case, April has restored our submission pipeline and we have a varied menu on offer. Brian Bassanio Paul shares a poignant essay on love and loss; Sayed Amjad Hussain offers light relief recalling his struggles with the English language; Furqan Ali engages Changez Jan in a conversation about history; and Komal Raja undertakes a quirky journey across the world of books.

Let’s see what May has in store for us.

PS: Anjum Altaf came across a couplet from 1979. He believes it is his but has no recollection why it was written and what at the time might have led to its genesis:

لِکھنے کو کُچھ رودادِ چمن ڈھونڈ رہا ہوں
ایّام جنگ میں نبضِ اَمن ڈھونڈ رہا ہوں

Likhney ko kuch ruudaad-e chaman DhuunD raha huuN
Aiyaam-e jang meiN nabz-e aman DhuunD raha huuN

I search the garden for a story to write
In time of war I seek the seed of peace

Click HERE to access the current issue

My dear Stranger,

Don’t try only to be (homo) Sapiens; try, rather, to become Ecce Homo and live Beyond Good and Evil.

Forget about Discipline and Punish, and be The Myth of Sisyphus.

Being The Prophet might allure you, but let go of the Genealogy of Morality. Critique of Pure Reason would lead you to Being and Nothingness. Mastering The Art of War might make you live Odyssey, but mastering The Art of Loving would free the Caged Birds of your soul.

Have you seen Women in Love? If not, go find them at Madame Bovary’s. If you want to know, Why Boys Fail in College?, you will find the answer in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. But if you want to understand A Treatise of Human Nature, then you must also learn The Interpretation of Dreams.

One must move beyond binaries like Sifar se Aik Tak, opposites like War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment. Today is the time of Fifty Shades of Love, and one must learn the Twenty-One Lessons of Twenty-First Century. Yet people would still cry, My Name is Red, though they are all merely Catcher(s) in the Rye. This is no longer 1984, my dear; it is already the time of A Thousand Plateaus, where The Story of Philosophy has been altered by Technopoly and Derrida-Haramda. Multiplicity (is) The New Science of Personality, Identity, and the Self. It is no longer Das Kapital’s era. It is the Age of Reason. Plato’s Republic won’t work in Animal Farm(s) anymore. The Politics and Poetics of Aristotle won’t take you in Sophie’s World. Therefore, climb off the Wuthering Heights and stop being a Kite Runner.

Man’s Search for Meaning will often lead him only to The Problems of Philosophy.

If you want a Little Woman, you must risk being The Unhappiest Man. Also, don’t seek for Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina. Lower your Great Expectations and endure the Unbearable Lightness of Being, but don’t become Jude: The Obscure who’d go after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Put yourself on The Trail and let your Metamorphosis complete. Otherwise, like the Brothers Karamazov, you will end up lamenting: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. It is the best to be Human, All Too Human, but skip being The Idiot.

You know, the current state of world affairs is like Hassan ki Soorat-e-haal—khali Jaghen Pur karo, yet people still look for Nuskha Haye Wafa.

I have seen Sons and Lovers turning into Gender Trouble. I have seen A Thousand Splendid Suns sinking down for Midnight’s Children. I have seen the Kashmiris’ Fight for Freedom becoming The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

I have filed A Case for God, but The God Delusions had dismissed my appeal, insisting There is No god But God.

Anyways, have you ever met the Dancing Girls of Lahore? If not, perhaps Faust will guide you through the History of Sexuality and those would be the Notes From Underground, including The Second Sex and The Satanic Verses. Sometimes, they might give you Nausea, but other times, they would sound like Divine Comedy. However, the Sound and the Fury of the Lucifer and the Lord might kill the ones who were Waiting for Godot.

The Leaves of Grass are being crushed by the Soft Science, and the world has turned into a Wasteland. The Letters to a Young Poet are forgotten by youngsters and the world has become a Dead Poets Society.

People now consume Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Milk and Honey.

Sometimes, I want to be retired from the Catch-22(‘s) of life and play Beloved with you—whom I often call—The Stranger. I yearn to have a Palace Walk with you, but your Ministry of Utmost Happiness denies me the chance to be the God of Small Things in your life and in my world then, Things Fall Apart.

As a remedy, I will turn to Lady Chatterly’s Lover, who, I think, had Letters from a Stoic. They would be sufficient for A Hundred Years of Solitude for me.

Yours no one,

~Komal Raja

Note: All italicized phrases are titles of great literary and philosophical works.

Komal Raja, a social and cultural anthropologist, completed her doctorate at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany. Her work explores political identification, memory, and everyday life in Azad Kashmir. She writes poetry and prose in Pahari, Urdu, and English.

Furqan Ali (FA) met Changez Jan (CJ) in December 2025 when the latter visited his hometown, Peshawar, from Singapore where he now lives and works as a banker. The meeting took place at the well-known Chief Grill which is Furqan’s second home. This interview, a follow-up to that meeting, has been conducted over email and edited for length and clarity.

FA: What is your view of history as a discipline and as a source of knowledge?

CJ: The study of history to me is an important duty. One must remember and not forget what has happened in the past. But the danger with the study of history is believing that everything that is written must be true. When you read history, the reader must keep in mind that what he or she is reading was likely written by the victor. That is why it is important to give a voice to the underdog or those that ‘lost.’ Hence my first book on the Hindu Sahis (c. 822–1026 CE). They were a speed bump in the path of Mahmud Ghazni and I have tried to give them a voice. It is the same with Khushal Khan. The same events need to be recorded but from the point of view of the many participants, not just victors and losers but bystanders as well.

FA: Whoever controls history controls the nation. Bertrand Russell pointed that out when he noted that “History, in every country, is so taught as to magnify that country.” This helps explain why history is often either omitted or “murdered” in schools. Can this issue of power be addressed by writing more history? If not, what else might be needed?

CJ: It must be kept in mind that there is more than one version of history. Just as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” truth is interpreted by the partisan. Some aspects of history are unproblematic, like the dates and names. Others are more complex. One should remember three things when reading history. First, it is difficult to assess the intentions of the characters who play a part in events. For the current crisis in the Middle East, there will be several versions of the same events many years from now.

The second is the intention of the writers of history. In Mughal courts, court historians would often record events to flatter kings. There may be some exceptions, like Al-Beruni, who despite being part of Mahmud of Ghazni’s court, gave a balanced account of the Hindu Sahi dynasty. Others, like Ferishta, in order to flatter their Mughal lords, wrote very negative accounts of Pashtuns, as it was Pashtun Kings (The Lodhis and the Suris) that the Mughals overthrew to become rulers of India. It was a Mughal ‘state-sponsored’ campaign to malign Pashtuns that has lasted to date in the culture of Muslim North and unfortunately crept into the teaching of History in Pakistan. From the Lodhis, to Pir Roshan, to Khushal Khan, and even to Badshah Khan, the ‘state’ has never encouraged their version of history to be studied.

The third is the view of the reader. It is always important to study the view of your opponents. But readers may give up if they find the opposing view offensive or completely at odds with their beliefs. In such situations they may take the easy way out, just agreeing with what is comfortable for them without coming to terms with uncomfortable events of the past. For example, as a young Muslim reader, I always found it difficult to digest the loot and plunder of the East India Company vis a vis the Mughals. But I experienced no such qualms when reading of what Muslim conquerors did when attacking India.

That is why it is not just important to write more history; there is also a need to encourage reading different versions of it.

FA: I recently read a critique of the Oscars by a literary critic in which she commented that contemporary films, and art more generally, tend to focus on particulars without moving toward universalization. Similarly, Ayesha Jalal, the renowned historian, mentioned in a podcast—when asked about her position on Jinnah in relation to another political scientist’s new book challenging her interpretation—that the problem with newer narratives lies in how they are constructed. Rather than deriving universals from particulars (that is, making sense of historical fragments), these interpretations assume a universal framework first and then select particulars to fit it.

In contrast, I find that your books, in general, tend to circle around historical particulars without offering a broader universal interpretation (though I may be mistaken). What do you think about this? How should history be interpreted? If we are not to derive meaning from events then what is the point of history?

CJ: As I am not a trained historian, out of humility I am very careful in my books to try not to influence the thinking of the reader in any particular direction. I try to share events and narrate how they transpired. I respect readers and expect them to make up their own minds about what is in the book. I was quite surprised when Forgotten Kings came out that many readers in India and Pakistan appreciated my narration of the untold story of the Sahis in a positive light. Yet there were some in Pakistan who felt it was a great testimony to the genius of Mahmud of Ghazni. The interpretation is for the reader and one should not influence the mind of another. That is why many students in Pakistan find fault with how and what they are taught in ‘Pakistan Studies.’

FA: I have noticed a recurring pattern in your writing whereby you often weave the complex web of Pakhtunwali, the code of Pakhtun life and its guiding principles, into your narratives. This is evident in your latest work on folklore, The Ballad of Yousuf Khan and Sherbano — we see Yusuf driven by revenge for what his cousin did to him and abandoning his newly-wedded bride who pines for him. Nowadays, we frequently see how “honor” is invoked to become a tool of oppression.

Could you tell us if Pakhtunwali ever truly existed as a coherent code or is it partly a mythologized construct—a remembered ideal rather than a lived reality? If it did exist, is it now a forgotten legacy or does it still meaningfully shape the lives of Pashtuns today? Would an alien observer, say, from Mars, be able to infer such a code merely by observing contemporary Pashtun society?

CJ: It was important for me to retell these stories in the way I did because I wanted to achieve two things: convey the stories to an English-speaking audience to further the chances of preserving them; and explain Pashtun culture through them. Pakhtunwali as I understand it, has three main pillars: Badal (Revenge), Melmastya (hospitality) and Nanawatai (to give refuge, even to an enemy). Badal and Melmastya can still be observed in our society on a daily basis; the last well-known examples of Nanawatai that I can think of were the Taliban not handing over Osama bin Laden (who was their guest) and the one that has now become a movie called ‘Lone Survivor,’ in which an Afghan chief gives shelter to an American soldier and resists the Taliban.

What I want to explain is that principles and codes like Pakhtunwali and even the teachings of Islam can be misquoted to serve different agendas. The greatest abuse is the linking of these to ‘honor killings.’

While Badal is important to sustain balance in a society where there is no formal justice system, there is also the jirga where feuds can be settled. These jirgas are still in use today.

