It’s never too late to learn. It was last year that my father, after retiring from the Indian Administrative Service, decided to learn the Urdu language. It was something he wanted to pursue for a long time, but his commitment to public service prevented him from doing so.
Here stood a man with a snow-white beard seeking admission to a certificate course in Urdu at Panjab University, bubbling with enthusiasm and zest. My sister and I were delighted at the thought of our father attending university with young adults as his classmates. Our mother had her reservations about this and lodged her protests. To no avail, democracy had won!
Come July, father, armed with his notebook, Qaida and his favourite fountain pen, entered the hallowed portals of the Urdu Department where he would learn the script from scratch over the course of a year. Even before we knew it, our family WhatsApp group was flooded with beautiful sher-o-shayari. Our conversations were centred on Faiz, Ghalib, Kaifi Azmi and so on. The dining table saw father at his passionate best when he would recite nazams and ghazals of his favourite Urdu poets.
I would often find him studying early in the morning in his study with the discipline of a soldier. He would finish all his assignments and home work on time. Armed with doubts, he would stay back after class to clarify his problems with fellow students and his Ustaazni. I chanced upon his thesis, which for a moment I thought, was printed. Such was the level of neatness in his handwriting. He put in his blood and sweat into crafting his dissertation. As the exam dates drew closer, he put in more and more hours of labour. The household atmosphere bared an uncanny resemblance to the time when I wrote my board exams.
The viva panel was impressed to see a senior citizen in the garb of a student. Roles had reversed — now my sister and I dropped our father to his examination centre. After every paper we would ask him, “How did it go?” and he would give us a cryptic reply in the form of an Urdu couplet.
The results were announced in the last week of June and lo behold! Our father had topped the university examinations bagging the prestigious gold medal. It was mother who called me to break the good news. To be honest, given our father’s flawless academic record, it didn’t come as a surprise. But, we were excited and happy. That day we celebrated by ordering in pizza and raised a toast to his roaring success. And he ended the meal by quoting Nida Fazli, “Koshish bhi kar, umeed bhi rakh, raasta bhi chun; phir iske baad thoda muqaddar talaash kar.”
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