‘Gold dust’ of grandfather’s script

On the night of August 14, 1947, my parents caught the second-last train chugging out of the Lahore railway station. Miraculously they crossed the Wagah border and breathed in the air of freedom, redolent with the fragrance of home soil. But this is not a story about their train to India.

When my siblings and I were growing up, our house here was full of books and journals in English, Hindi and Urdu. Our father would often read out couplets from Ghalib, Iqbal, Mir, Faiz (his classmate in Lahore) and other legendary poets. At times, he would recite verses of his own father that he could still recall. All of grandfather’s work; newspaper clippings, manuscripts and notebooks had been left behind in the ancestral haveli at Sialkot.

Though grandfather’s poetry resonated through our childhood, none of us had seen or heard him; not even a faded photograph existed. A revenue official in the 1920s, he was a poet at heart — a rebellious one. His poetry was immersed in the fiery events of the freedom struggle. He wrote copiously on it along with rich tributes to Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai, Tilak and other nationalist icons. Disciplinary proceedings were mooted against him. It was only with the kind intervention of a liberal, literary-minded British revenue commissioner who wrote, ‘This man will be more dangerous to the empire outside the service than inside’, thereby rejecting the case!

It was a family lament that nothing of his literary treasure existed. But then, from nowhere an old tattered notebook of his writings was found in a distant relative’s house. The small notebook, with weathered paper, had nazms and ghazals scribbled in fading blue ink — some complete, some abandoned half way. There it was, in front of our eyes. But the notebook remained locked up as nobody in the family knew Urdu.

But with the advent of Covid lockdowns, many forgotten projects got a new life-and exploring the notebook became a priority. The first task was getting the poetry transliterated into Devanagari script to make it accessible to us all. Some Urdu-knowing friends encouraged us to have it published. This entailed getting authoritative advice on the correct meanings and nuances of chaste Urdu. A question arose on the correct meaning of the word ‘Ghubaar’, his pen name (takhallus) used for the poetic oeuvre. As a family of Urdu ignoramuses, we conveniently took it to mean ‘vent out pent up feelings’. However, an erudite scholar corrected us and explained that it meant ‘dust-like’, as denoting a pall of dust left behind. He shared that in the 14th century a calligrapher, Umar al-Aqta, presented to the Sultan Timur a copy of the Quran which he had calligraphed in the ‘Ghubaar’ (literally, dust) script, a copy so tiny that it could fit under the socket of a signet ring. Alas, it was too small for the Sultan’s ego and was rejected!

But when the Kalam-e-Ghubaar comes out in print, the tiny specks of grandfather’s fading ink will glow like gold dust.