Adam Khan and Durkhanai exemplifies the last theme of Nanawatai. Yusuf Khan, I agree, should have never left his wife – it was a misplaced sense of duty and honor. The story is about how to fit love into our culture and how it must co-exist with honor and power. That is why I quoted Rumi in the beginning of Adam Khan and Durkhanai :

Your task is not to seek love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Sometimes those barriers are our beliefs.

FA: How should we think about historical movements like the Roshnai Movement of the 16th century, which you mentioned in your book Warrior Poet: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Khushal Khan Khattak? Or even the Mazdoor Kissan Party of Afzal Bangash and Sher Ali Bacha? These movements were once very significant but eventually declined and are now largely forgotten.

CJ: Not everyone has forgotten them. I have been in stores across Peshawar that were selling books in English, Urdu, and Pashto on these movements. I was lucky enough to find such books at Kitab Kor. They are doing a lot of good work to promote alternate voices to officially promoted history. Hopefully, they will be better remembered now that we have more than just books to spread their narratives and share their stories. There are very proactive influencers that I follow on social media who continue to share the stories of the silenced.

FA: You have translated two folk tales from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa into English. Folklore plays a significant role in shaping the mental, emotional, and cultural landscapes of individuals and societies. Could you tell us what struck you most in researching these stories?

CJ: When I was researching these stories I realized that the women in them have strong characters. Durkhanai and Sher Bano were no frail women. Durkhanai was a strong-minded woman who wanted to be educated. She and Sher Bano both had minds of their own and were not meek women needing the protection of men. They both had agency and voice. Another woman who impressed me was the mother of Yusuf Khan – she was intelligent and aware enough to know that love and happiness carry a higher value than ‘perceived’ honor.

FA: You mentioned that you are currently working on two books: one on the life of Abdur Rahman Peshawari, a journalist and diplomat from the pre-Partition era; the second on your grandfather, Yahya Jan, the first Education Minister of KPK (formerly NWFP). Why were you drawn to these figures?

CJ: I choose to write about them because of a concern about the lack of effort among our people to record and preserve the history of their land. Yahya Jan was my grandfather and Abdur Rehman was his elder brother; their lives encompassed many achievements and struggles. I am aware of these stories but I know that a few generations after me they may be forgotten. So I would like to leave a historical record for posterity.

FA: Finally, what has been the audience response to your books? If fewer and fewer people read history and many are increasingly impatient with it, what is the case for continuing to write it?

CJ: The response to Forgotten Kings was good. I have given many interviews about it, especially to media houses in India. They thought it refreshing that a book on Hindu kings would be written by a Muslim from Pakistan. But I do not feel this way. History has no race of religion; all religions and races have histories that have to be studied dispassionately. I have also delivered lectures about the book, one in Singapore at the Hindu Centre and one in Islamabad.

I have been receiving positive feedback from people in Pakistan as well. The problem is to create awareness of the books. My purpose was to write the book to preserve the information. Whenever in the future people develop an interest and want to read about the subject, at least there will be some material available to them. Mine is a labor of love; whether people read it or not, is a separate question. My purpose is the preservation of this information and these stories.

Changez Jan hails from Kohati Gate, Peshawar. He was educated in London and lives in Singapore where he works as a banker.

Furqan Ali is a member of the TPR team. He lives in Peshawar and writes on governance, climate, gender, finance and literature.

I began studying English more than seventy-five years ago, when I was in 5th grade. While I have learned to love the language, alas, I have not mastered it. If someone masters the Urdu language in all its intricacies and nuances, it is said that the language has become his handmaiden. While there have been notable desis who have excelled in English, for most of us English remains an untameable shrew.

In early classes, we learned English by rote and if that did not work, then a slap or a stick by the teacher would do the trick. However, questions and doubts about the proper use of English persisted. When I was in the 7th grade, my brother, Sardar, an honours graduate of Islamia College Peshawar, took it upon himself to help me in English reading. Within a week, the archaic, erratic and illogical nature of the language presented itself to me.

Once, when I was reading aloud, I came across the word “know.” I read it kanow. My brother interrupted me and said the word is pronounced as ‘no,’ explaining that the letter ‘K’ in the beginning is silent. So, a logical question came to my mind: if letter ‘K’ makes no sound why was it put there? By this time my impatient brother had had it. He slapped me across the back of my neck and declared it was put there by God. And as we all know, one does not challenge God when He becomes the final arbiter of archaic grammar.

When I entered college, I could speak an English that was a mixture of Victorian formality and street lingo. I tried, however, to speak as correctly as I could. I was always polite when I came across teachers and would greet them in English. One day, it was a few minutes after noon when I saw my English teacher, Professor H. M. Close, walking towards the principal’s office. “Good noon, sir,” I greeted him. He smiled and replied, “good afternoon, Amjad.” I thought that since I had missed the noon hour by a few minutes, he was right in greeting me the way he did. The Brits are fastidious about time, as we know. So, I needed to greet him just as the bell tower struck the hour of twelve. One day as the college tower clock was in the middle of striking 12, I saw Mr. Close and again greeted him “Good Noon, Mr. Close.” He smiled and said, “good afternoon, Amjad.” After trying a few more times, I gave up but still wondered why in the English language morning tiptoes into the afternoon and skips the noon hour altogether.

In Urdu we have a whole body of literature devoted to the noon hour. For example: sooraj sawa naizey per KhaRha thaa (the sun was at its zenith). Translated into English, it would read, “the sun was standing at one-and-a-quarter javelin.” Just imagine how much gets lost in translations. In Eastern societies, the day lingers on, so that there is not a precise cut-off between different times of the day. It takes a while for do-pehar to slide into seh-pehar, not to mention shaam and raat. We desis tend not to conform to the movement of the hands on a clock.

But there is most definitely high noon in English. We don’t call it high afternoon, do we? If that were true, then the famous Western movie, High Noon, would have to be named differently.

I have often wondered, and I am sure others have too, that we pronounce ‘but’ as in the rear-end, but we pronounce ‘put’ as in ‘shot put’. When I get an urge to question the illogical pronunciation, I am reminded of the not-too-gentle slap of my brother, and his profound quote that the silent ‘K’ in ‘know’ was put there by God. Such are the vagaries of the English language, as anointed by the higher authority.

Having been taught in the British system of education in Pakistan, it was difficult for me to adjust to the free-flowing American English. In high school, formality was taught in reading and writing. In an application for anything, from a leave of absence to the issuance of a gun license, the concerned authority had to be addressed properly.

After making the case or the request, we were taught to end the application with the customary ‘I beg to remain sir, your most obedient and faithful servant’. I don’t know why we had to enter someone’s servitude to get a day off or to obtain a gun license.

Below, I’m narrating a story that was shared with me by the late Mohsin Ali, a one-time Diplomatic Editor of Reuters news agency, and later the Washington correspondent for the Times of London. According to him, there was this man who took pride in using correct English and English metaphors.

When his mother died, he applied for leave, and keeping with his habit of proper English, he wrote: “Sir, it is with extreme sadness that I report that the lady who used to rock my cradle has now kicked the bucket. I request three days’ leave so I could properly say goodbye to my dear departed mother and properly send her on her journey to the hereafter.”

I have read and re-read many times a small book by William Strunk and E. B. White, titled The Elements of Style. While it is a time-tested and time-honoured little book, I always get bogged down with the exceptions to the rules.

It is a well-known fact that for languages to survive and flourish, they need to remain relevant. They imbibe influences from other languages and become rich in the process. Just look at the influence of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent on the English language. A whole lexicon of words from the subcontinent has entered the English language. While Shakespeare was totally unaware of samosa, dosa or curry, his present-day relatives are quite at ease with those culinary indulgences.

Now an example of how languages fail to evolve in isolated conditions. Amish people are farmers, originally from Germany, who now reside in closely-knit communities in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. They shun modern conveniences such as electricity, radios and cars, and have their own schools where education up to the 8th grade is mandatory. They farm using ploughs and horses, and travel in horse-pulled buggies. They practice an orthodox Christian religion that resembles Catholicism. They speak an archaic German language which is hard even for Germans to understand. Languages left in the petri dish of closed communities, with little or no interaction with outsiders, remain static and get fossilised. An Amish man would be totally lost in Germany, just as I would be in Scotland or Ireland.

Many years ago, while hiking on the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire, our contingent came across a small group of Scotsmen. We struck up a conversation about hiking. One of them was curious about our background. “Are you a niitive?,” he asked. I asked him to repeat, and after a few times I understood his question. He wondered if we were natives. He must have thought we were American Indians. He was annoyed that we had a problem understanding him. To illustrate the point, I told him a WWII story about an unconscious American soldier who was brought to a British field hospital. After a day or so, he woke up in totally unfamiliar surroundings. He was scared and was sure he was going to die. He asked the nurse if he was brought there to die. To that, the English nurse replied in her clipped accent, “No sir, you came here yesterdaiy,” (sounding like, yes-to-die)

In the musical comedy (and also the movie), My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) is exasperated when the cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), has difficulty using proper English. He cries out:

There even are places where English completely disappears.
Well, in America, they haven’t used it for years!

The refrain in that song is telling, and the lyrics end with the taunt:

Why can’t the English,
Why can’t the English learn to speak?

And here are we desis, trying to imitate English.

Sayed Amjad Hussain is an emeritus professor of cardio-thoracic surgery at the College of Medicine and Life Sciences and an emeritus professor in humanities at the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Toledo. He was born in Peshawar and graduated from Khyber Medical College which honoured him with the title “Farzand-e-Khyber” (Son of Khyber) in December 1993.

I remember the smell first. Services Hospital, Jail Road, Lahore. Antiseptic mixed with something damp and metallic. It stayed in the air, in the bedsheets, in the clothes we wore back home.

My father, Barnet Paul, was seventy-one when we brought him there. Before that, we had taken him to a private hospital. I remember holding him as we tried to get him inside. He could no longer walk properly. His hands felt lighter than they should have.

They did not check him first. They told me the cost. “One hundred thousand per day for a Covid patient. You need to deposit a few hundred thousand before we begin.” They were speaking to me, not to him.

I could afford it—for some time. But I did not know how long that time would last. Standing there, I realised something I had never had to calculate before: how long a life could be sustained before money ran out.

We turned back. We brought him to Services Hospital. They were slow. Not careless, just overwhelmed. It took hours for someone to see him properly. Then longer for a bed. I think it took days before he was properly shifted into the ward.

Everything moved in lines. Even urgency had to wait. There were ten beds in the ward. Sometimes more people than beds. The fans above moved slowly, pushing hot air around. It was May. The heat did not leave, even at night.

People coughed constantly. Some called out to God. Some argued. Sometimes there were announcements asking attendants to step out because the head doctor was coming. Every day, someone left. Not discharged. Gone. And every day, someone new took that bed. My father stayed in the middle.

He did not speak much. Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus had taken his memory slowly over the years. He had forgotten names, places, faces. By the end, he did not recognise his brother or sister. But he still recognised me. And my sister. He used to call me “Bunny.” Sometimes “Brian.”

Even in those days, when everything else had faded, that stayed. It was just the two of us. We worked in shifts—sixteen hours each. One would stay. The other would go home, sleep for a few hours, and come back.

When the body begins to fail, love becomes practical. It bathes. It lifts. It feeds. It waits.

We managed everything. His medicines. His reports. His tests. We carried him to the stretcher. Helped him onto the wheelchair. Waited in lines. Waited outside rooms. Waited for results. Care, in that place, was not given. It was maintained. At night, I slept on the floor or on a bench.

Cockroaches came out after midnight. So did other insects I never identified. They would crawl across my arms, my neck, my legs. By morning, my body would ache and itch not just from the bites, but from the surface I had been lying on.

Sleep was never complete. Just a pause. During the day, I cleaned him. Bathed him. Changed his clothes. Helped adjust the drip. Assisted with the catheter. Watched the doctors and tried to follow what they were doing. I had never done any of this before.

But after a few days, it felt like something I had always known. There was an old man on the bed to my father’s left. His son and daughter-in-law came sometimes. Not often. A few hours, then they would leave. I started helping him too. Bringing his medicine. Feeding him. Adjusting his blanket.

One day, his son came and tried to feed him. The old man refused. He pointed at me and said, call him. “I will eat if he gives me food.” I stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. It wasn’t pride. It wasn’t sadness. Just something quiet. How care moves. How it settles.

Covid kept everyone away. No relatives came. Not from my father’s side. Not from my mother’s side. I understood why. But understanding does not fill space. A friend from college came sometimes. She brought food. She didn’t stay long.

Once, a relative, more a friend than family, came and handed me money.

I told him I didn’t need it. He insisted. It was the first time in my life someone gave me money like that, without me asking, without explanation, and without taking it back. I remember that more than the amount.

My father had always avoided asking for help. He never liked borrowing money. Never liked depending on others. We grew up that way. I remember once asking him why we didn’t have the things other people had—cable TV, computers, small luxuries. He told me: “Have you ever seen us ask anyone for food? For money?”

He pointed out how others around us lived—borrowing, owing, collecting things they couldn’t afford. “Our life is simple,” he said. “But we are not under debt.” That stayed with me.

He was a disciplined man. He woke up at five every morning. Turned on the radio. Listened to old songs. Made tea. Smoked his cigarette. Sat quietly.

He worked at Saint Anthony’s High School. That school paid for my education. He was never late. We did not talk much.

He did not like noise. Did not tolerate childishness. He wanted seriousness, order. Sometimes he was harsh. Sometimes the house felt controlled, quiet in a way that was not always peaceful. But he was still my father. And I respected him.

In the ward, I sang to him. Old songs. The ones he used to listen to in the mornings. I sang when he was awake. I sang when he was half-asleep. Sometimes he moved his eyes. Sometimes his fingers. Sometimes his breathing shifted.

In those two weeks, I kept thinking about something the doctor had said earlier. That there was no point to the ICU. That we could use the oxygen for someone younger. Someone with a better chance. I understood what he meant.

But in that ward, understanding did not matter. Because here, life was not theory. It was weight. It was breath. It was presence. He passed away in the morning. Quietly. No final words. No moment to hold on to. Just a slowing, and then stillness.

The night before he passed, he was only partially conscious. I still sang.

ik pyaar ka naghma hai, maujoN ki ravaani hai
zindagi aur kuch bhi nahiiN, teri meri kahaani hai

Now the ward felt different. Before, it was full. After, it had space. I still think about those two weeks. Not as a fight against death. We were not saving him. We knew that. But we were not leaving him either. I carried him. I fed him. I cleaned him. I stayed.

And maybe that is what those two weeks were. Not time we were given. But time we chose not to abandon.

One of his childhood friends came to me at the graveyard and said, “Your father always said you were bright. He used to say you deserved the best, and that you would do something great in life.” My father had rarely spoken to me that way in person. But hearing it then, I understood that love does not always arrive or depart in the language we expect.

Brian Bassanio Paul is a music enthusiast and cultural critic. He writes about the intersection of music, society, and the human condition. He can be reached at brian.bassanio@gmail.com.

Contra Eliot, March has been the cruellest month for us. Ramzan, in which a certain class of Pakistanis confine themselves to eating and sleeping, was difficult enough. Add to that the wars of aggression that engulfed our region the day our March issue came out. Not surprisingly, non-Pakistani contributors who had promised to grace the April issue were distracted by the stress of events.

Many, both here and abroad, had taken on the burden of defeating the aggressors by praying intensely and furiously forwarding WhatApp messages that brought to mind Harbans Mukhia’s poem pareshaani (Agitation) in which, after listing all the things that agitate him (including Obama’s Afghan policy and the relentless honking of horns), he concludes:

mujhey yaqeen hai / meri pareshaani hii maiN / in sub mas’aloN ka hul hai

(I am convinced / only in my agitation / is the solution to all these problems)

Given all that, it fell to one of us to keep the ship afloat. Anjum Altaf discovered in his father’s papers two documents of historical interest. The first is a personalised letter to civil servants from General Ayub Khan on the modality of good governance once he had cleaned out the vipers’ nest of politicians. The letter is being deliberately reproduced without comment to allow readers to arrive at their own conclusions and, hopefully, to record their reaction in the space for comments in order to initiate a discussion. Needless to say, governance remains a vital issue to this day, one that remains unresolved.

The second document is an unpublished memoir (in Urdu) of a student’s tenure at Islamia College, Peshawar, during the years 1937 to 1941. Along with a description of college life in those days, the memoir records the visits of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937 and representatives of the Nizam of Hyderabad, the finance minister and the two crown princesses, in 1938.

War, of course, is on everyone’s mind, but what one finds difficult to relate to is the extent to which life continues to proceed as normal – the T20 World Cup, Oscars, Eid, marriages, etc., etc. The sole concern seems confined to ensuring a full tank of gas.

This should not be a surprise. One recalls the paragraph from Proust when the First World War is ongoing not too far away from Paris. Here is what Marcel observes in the final volume of In Search of Lost Times (and expresses in a stunning sentence):

By dinnertime the restaurants were full; and if passing in the street I saw a poor soldier, home on leave, having had six days’ escape from the constant risk of death, and now ready to set of back to the trenches, allow his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows, I suffered as I had in the hotel at Ballbec where fisherman had watched us eating, yet this time the pain was greatest because I knew that the misery of the soldier is worse than that of the poor, as it combines every variety of misery, and even more touching because it is more resigned and nobler, and because it was with a philosophical shake of the head, without hatred, that, ready to set off back to the war, he would say, as he saw the shirkers rushing to grab their tables: “You’d never know there was a war on here.”

[I recall Aijaz Ahmed remarking in one of his essays that such Proustian sentences could not be written in Urdu because the language has virtually no punctuation without which embedding so many thoughts in one sentence is not possible.]

And here is what Stefan Collini notes in the latest volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters written during the same war when London was under attack:

Editions of correspondence can provide historians with sidelights on the social life of the time. For example, it is striking how much of the prewar life of the comfortable classes seems to have been sustained even in wartime, especially in the form of lunches and dinners at clubs and restaurants. Eliot’s occasional reports of the wines he was served on these occasions make the point. Consider the following sequence spread across just a few months from December 1942. Dining alone with one hostess, he could report ‘a very good dinner, with some very palatable Beaune and some really capital brandy’. A couple of months later, after having dined with the journalist and bibliophile Richard Jennings, he noted: ‘We consumed an excellent Chateau and woodcock. On Thursday I discovered a noble Richebourg ’28 at the club which I shared with Lymington.’ The following month, another friend came to dinner at the Fabers’ Russell Square flat where Eliot lodged for two or three days each week, an occasion prepared for by the friend ‘having brought two bottles of excellent Burgundy (a Corton ’24 and a Clos de Tart ’24) four weeks in advance to condition themselves to the flat’. Faber entertained Eliot and others to supper at Quaglino’s after attending the theatre in December 1943, a meal that included ‘oysters and Chablis’; two months later Eliot reported having had lunch with John Betjeman ‘at the Holborn Restaurant, where he gave me oysters and a bottle of Gruaud Larose 1928’.

This is what it is, the indifference and tyranny of life. Yet, it is hard to reconcile with. We can’t help recall lines referring to the same war from Wilfrid Wilson Gibbon’s poem ‘Lament’:

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings—
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams…
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

And the poem aakhri aadmi ka rajaz by Ifrikhar Arif with its refrain ‘har taraf sukoon hai.’

Anjum Altaf has transcreated both poems, the first into Urdu and the second into English.

Onwards to May. We will either sink or swim depending upon the state of the Strait of Hormuz.

***

PS: We are pleased to link our readers to Claire Chambers’ Prufrock in Pakistan which appeared coincidentally on 29 March, just in time for our April issue.

‘Lament,’ a poem by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962) is transcreated into Urdu under the mentorship of Muhammad Saleemur Rahman sahib. aaKhrii aadmi ka rajaz by Iftikhar Arif (1940-) is transcreated into English with no one to share the credit or the blame.

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings—
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

nauha

hum jo haiN yahaaN abhii
hum jo bach gaye yahaaN
kaisey muskuraayeN ge
kaisey dekh paayeN ge
aaftab ke jalvey
aur meeNh ke ye cheeNTey
kaisey ro’eN ge un ko
jo bichaR gaye hum se
de gaye humeN sub kuch
un ko bhi to bha’ey they
aaftab ke jalvey
aur meeNh ke ye cheeNTey

meeNh se bhiigey bhiigey phuul
aur ye parinda jo
in meN chehchahaata hai
choTii choTii baatoN ko
kaisey yaad rakheN ge
ye hava’eN aur baadal
ye ravaaN davaaN nadyaaN
jin pe un ke KhwaaboN se
chaa’oN hai uluuhii sii
aur hum na jaaneN ge
un ke dil kahaaN TuuTey
aur huey doneem aaKhir!

aaKhrii aadmi ka rajaz

masahebeen-e shah mutma’in hue ke sarfaraaz sarbareeda baazu’uN samait
shehr ki faseel par laTak rahey haiN aur har taraf sukoon hai
sukoon hi sukoon hai

fughaan-e khalq ahl-e taifah ki nazar ho gayii
mata-e sabr wahshat-e dua ki nazar ho gayii
umeed-e ajr be-yaqeeni-e jazaa ki nazar ho gayii
na aitbaar-e harf hai na abroo-e khoon hai
sukoon hi sukoon hai

masahebeen-e shah mutma’in hue ke sarfaraaz sarbareeda baazu’uN samait
shehr ki faseel par laTak rahey haiN aur har taraf sukoon hai
sukoon hi sukoon haii

Khaleej-e iqtidaar sarkashoN se paaT di gayii
jo haath aayii daulat-e ghaneem baanT di gayii
tanaab-e Kheyma-e lisaan-o lafz kaaT di gayii
fiza woh hai ke arzoo-e Khair tak junoon hai
sukoon hi sukoon hai

masahebeen-e shah mutma’in hue ke sarfaraaz sarbareeda baazu’uN samait
shehr ki faseel par laTak rahey haiN aur har taraf sukoon hai
sukoon hi sukoon hai

We Won

All’s well, courtiers tell their kings
pointing to headless, limbless bodies
strung across city walls.

Drums of war drown questioning voices,
fervid prayers consume the fruit of patient toil,
honest work is lost to lust for gain,
words are stripped of meaning,
blood is sacred no more.
All’s well.

All’s well, courtiers tell their kings
pointing to headless, limbless bodies
strung across city walls.

Crumbling walls are plastered with rebel skulls,
diminished fortunes swell with ill-got loot,
language is rendered incapable of meaning,
words float free of truth,
peace is now a quest for fools.
All’s well.

All’s well, courtiers tell their kings
pointing to headless, limbless bodies
strung across city walls.

Anjum Altaf is the author of Transgressions and More Transgressions, two volumes of poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The author retired as a Colonel in the army and later owned a printing press on Hangu Road in Kohat. Anjum Altaf recalls visiting it early in his life. He also recalls repeatedly hearing from his father some names mentioned in this memoir including those of Professor M. A. Latiif, Salim Anwar Baig, and Abdul Ali Khan.

These selected excerpts, chosen to exemplify personal, intellectual, political, and historic aspects of life at Islamia College of the time, are translated by Anjum Altaf.]

Preamble

عالم بےخبری طرفه تماشہ بود است

حیف صد حیف که ما زود خبردار شدیم

“The most pleasant four years of my life – 3 June 1937 - 21 May 1941”

[Note: This couplet was clearly recalled from memory, an indication of the familiarity with Persian of students of the time. A search reveals that it is from a ghazal by Foroughi Bastami and the original reads as follows:

عالم بی خبری طرفه بهشتی بوده‌ست

حیف و صد حیف که ما دیر خبردار شدیم

(The world of ignorance was heavenly

Alas, we became aware of this too late)]

Opening

I joined Islamia College, Peshawar, on 3 June 1937 to study English, Economics, History and Arabic. I feel it necessary to state that before me only one other person from our clan had enrolled in a college. I was completely unfamiliar with the environment of a college and its etiquette. By the grace of God, I quickly got to know other students and the rules of college life.

I was assigned a room in Grant Hostel whose warden was the late Professor M. A. Latif. In the first few days I met Mir Altaf Hussain, a student from Peshawar. Very soon our friendship and mutual affection made us inseparable.

For the summer break at the end of June, I went home to Kohat and Altaf went with his parents to Abbottabad leaving his address with me. During the break we continued to correspond and keep in touch. It was a coincidence that our interests and personalities were very similar. Altaf invited me to Abbottabad and I went to see him for a few days. Professor M. A. Latif was also there and we had the honour to visit with him several times. We were very impressed by his style of conversation, wit, and knowledge of and expressiveness in English.

We got together again when college resumed in September 1937. Altaf, Ghulam Rasul and I were allotted a room in Oriental Hostel where the warden was the late Professor Mohammad Shafi. Among our hostel mates were Nadir Khan Durrani, Mohammad Yaqub Khan of Mardan, Abdul Rauf Khan, and Abdul Ali Khan son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

In the afternoon, Altaf and I participated in games; I played football and Altaf hockey. On days when no games were scheduled we went for walks. In both directions we used to converse in English discussing varied topics.

Visitors to Islamia College

In 1938 for the celebration of Seerat-un-Nabi, Syed Abul Hasan Nadwi (Ali Miyan) came to our college [from Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama] and addressed us in the college mosque. I remember the following other distinguished persons who visited our college from time to time and enlightened us with their knowledge:

Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
Hazrat Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung of Hyderabad (Deccan)
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Malik Khuda Baksh, Advocate
Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan
Sardar Abdul Rab Nishtar
Pir Baksh Khan, Advocate

Visit of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, President of the All India Congress, visited our college. The event was organized in Cunningham Hall. The welcome address was read by the President of the Khyber Union. Following that, Mian Taskeen ud Din recited Allama Iqbal’s poem ‘dua’ in a melodious voice (lehan-e da’oodi). I recall two couplets of the poem:

ya rab dil-e muslim ko woh zinda tamanna de
jo qalb ko garma de jo rooh ko TaRpa de

maiN bulbul-e nalaaN huuN ek ujRe gulistaaN ka
taseer ka saa’il huuN mauhtaj ko daata de

Panditji rose from his chair, removed the garland of flowers from around his neck, and placed it around that of Taskeen ud Din Sahib. The hall resounded with slogans and the ambience of exhilaration and pleasure (kaif o suroor) was such that I am unable to describe it. It was an occasion to be seen and heard which continues to yield joy to me.

An event in Kohat

In the same year, citizens of Kohat decided to organize a major celebration for milad-un nabi to which Hindus, Sikhs, local Christians, and Britishers were to be invited. The management decided to request Dr. Ali Umer Hayat Sahib to deliver the principal address. I was entrusted with delivering the invitation which I did and which he graciously accepted.

The event was a grand success. Doctor Sahib, in his characteristic style, delivered such a magnificent discourse in English on the personality of the Prophet that the entire audience was left in awe. The maidan resounded with slogans of takbir. Kohat was blessed with this honour courtesy of the collaboration of Islamia College, Peshawar.

The death of Allama Iqbal

It was also the year when Allama Iqbal passed away. A few days before his death, we had read the following couplets in the newspaper:

سرود رفته باز آید که ناید؟
نسیمی از حجاز آید که ناید؟

سرآمد روزگار این فقیری
دگر دانای راز آید که ناید؟

(Will the song that has ended arrive again?
Will the breeze from Hejaz arrive again?

This servant’s time is almost at an end
Will anyone else knowing the secrets arrive again?)

With these couplets he had predicted his departure. The occasion was marked by a commemorative event at the college at which senior students spoke to express their sorrow and mark the loss to the nation.

A game of tennis

Mirza Anwar Baig was a tennis player and in charge of the tennis court and programme. He was a child among children and an adult among adults. He arranged a match of the college team with that of Sir Cunningham, the governor of the NWFP. On the appointed day, he escorted the college students along with the players to the Governor House, Peshawar, in two or three official buses. Our team was represented by Hussain and Chuni while the Governor’s team comprised the Governor himself and another Englishman. The court was surrounded by the dignitaries of the city along with military and civil officers and British ladies.

The match was highly contested and each of the players gave his best. I don’t recall who won but all the spectators were delighted. Later all of us were feted with a sumptuous reception and were personally seen off by the Governor who shook hands with everyone and bade us khuda hafiz in Pashto.

A transition at the college

In 1939, R. L. Holdsworth left for London and my benefactor Professor Dr. Umer Hayat was appointed the principal of Islamia College. Within a few days it felt like spring had arrived and there was a sense of freedom in the college. He initiated many reforms—the proctorial system was introduced and there was closer contact with students.

I remember Altaf and I were busy studying in our hostel room when Dr. Sahib dropped by accompanied by Hafiz Mohammad Usman and Professor Sher Ahmad. He enquired about our welfare, looked over the room, conversed with us, and left. A while later I fell ill and was unable to see him for some days. One morning what did I see but the Principal arriving at our hostel riding a horse. He asked about my well-being and left. He treated me in this special manner although I was not his student nor enrolled in the subjects he taught.

Once on returning from a trip abroad, Malik Sahib narrated his experiences to students in an assembly. I asked him “Dr. Sahib, where did you have your most delicious meal?” He laughed and said “I knew Safdar would definitely ask me this question,” and then added “In Europe, in Scandinavia, and in Asia, in Peshawar.”

Faculty-student relations

I wish to record another incident. I was a student of the arts and the late Mirza Anwar Baig Sahib was a professor of Chemistry and the head of the department. He was always very kind to me. I had gone to Kohat on the death of my father. One day Mirza Sahib along with his son Saleem Anwar Baig came to our home to offer his condolences and prayed for the soul of my father. I was neither his student nor a member of his proctorial group, only a friend of Saleem, and he came to offer his sympathy.

During the summer vacations I often wrote letters in English to the late M. A. Latif Sahib. He would mark his corrections on the text and return them to me. Once I placed a stamp in the envelope for him to use when replying. He returned the stamp in his response and indirectly expressed his displeasure at my act.

These incidents demonstrate how considerate and sympathetic our teachers were towards the students, what personal bonds they nurtured with us, and how much support and help they showered on us.

Usmania Hostel and the Nizam of Hyderabad

During these four years, most likely in 1938, a very prestigious event was held at our college nothing like which was seen at any other college in the subcontinent. There was a grand hostel in our college which was named New Hostel after its construction. The college administration decided to renovate it, give it a fresh coat of paint, and rename it Usmania Hostel. It was agreed that the Nizam of Deccan would be invited to inaugurate the new hostel.

The Nizam acceded to the request but sent Sir Akbar Hyderi, the finance minister of Hyderabad Deccan, to represent him. Along with him he sent the brides of the two royal princes, Azam Jah and Moazzam Jah.

The entire area around the hostel was decorated and a carpeted stage prepared. Chairs were arranged for staff, students, and distinguished guests under tents and canopies in a vast maidan. At the appointed time the distinguished visitors arrived. On the stage were the president of the management committee Khan Bahadur Saadullah Khan of Umerzai. On his right was the late Sir Akbar Hyderi to whose one side was seated Princess Durreshawar and on the other Princess Niloufer.

The proceeding commenced with the recitation of the Holy Quran following which Khan Bahadur Sahib presented the welcome address. In response, Sir Akbar Hyderi read out the message of the Nizam of Hyderabad and presented greetings and a donation on his behalf. In his speech, Sir Akbar Hyderi said “Youth of the Frontier, I find myself growing young in your presence. I feel immensely delighted and happy. This feeling has descended on me as soon as I have begun addressing the proud Pathans and the young and bright students of Islamia College.” The entire congregation exploded with cheers – Nizam Deccan zindabad, Sir Akbar Hyderi zindabad, Prince Azam Jah zindabad, Prince Moazzam Jah zindabad, the Islamic state of Hyderabad paindabad. Sir Akbar Hyderi pressed a button, a bell clanged, and the curtain was withdrawn from the plaque of Usmania Hostel. Shouts of Usmania Hostel paindabad resounded across the entire college environs. From that day on, the hostel is known as Usmania Hostel.

The sense of joy and delight that was witnessed in the college that day was never seen either before or after. The writer had the good fortune to participate in an event where everyone, young or old, was exhilarated and expressing their unrestrained delight to one and all.

Conclusion

After writing so many pages I recall all the incidents and events that I have failed to mention. In this narrative of devotion I have failed to pay sufficient tribute to my honourable teachers, staff, employees, and members of the administration. For that oversight I beg their forgiveness.

I can only end with a couplet of Allama Sir Mohammad Iqbal:

تو ہی ناداں چند کلیوں پر قناعت کر گیا
ورنہ گلشن میں علاج تنگیِ داماں بھی ہے

(How ignorant of you to have contented yourself with a few buds
Know that the garden has a cure for the limits of your capacity)

Note: Islamia College, Peshawar, was established in 1913.

Observe the structural resemblance to St. John’s College, Agra, which was established in 1850.

Much to our own (pleasant) surprise we are bringing you the March issue, our third, of The Peshawar Review.

For our inaugural issue in January we had suggested the theme of literature that had affected our lives in one way or another. The one contribution we received in response to the request was Radhika Yeddanapudi’s youthful encounter with Jane Eyre. With a lag, this issue offers two more recollections: Anjum Altaf recalls the impact on his life of reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Wilfred Owen between school and college; Faizan Aslam Soofi discovers in college a new way of seeing, and flying, with Toni Morrison.

We have an intriguing Urdu short story by Raja Shehzad translated by Shueyb Gandapur that speculates whether language alters the way we look at ourselves, our world, and others. Ahmed Kamran, in stories about the city of stories, brings alive a lost history of the forgotten heroes of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who dedicated their lives to the dream of justice and equality for all.

We are grateful to our contributors for supporting our vision to make The Peshawar Review a byword for narratives of quality and interest.

“Ruby, I ask you one last time. Hand me your absolute trust! Forget that you are a separate being for at least a day... or perhaps an hour... or even for just a single moment. Believe me, all our issues will be resolved. Otherwise, accept me the way I am, in entirety, make me a slave of your whims.”

“Do you think I am an idiot to surrender my freedom? Or to restrain yours? You have learned all these idiosyncrasies from your poet friends. Why don’t you live a normal life? Let me first get a divorce from my despicable husband. When I find a job in Islamabad, you can move there as well. We shall then be able to find a way out.”

Rubina did not understand many things about Raza. He was just a handsome man — educated and good enough in bed. But what was this nonsense about surrendering one’s will?

The atmosphere of that café at Susan Road was already depressing due to its dim lights. Though the evenings of Faisalabad did not carry the same romantic air like those of Hyderabad, yet there was a certain loveliness about them. This was her favourite table at Café Khayyam. From here, she could observe the traffic of people in that wealthy marketplace. It was the same café where Rubina and her now-husband used to come for their rendezvous during her college days. The café still had the same owner and waiting staff. The elderly waiter still said aloud his blessings in the same way, “Allah hayati de“ (May you live long). Probably he forgot to give them his blessings that day..

As usual, Rubina paid the bill and pinched Raza’s arm before saying goodbye. They never met again.

Rubina received the news of Raza’s death by electrocution from a newspaper. The kind of relationship they had didn’t warrant her going to his house to mourn his death. Still,she drove to the mohalla where he lived; the dark, narrow lane of Kaiseri Gate and the house of death; she turned back.

How did it come to pass? There are no answers to such eternal questions, but she continued to contemplate them. Why did Raza always desire such absolute surrender? Why did he love in such a silly and impractical way, as if he lived in a fantasy? She believed that Bano Qudsia’s pathetic stories had corrupted the idea of love for people who grew up in the 80s and went to Urdu-medium schools. Had he been the product of English-medium schooling like herself, would he have held the same ideas? Would he have been saved from electrocution if that was the case?

The grief of his death remained raw forever..

After Raza’s death, she remained melancholy. However the wish to get divorced slowly dissipated. She felt that her husband’s behaviour towards her was not that hostile anymore. “Yes, go ahead”; “Whatever you fancy”; “Sure, let’s do it” — now what justification for divorce is one left with when faced with such agreeable behaviour?

Raja Shehzad moved from Karachi to New Zealand. The translated story (jiituuN to tujhey pa’uuN) is part of his first collection of stories (log sargoshiyoN meiN goya haiN) published in 2022.

Shueyb Gandapur lives in Dubai. His travelogue (Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India) was published in 2025.

But Nobody/Somebody is not just a simple binary of the type portrayed by the transformation of Zohran Mamdani. I was intrigued by the realization that every nobody is a somebody in the sense that he/she/they has/have a distinct identity. I remain a nobody but I could very easily have been a completely different nobody from what I am today. The relevant point is that even as a nobody I have a unique identity that is an outcome of many random accidents that have occurred over my life. Which raises the obvious question — What was it that makes me what I am today?

For me, most of the identity-shaping accidents were compressed between the end of high school (1965) and the completion of my undergraduate degree (1971). I no longer recall the exact order in which they occurred but am fairly certain that the earliest ones came embedded in poetry. I read a lot of poetry in school and there were particular poems I was in love with. Hélas, for one, by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) whose first four lines have stayed etched in my memory:

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?

Hélas was followed by Eliot’s (1888-1965) The Hollow Men in which it were the last four lines that became an obsessive mantra:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

But the poems I loved were not the ones that shaped me. I can only explain that with an image — imagine me walking along a path reciting either of the set of lines quoted above; I keep to the path as I hum them. Identity-changing poems by contrast were ones that made me pull up abruptly and start walking in a different direction.

Which brings me to the two poems mentioned in the title of this essay. The first was by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) — mujh se pehlii sii muhabbat mirii mehboob na maang. Here, in the order they made sense to me, are the four worldview changing lines (translation by the author):

aur bhi dukh haiN zamaaney meiN mohabbat ke siwa
lauT jaati hai udhar ko bhi nazar kya kiijey
ab bhi dilkash hai tira husn magar kya kiijey
mujh se pehlii sii mohabbat mirii mehboob na maang

(the ache of love is not the only trauma in the world
I can’t help thinking of them — what can I do
you are still as ravishing as ever — what can I do
ask me not to love you the way I used to do)

The world of most teenagers, in love with the idea of falling in love, revolves around themselves. The startling discovery that there is a much bigger universe outside of themselves, full of injustices, that Faiz paints with searing, gut-wrenching realism, turns that world on its head and makes it impossible to set right again.

Nothing beyond the four lines of Oscar Wilde has stayed with me but I have a conversation with Faiz every day. More than fifty years later I adapted this poem into English and concluded it with the following lines:

Let us still love
But differently

The second poem I read at the same time was Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Here are the four lines that swerved my path:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Add to these four, two more lines from Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, referring to the Latin phrase from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”:

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

These lines were enough to turn me against war forever. Recall that the year was 1965.

I began by saying that it is random accidents that give even nobodies the unique identities they have; a different set of accidents could have yielded a completely different me. But I must add that even accidents are not entirely random — there is a path dependence to them. The fact that I came across these particular poems of Faiz and Owen was accidental but the fact that I was reading poetry at all was primed by an earlier accident — my being born in a house overflowing with poetry books, with a father who was a MA in English Literature and a mother who brought Urdu poetry in her dowry.

Now that I am thinking about this, I suspect I didn’t gloss over these poems but was receptive to their messages because I was likely nudged by something lurking in my subconscious. I recall I must have been seven or eight and perhaps unable to fall asleep for some reason when my mother recited the contrasting sh’irs of Mir and Sauda to distract me.

sirhaaney miir ke aahista bolo
abhii Tuk rotey rotey so gayaa hai

(speak softly by Mir’s bedside
he has just cried himself to sleep)

And

saudaa kii jo baaliiN pe gaya shor-e-qayaamat
Khuddaam-e-adab boley abhii aaNkh lagii hai

(when the tumult of Judgement Day reached Sauda’s bedside
the guardians of literature admonished he had only just closed his eyes)

A lesson that the same phenomenon could look so different through different eyes.

And I was initiated by my grandfather into recognising that things could be very different from what they were proclaimed when I was sent to live with him in Abbottabad after sonic booms blew out the windows of our house, located close to a strategic target in Lahore, on the first night of the 1965 war. Every time grandfather heard the sombre voice of Shakeel Ahmed announcing some spectacular success (hamarey jaanbaazoN ne dushman ke addoN pe Theek Theek nishaney lagaaye) he would invariably respond loudly with ‘Lies’ often with an added expletive.

At that time I had no way of knowing if he was right or wrong but I must have imbibed that there could be two sides to every narrative. It just so happened that I arrived in London to join college towards the end of 1971. I was able to confirm then that there were indeed two sides to every narrative and also that our side was making things up. Over time I was to learn that was always the case. Grandfather was right.

I am what I am, with the identity I present, courtesy of a grandfather and parents I had no hand in choosing, a few lessons that were communicated at home without the intention of teaching, some interests that were nurtured by being surrounded by books, a couple of poems I stumbled upon without seeking them out, a dislocating Partition, and a couple of gratuitous ‘wars.’

That’s what life is like but I keep running into people who take all the credit for what they become.

Anjum Altaf is the author of two volumes of poems, Transgressions and More Transgressions, inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and co-author (with Amit Basole) of Thinking with Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation. His most recent book, A Modern Introduction to Indian Music and Other Essays, was published in Delhi in November 2025.

I was with my dear friend Ali Yawar. We had been travelling together by train and bus to small towns in Sindh and Punjab since leaving Karachi some weeks earlier. We stayed with our friend Altaf Malik for a few days in his small hill-top village of Chinji in Talagang district. Then, crossing over the kala chitta mountain range, we came to Khanpur (famous for its red-blood oranges and lake) in Hazara where we stayed with our friend Raja Akhtar Kiyani. Some may be aware of the true story associated with the lake formed when the Khanpur Dam was built during the 1960s. The old ancestral haveli of a prominent local landlord, Raja Sikandar Zaman, was submerged despite his desperate efforts to save it. Amjad Islam Amjad powerfully fictionalized the story, setting it in a Punjabi village with Chaudhry Sikandar as the lead character, for the PTV serial Waris, perhaps the first popular serial aired on PTV’s national satellite circuit starting in December 1979. While visiting the Khanpur Dam resthouse where Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) had been detained for a time, I had seen the ruins of the haveli still visible then in the middle of the lake when the water level dropped.

From Khanpur we had come to Mardan where our host Qadir Khan, a truck driver, put us on the bus to Peshawar. The air was wet with the rain that had been falling since we reached Mardan. The sky had remained mostly overcast but now the clouds had cracked and a warm sun peeped through an hour back as our bus approached Peshawar after a brief stopover at Charsadda. Even at a crowded bus terminus located in the heart of the city, the light breeze was cold and refreshing.

We had not come to Peshawar on a young men’s tourist trail—to see the old city, roam around the fabled Qissa Khwaani Bazaar, or taste the famous Peshawari Chapli Kebab or Tikka at Namak Mandi. Hiring an auto-rickshaw from Saddar, we headed towards Tehkal Bala, then a small village located outside the city in the idyllic environs of Peshawar’s Forest College. Tehkal Bala is now long incorporated and subsumed in the crowded city of close to three million people—Hayatabad, Askari Town and the D.H.A. are Peshawar’s new expanding frontiers to the west.

Tehkal Bala is the home of NWFPs (now KPK) well-known Arbab family of politicians including Col. Arbab Niaz Mohammad Khan who was charged in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and several former ministers and chief ministers. Here, our host was Arbab Mohammad Khan Kaka, a jovial old man and a veteran of NWFP’s long-forgotten militant peasant movement. Ali Yawar and I, two young men from Karachi, and Kaka, then a middle-aged man of about 50, were part of a still-vibrant revolutionary Marxist socialist movement in the country. In our youthful days, we, and countless others, had dreamt of a world free of exploitation; a dream to build a world where toiling people of the working classes could live a decent and happy life with equitable distribution of wealth, food, shelter, adequate healthcare, and good education. It was a dream that did not let us sleep.

Dedicating our lives to the cause, we spent our days in Karachi among factory workers, political activists, and similarly restless youth who shared our cherished ideals. To share our dream, exchange our ideas, and build a party of revolutionary youth, we would travel to towns and villages across Pakistan meeting other progressive workers, staying with ordinary people—factory workers, bus and truck drivers, coolies, loaders, peasants and farm workers. It was another world.

Kaka was a part of that movement. I met him for the first time in the autumn of 1973 when I was among scores of student activists who had joined hundreds of progressive workers to give a rousing welcome to the heroes of Hashtnagar, Lala Abdul Sattar and Mohammad Khan Kaka, arriving at the Karachi Cantonment railway station from Peshawar. From the railway station we rode the local circular train to Landhi, an industrial suburb of Karachi, where Lala Sattar and Kaka were to address a rally of Karachi’s mostly Pukhtun textile industry workers. All along the ride we were shouting slogans of ‘Mazdoor Kisan Raj Zindabad’ without caring for the bewildered looks of the fellow passengers.

The personal bond I developed with Kaka remained intact over time. Though I did not meet him during his last years (he died peacefully in Tehkal Bala in 2021 at the ripe age of about 94), my love and respect for him remained as strong as ever. A few photographs of him and Lala Sattar taken during their reception in Karachi in early 1970s remained with me for a few years but have since been lost in all the water that has flown down the bridge in the last half century.

Mohammad Khan Kaka was an excellent host, a good cook, and very pleasant company for hours on end. I remember the morning Kaka made me a corn-flour roti (flat bread) with some vegetables and tea for breakfast in his yard. The corn roti was thicker and crispier than that usually made in Punjab. I still relish and long for that taste which I feel in my mouth even today. During our visits, we stayed at night in the guest room of Kaka’s home and spent our spare time during the day in the village hujra, the villager’s common guesthouse and a kind of social club. Staying in hujras of KPK villages, from Peshawar to Nowshera and Mardan, from Malakand to Swat and Kohat, I first noted and always felt amazed at the strong traditions of Pukhtunwali in Pathan society, a code of Khpelwaki (self-authority), Ezzat (respect), Pannah (giving asylum), Chegha (call for action), and Barabari (equivalence).

In complete contrast to what is usually believed outside KPK, especially in far-off places like Karachi and Lahore, where most people have little actual interaction with living Pukhtun culture, I have rarely seen anywhere else a more so-to-say ‘democratic’ and self-consciously proud society in its one-to-one relations with others. In a Pukhtun village everyone is treated at par, regardless of his social and economic status. In traditional Pukhtun village hujras, I have witnessed ordinary peasants, with soiled bare feet, casually sitting next to a senior police officer or an army general, confidently participating in discussion and unreservedly expressing their views. I have seen junior government employees in a private gathering with senior officers, at times their own departmental heads, yet behaving as confidently as those senior officers’ own peers. They enter the hujra, stand tall and erect, say Asalam Alaykum loudly to everyone, and confidently take their seats on the floor next to the previous visitor, regardless of his social standing or official position. On departing, they rise, say Asalam Alaykum firmly to all and leave. No slouching, no hunched shoulders, as so often seen in Punjab and Sindh. The same goes for women inside homes. More often than not, Pukhtun women decide inside homes, though they seldom participate in public affairs outside. But if they do, they have unmatched confidence and authority in their persona.

I had rarely seen a more lovable person than Mohammad Khan Kaka. He was at my home in Karachi on my wedding day and, along with Professor Azizuddin from Lahore, helped me don the bridegroom’s dastaar. My mother (of Pashtun ancestry) had insisted I wear the traditional headgear for the occasion but I had no idea how to wrap it around my head and make it stay there.

Kaka had lots of stories to tell about militant peasant movements in KPK as did a few other veterans of those revolutionary struggles like Lala Abdul Sattar and Sher Ali Bacha (Bachaji), both from Mardan. Sher Ali Bacha was another extremely pleasant and rewarding companion with whom I spent some time together. In about 1979, during General Ziaul Haq’s martial law, Bachaji spent a week with us in a hideout in Karachi before he went into exile in Afghanistan. He was the first to formally associate the word ‘Pakhtunkhwa’ with the name of a political party when he formed his own group of Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP-Pakhtunkhwa) in 1978. He returned home in 1981 and was arrested.

Taking the cue from Bachaji, Mahmud Khan Achakzai established his Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party in 1989 and Bachaji was elected as the party’s first general secretary. Bachaji was an excellent Pushto poet and his contribution towards raising progressive Pushto poetry to new heights is widely acknowledged in KPK’s literary circles. He revived Kaka Sanubar Hussain’s Olasi Adabi Jarga after Kaka Sanubar’s death in 1963 and wrote about ten books in Pushto on philosophy, history, socialism, and KPK’s peasant movements. Soft spoken and always with a faint smile on his face, it was a treat to talk to Bachaji and listen to him. Indeed, he was a towering personality in the progressive literary and political movements of KPK, though he had turned to extremely radical Pukhtun nationalism in his poetry and public speech, especially after the Communist Saur Revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, calling for establishing a unified Pukhtun land from Wakhan to Bolan and from Bakhtar (Bactria) to Margalla as an unfinished task of the Afghan revolution.

The first modern peasant resistance in the NWFP had taken place at Ghalla Dher in Mardan in 1938 but for me, listening to stories from Mohammad Khan Kaka, Lala Sattar and Bachaji of the peasant battles they personally fought was a fascinating journey into the past. In their youth, Lala Sattar and Mohammad Khan Kaka took part in the battles peasants fought under the leadership of Lala Ziarat Gul with local landlords at Charsadda in 1948. Lala Sattar led the command in battle at Mandani in 1971. Bachaji was a prominent comrade-in-arms in the battle fields of Hashtnagar during 1971-1972. After the revolutionary upsurge of youth in 1968 leading to the fall of Gen. Ayub Khan’s long rule, the stories of revolutionary militant peasant movement of Hashtnagar were part of the repertoire of tales told in the fabled chai khaanas of Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar.

The KPK has a long history of Deobandi nationalist movements and Sufi networks fused with revolutionary peasant movements that were inspired by socialist and Bolshevik ideas after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the past, there were pioneers like Khushal Khan Khatak (Kohat, 1882-1962) [a namesake of the celebrated poet of the 17th century], Mufti Abdul Rahim Popalzai (Peshawar, 1890-1944), Kakaji Sanubar Hussain (Peshawar, 1897-1963), and Lala Ziarat Gul (Mardan, 1918-1979). They were followed by Lala Abdul Sattar (Mardan, 1922-1996), Afzal Bangash (Kohat, 1924-1988), Mohammad Khan Kaka (Peshawar, 1927-2021) and Sher Ali Bacha (Mardan, 1932-1988).

Hundreds of young men from the valleys of Peshawar, Mardan, and Nowshera crossed borders into Afghanistan in their fervour of Jihad against British rulers. A group of young Punjabi students from some top colleges in Lahore (Government College, King Edward Medical College, Aitchison College, Islamia College), inspired by the call of the Jihad movement given by Deoband Ulema (led by Maulana Mahmoodul Hasan, Obaidullah Sindhi and Fazal-e Rabbi and others) had also crossed the border into Afghanistan in 1915 to fight alongside Turkish forces against Britain. But finding all routes to Turkish lands blocked to them, about 70 of the young men from areas forming present-day Pakistan travelled to Russia to find a route to Turkey. Among them, those from KPK were Abdul Rab, Abdul Majid Khan (a Kashmiri living in Peshawar and a younger brother of Abdul Qayum Khan, later a chief minister of the NWFP). Abdul Qadir Sehrai, Fida Ali Zahid, Masood Ali Shah and Ghulam Mahbub, all from Peshawar; Akbar Shah Miankhel from Nowshera; Nisar Mohammad Yousafzai from Swabi in Mardan; and Mohammad Akbar Khan, Sultan Mahmud Tarin, and Gohar Rehman Tarin from Hazara.

About 26 of these Indian youth enrolled in the Indusky Krus, a political and military training school at Tashkent that was established to educate and train them for revolutionary work in British India. Later, Indusky Krus was merged into and transferred to the newly established Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. Most of the alumni of the Communist University returned home and worked for varying lengths of time for the newly formed Communist Party of India. Some of them also gained prominence in the communist movement of India and Pakistan. Mohammad Akbar Khan established a bookshop and published a few books in Peshawar. Akbar Shah Miankhel resumed his studies and practiced law in Nowshera after obtaining his law degree. He was also elected an MPA from Nowshera in 1951. In 1941, he, together with Bhagat Ram Talwar of Ghalla Dher, Abdul Majid Khan, and Mian Firoz Shah, a transporter, helped Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in his daring escape from India to Kabul from where he reached Germany and formed an Indian National Army (INA). Disguised as a deaf and dumb Muslim, ‘Ziauddin Khan’, Bose also visited Ghalla Dher on his clandestine journey from Calcutta to Peshawar, where he stayed for a few days at Taj Mahal hotel and later moved to a house of Feroz Shah, inside Bajauri Gate in Peshawar, before crossing over the border to Afghanistan via Khajuri Maidan camp on Jamrud Road and the Shinwari tribal lands.

Bhagat Ram Talwar was a younger brother of Hari Kishan Talwar, who was hanged to death in Mianwali jail in June 1931, a few months after Bhagat Singh’s execution in March in Lahore, for Talwar’s similar assassination attempt in December 1930 to kill Geoffrey de Montmorency, then governor of Punjab.

But many of those young men reaching Russia stayed back and never returned home. Nisar Mohammad Yousafzai of Swabi joined the Afghan army and fought the British Indian army in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919. Later, he went to Russia and joined the Russian Red Army, fighting for an independent socialist Tajikistan. He was appointed as People’s Commissar (Minister) of Education in the first Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic founded in 1924. To comply with the Soviet leadership’s drive for Russification of the Soviet society, Nisar Mohammad changed his name to Nisor Avalovich (after his father’s name Awal Khan in Swabi) Magomedov and married a Russian girl. He taught Pushto language in Moscow University and never returned home. Nisar fell from grace during Stalin’s great purge in 1937 and was shot dead in a prison.

Many years later during de-Stalinization of Russia, a street in Dushanbe, the Capital of Tajikistan, where the offices of Tajik Ministry of Education and Sciences are located, was named after him with an inscription ‘The Son of Afghans who Dedicated his Life for Tajiks’.

Before leaving for Afghanistan, Nisar had left behind a young wife and an infant son. In Russia, he had a few daughters from his Russian wife. It is said that two of Nisar’s daughters visited Peshawar in the late 1990s as part of an official Tajik delegation. Learning about their presence in the delegation, Nisar’s grandson, Maqbool Ahmad, rushed from Swabi to meet them in Peshawar but did not succeed. The delegation had already left for Tajikistan.

Abdul Rab of Peshawar came to Russia from Istanbul in 1917 and remained there working with people like Maulvi Barkatullah, M.N. Roy, and other émigré Indians for the independence of India. He relocated to Istanbul with his Turkish wife in 1923, following Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi. He lived and died in Istanbul.

These are the stories of some amazing people from another world, long forgotten and erased from our collective conscience. True to the city that tells tales, the city of Qissa Khwani, my memories of Peshawar are always full of stories of people and places. Once in Peshawar, I visited the house of a friend, Yousuf Anwar Khattak, from a village somewhere towards Warsak Dam. On our way from Tehkal Bala to his home, we walked a considerable distance through farmlands with a burst of magnificently coloured flowers. I was thrilled when Kaka told me those were poppy plants. I had never seen a poppy field in full bloom. It reminded me of the laleh fields so often described in Urdu and Persian poetry with intense emotion. I recalled Ghalib:

سب کہاں کچھ لالہ و گل میں نمایاں ہو گئیں
خاک میں کیا صورتیں ہوں گی کہ پنہاں ہو گئیں

(Not all, just a few have bloomed as tulips and roses
How many exquisite others must lie buried in the dust)

And Mir captured the feeling poignantly when he said:

رنگِ گل اور بوئے گل ہوتے ہیں ہوا دونوں
کیا قافلہ جاتا ہے جو تو بھی چلا چاہے

(The flower’s colour and fragrance both dissolve into the air
What caravan departs that makes you too wish to leave)

Ahmed Kamran, a former banker, was a political activist in Karachi during his youth. His travelling companion, Ali Yawar, is another forgotten hero who dedicated his life to equality and justice for all. Ahmed Kamran has dedicated the book (Pakistan: Clash of Ideas / Pakistan ka matlab kya) he co-authored (with Anjum Altaf) to Ali Yawar. Ali Yawar’s nephew, Asad Haider, trod the same path. It is ironic that it was only outside the country that his immense contribution, in a very short life (1987-2025), found recognition with an obituary in the New York Times and a retrospective in the New York Review of Books that extolled him as “the foremost socialist thinker of his generation.”

Everybody wants to fly. Some of us know it, others don’t.

And some of us simply have novel notions of what flying is. Take, for example, the insurance agent at the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. He claims he is going to ‘fly away’, then leaps from a hospital roof. When I first read the book’s opening scene, that was my definition of flying too. I wanted to fly like that. Suicidal.

At the time, I was in the middle of my undergraduate abroad. All my life, this had been my dream: to escape my dying country. Fly off to some first-world heaven. And so, I had. But by the time I picked up Song of Solomon, it had been two years of studying abroad, and I’d still not settled in. I never called it home. I never managed to surrender or assimilate. My father expected me to get a work visa, and eventually a British passport — yet here I was, incapable of stomaching the overripe abundance of it all. I had gotten my paradise. Now I wanted to escape that too.

There were many reasons I found living abroad so disagreeable, most of which cannot be explicated here. Suffice to say, I became supremely depressed. Now that my first-world fantasy turned out to be a sham, I didn’t know where else to go. I had always been an escapist par excellence; every reader starts out as one. But since there was no earthly paradise left to run to, I acquired a new, intense and reckless kind of escapism: the despaired desperation of Morrison’s insurance agent.

With such a track record as mine, I would have gone on endlessly trying to escape everything the universe gave me — had it not been for the intervention of this novel. Through my second year of university, I began reading Song of Solomon. I followed Milkman, the novel’s protagonist, out of his nuclear family, to the street life of his impassioned friend Guitar, the uninhibited house of his eccentric aunt Pilate, travelling to Virginia in search of buried treasure and ending up in Shalimar — a place Milkman discovers to be his own ancestral home town. This plot line sounds like a pretty normal Bildungsroman novel. A coming-of-age, self-discovery in the garb of a quest narrative. And on my first read, that’s pretty much all I took away from it.

Anything beyond that I struggled to parse. What did the book eventually have to say about flying? How did the ending reflect upon that opening scene with the insurance agent’s suicidal leap? Despite not knowing the answers to these crucial questions, I was intoxicated by Morrison. I had already read Beloved and been swept up by it. I could recite whole segments of her interviews from memory. I admired her measured and elegant speech, her forceful writing. So naturally, I felt I had missed something important in this particular novel: Song of Solomon was hiding its secrets.

The push to go looking for them came from an unlikely person. I call him Chacha, but really he is my grandfather’s brother. The circumstance: your typical family gathering. Amidst the racket, he was delivering some orations about the importance of family and blood. With expert rhetorical skills, he spoke of ancestry, lineage, and tradition. History and the past. He told us about my grandfather. Relaying little stories and anecdotes. Bhai Soofi this, bhai Soofi that.

As he went on, the clangour of the room faded and I zoned in on his voice. A scene from the novel reemerged, vividly: as the Danville residents tell Milkman about his grandfather and father, he begins to see them — and by extension, himself — in a new light. He grows ‘fierce with pride’, Morrison writes. On the other hand, for stark juxtaposition, there was me. I felt nothing of the sort. Now that I thought about it, the scene didn’t make any sense (which was why the progression of Milkman’s character arc, and the insights of the novel’s ending, also evaded me). Later in the book, when Milkman hears the tale of Solomon, he jumps around and exclaims proudly: ‘my great granddaddy could fly!’ I found the sentiment wholly alien. How could one be proud of an ancestor they’d never met? What was it that moved Milkman so pivotally in these scenes?

I was determined to know. And the only way to know what Milkman knew, was to follow in his footsteps.

*

Haripur is a few hours from Islamabad by road. It’s a full blown city now, but from the stories I’d heard it sounded more like a village or small town. Of course, this wouldn’t be anything like the town of Shalimar in Morrison’s novel. But it was the closest equivalent for me. From this city of Haripur, the aforementioned Bhai Soofi hailed. It is the place from which my granddaddy flew — and also the place which gave him wings.

I got off at the house, still preserved mostly in its original architecture. It had a small courtyard, and a narrow staircase so steep that it might as well have been a ladder. I climbed it to the rooftop of that nearly 100-year-old house. From here, Chacha showed me the mosque where Bhai Soofi would spend a great deal of time praying and meditating — a practice which laid the groundwork for my present surname, Soofi. Meanwhile, Chacha showed me around town. He took me to the school outside which Bhai Soofi sat in longing till a teacher noticed him, and convinced his father to enroll him as a student. That was the famous story of how Bhai Soofi took flight. How a former shepherd became the first in his family to get an education, move out of Haripur and break the class barrier.

In the novel, Milkman’s father Macon Dead has a similar flight. Macon realises that everything bad that ever happened to his father ‘happened because he couldn’t read.’ So Macon learns to read and eventually becomes a property owner. Song of Solomon never explicitly presents Macon’s rags-to-riches story as a “flight”, but I always saw it as one. If the folklore of Solomon’s mythical flight expressed the possibility of black people’s escape from slavery, then Macon Dead’s story expressed the possibility of black people escaping their chains, not by flying back to Africa, but by making it big right there in post-slavery America.

So, having taken this interpretive liberty with the novel’s central motif, my grandfather’s story reminded me of Macon Dead. At the time, I was about to graduate university. I was having many conversations (bordering on arguments) with my own father, about what mattered in life, and why. What to do and how. His ageing was ever so evident. There was talk of family property, passive incomes, inheritance. The materialism of it all began to wear me down. Ungrateful, spoilt, self-absorbed as Milkman — it took coming to Haripur for me to actually grasp what Milkman realizes about his father in Shalimar: that social mobility was ‘his life, his future, his present, and all the history he knew.’ It was the wings my father saw his father fly with. Like Milkman in Danville, I could now see my own father from the vantage point of his origin in Haripur.

The trip to Haripur started out as an experiment. I wanted to see if you could interpret literature experientially. But the more I reflected on Song of Solomon through my experience, the more it reflected my experiences back to me in a language by which I could clearly comprehend them. Developing this kind of dynamic, pulsating relationship with a book is the rarest pleasure of a reader. Maybe one book in every ten hits you like this, and that too if you’re lucky. With Song of Solomon I developed such an intimate love affair. If initially I visited Haripur digging for the novel’s secrets, soon the novel would drag my own secrets out onto its pages. It started acting like a mirror in which I could weigh and consider some of my life’s most imminent questions.

*

About halfway through the novel, Guitar presents his sublime four-sentence thesis on why peacocks cannot fly: ‘All that jewellery weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.’ He is making a pointed comment about Milkman’s privilege. Guitar is a vagrant wanderer of the streets with a revolutionary spirit. With no family name or fancy household to anchor him, he is, in a way, free. His only mooring in the world is the community of black people for whom he feels fiercely responsible. Milkman, however, is tied to the expectations of his father Macon Dead. Macon has capitulated to the white world, and trampled upon poorer black people to become wealthy. Macon wants Milkman to do the same. He tells his son that ‘money is freedom.’ But Milkman looks up to Guitar’s version of freedom instead.

As my affair with Song of Solomon intensified, I was weighing these ideas myself. I wanted to wander, to write, to teach, and live my whole life with a freedom that roamed anchorless. But then, having returned from Haripur, I also understood my father’s demands. His fixation on money, security, and stability. Having these things did and would free me to do what I wanted to do. That being acknowledged, there was much truth in Guitar’s framing; my privilege was a kind of ‘jewellery’ that weighed me down, with vain expectations about the flashy careers I should enter, the amount of money I should earn, the more-than-decent lifestyle I must lead. It engendered a shallow cowardice in my approach to life which Guitar resents Milkman for having. I urgently needed a resolution to this paradox of privilege: as my graduation loomed near, I needed to make important decisions. What was I to do with the life I had been given? And more importantly, why?

So, I began re-reading the novel in fragments. This time, another scene drew my attention. It appears at the start of the novel, when Guitar and Milkman visit Pilate’s house for the first time. ‘If you don’t want us here, Miss Pilate, we’ll go,’ Guitar says. And Pilate replies: ‘I ain’t the one with the wants. You the one want something.’ I still smile every time I read this. It’s as if Pilate pulls the rug from under my feet. She sweetly and teasingly turns the tables around. Look at Morrison’s description of her in that moment: ‘while she looked as poor as everyone said she was, something was missing from her eyes that should have confirmed it.’ Here begins the novel’s other, parallel critique of money-chasing as a life value. Pilate’s house ‘achieved comfort without one article of comfort in it.’ There is no fancy furniture, no tablecloths, and no running water. But, Milkman realises at the end of the book, ‘peace was there.’ How wise these three words sound in the moment where they appear — like a revelation of the obvious!

I began to understand, slowly, that Pilate had the kind of magnetic personality which unwittingly becomes an oblique commentary on everything and everyone around it. I hadn’t paid her much attention on first read. But now, this singular character became the centre of the entire novel. I went back and read every scene she appeared in. Who was this dynamic, electric person? And what did she know?

*

When Pilate tells the tale of rebuilding her life from scratch following her father’s death, she reveals how she tackled ‘the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?’ I think these questions ought to have been written out in bullet points. Reading them is like watching the fog lift from Lahore on a winter morning. It became utterly clear to me, the instant I read these lines, that in order to build the life I wanted, I must answer precisely these seven questions:

1. How do I want to live?

2. What is valuable to me?

3. When am I happy?

4. When am I sad?

5. What is the difference?

6. What do I need to know to stay alive?

7. What is true in the world?

Nowadays we have Ikigai. We have self-help books and TED talks. I had read and heard many of them. Or tried to. But none of them moved me and clarified my vision like Pilate’s string of questions. Asked with immense sincerity, and only vaguely answered in the book, they evade the over-explanation of SEO-optimised lifestyle content. The more I thought about these questions, the clearer I became about the life I wanted, and how possible it was. The sparseness of exposition lends them great force. How subtly they restate and modify the terms of debate! Instead of money, value. Instead of how much, what. Instead of what I need, what I need to know.

Everything is stripped down to the core, to the essentials. And I don’t mean essentials in the pragmatic sense of necessities, but as in essence. Pilate is a person of essence. Unconcerned with the unnecessary, and defining for herself what it constitutes. With this life-defining ability, she chooses peace over comfort. It’s a subtle distinction, but one that clarifies thought: peace, properly speaking, is comfort without the jewellery. In my life, I have learnt to seek people like Pilate. I have been fortunate to find a few, and whenever I do, I start looking to them as a sailor looks to a lighthouse. They bring what matters into razor-sharp focus, even just by their presence. They reorient and clarify.

The most important clarification Pilate provided me was on the novel’s central motif of flight. In the novel, this is always a metaphor of escape, or ascendancy, or both. But Pilate does not fly at all. At least not how the other characters do. She does not, like Macon Dead, make it big in the white world. She does not, like Solomon, up and fly away, leaving her loved ones behind. The book’s titular song, which we encounter first in Pilate’s voice, critiques precisely this aspect of Solomon’s story: ‘Solomon don’t leave me here, / Cotton balls to choke me, / Solomon don’t leave me here, / Buckra’s arms to yoke me…’ The “song of Solomon” is actually not written in Solomon’s voice at all, but in the voice of the people he leaves behind.

Again — a subtle but radical reframing. How much is neglected, omitted, left behind, in this mania of flying? How many of his own people, how much of his own history, did Macon Dead deny to become the wealthy man he became? How much of his own family was Milkman trying to escape in his ambition for anchorless freedom? And then I thought of my own country, which I flew from to chase my First-World dreams. My first language, like a first wife, thrown aside with careless cruelty for the allure of English. And what of Haripur? The place I had somehow come from, yet never looked back at? What of my father, and his father — what of the lives they left behind in search of multiple cars and a big DHA home? Is it possible to fly without being uprooted? Only one character in Morrison’s novel says yes. Yes, it is possible.

Pilate doesn’t run from her father’s ghost, she seeks it. She regards her history with reverence. Her past is a worthy consideration in the making of her future. When the insurance agent stands atop the hospital in the book’s opening, she remembers her ancestor Solomon. She recognises the despair, the pain, the reckless ambition that compels a man to fly. But her song also critiques it, by framing flight as an escape from responsibility. It is so in Milkman’s case, and it certainly was in mine. I had already begun to feel that a future in the First World, severed from the past that had produced me, was untenable. I no longer wanted to escape my family or my country. I desired neither Guitar’s freedom, nor Milkman’s. I wanted Pilate’s.

Simply because Pilate is the most free person in the novel. More so than Milkman, with all his father’s wealth. And more so than Guitar, with all his houseless roaming and festering resentment. Pilate experiences material and financial constraint — but she is not spiritually enslaved by it. She rides the air by surrendering to it. She is so sure of who she is and where she comes from that possibility expands before her. Indeed, was it not so with me? If my father and grandfather had yanked us from that little old house in Haripur, had survived all that they survived and even triumphed upon it, was this not a history worth remembering? And who could I ever become without it?

When I finally understood Song of Solomon, the entire fiction of my self unravelled. I realised that I was no one and everyone. That I was part and product of the human spirit’s tenacity, persisting over generations. That I merely stood on the shoulders of great men and women who came before me, each of whom tried to fly higher than the last. That they all made certain compromises in order to be able to fly. That I could admire and respect those compromises. But also, that I need not imitate them. That my flight could look different from my grandfather’s and my father’s. Because I knew something they couldn’t afford to know. I knew what Pilate knew: that without ever leaving the ground, you can fly.

Faizan Aslam Soofi is a writer and educator from Lahore, Pakistan. He did his BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, and is now teaching at a school in Karachi.

The big news is that we are still around and continuing to receive submissions from far and wide. With your support we can nurture the hope of making TPR a global platform firmly rooted in Peshawar.

For the February issue, our second, we have just as varied a menu as we had in January. Shuyan (Michael) Huang has a perceptive memoir-driven retrospective on Pakistan that connects Peshawar with Mars. There is much to think in it, courtesy of Manto, for the sensitive reader. Professor Harbans Mukhia offers a Partition story rimmed with pain and humanism at the same time. The story has an unusual coda that could not have been found anywhere else other than on the pages of TPR.

Our blockbuster piece this month, to match Sourav Roy’s documentation of Ramkinkar in January, is the story, and more, of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Follow its travails and triumphs in hard times as told by William Harvey who was associated with it in Kabul and remains connected with it in its new home in Portugal.

We round off the issue with a story by Samia Altaf, a teenager’s recollection of why and how a mother left to live in a jamun tree.

We hope you will find the offerings of interest and continue to encourage us as we consolidate the niche where we serve the kind of personal narratives that are lively and meaningful in these trying times.