In the winter of 1975, when I was living in the suburb of Wimbledon Park and feeling isolated from Central London, from where I’d moved after five years, I would travel by underground to Red Lion Square to attend a weekly evening class in intermediate Urdu. It was a gap year; I’d applied to universities to study law on my father’s instructions, been rejected by five and finally decided to pursue my wish to study languages instead.

Sayyad Moinuddin Shah — or tall Shah Sahib, as we referred to him — was a family acquaintance; he taught the class, which he’d summoned me to attend, to sit an A-level exam in Urdu the following summer. My reading skills were rusty; I’d read Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Urdu in my mid-teens, but I could barely write two legible phrases. Though my reason for attending classes was nominally the exam, it was actually the escape from the cultural hollow of the suburbs that I valued, and the time spent with Shah Sahib and his students in the cafeteria. (Life in Wimbledon Park had little, except the park, the local libraries and the cinema — a 20-minute walk away — to offer a man of 20.)

The following spring Shah Sahib tutored me privately nearly every morning. Rubbing his eyes, he’d meet me at the door of his Earl’s Court flat, his 6’4 frame wrapped in a maroon robe.

Shah Sahib, born in Agra, must have acquired a Pakistani identity en route to England. He never married and was researching the Fort William writers of Urdu prose at the India Office Library. I don’t think he ever completed his doctorate; instead, he became the most popular Urdu teacher in London’s expatriate community. He was also an exceptionally good cook.

Our lessons focused on reading Umrao Jan Ada, my first real encounter with an Urdu novel, though I knew it in English translation. Shah Sahib would correct my erratic diction (“‘farq’ nahin, ‘faraq’! ‘Dikhta hai’ nahin kahiye, it’s ‘dikhai deta hai’!”). He’d chastise me for my chronic inability to spell Arabic words and for my occasional mistakes with gendered nouns. (Even today, ‘chhat’ and ‘ghaas’ confuse me and I can’t get my pen around writing ‘ain’ and ‘suad’.)

There’s a parable somewhere which says that each of us has nine — or is it 12? — teachers who guide us to our goals, including a hidden one.

There were also the incidental pleasures of discussing poetry; though I no longer recall the syllabus, I remember responding with silent chagrin to Shah Sahib’s constant caveats about my favourite Faiz poems — “‘Dard ke kaasni paazeb’, iss ka matlab kya hua!” And now and then he’d fulminate about the fecklessness of the day’s youth, particularly the new generation of Pakistanis in London.

I sat my exam in summer ’76 and gained the highest marks. Two years later, after a stint at the doomed BCCI as a trainee banker and a move back to West London, I was accepted by Ralph Russell as a second-year student in South Asian Studies at SOAS. In the first year, my major was Persian; the next year I attended Urdu literature classes, too. Our Urdu studies were predominantly poetry-based; we immersed ourselves in masnavi, marsiya and mussadas; in Mir Taqi Mir, Meer Anis, Ghalib, Iqbal, Hali, Faiz et al. The key prose text I studied, with the now legendary David Matthews, who later translated it, was Umrao Jan Ada again. The other fictions were Taubatun Nasooh, which would have been enough to stifle my interest in Urdu literature forever, and a handful of stories by Premchand, Krishan Chander and Saadat Hassan Manto which did not inspire me either. Sadly, I missed the classes on Bagh-o-Bahar, which I later grew to love. Umrao Jan Ada, which, along with my flair for poetry, saw me through exams, remained for many years my lasting link with Urdu fiction.

In 1991, a decade after graduating, I dedicated a year to reading Urdu fiction. Shah Sahib was editing the journal Urdu Adab, in which I read interesting articles including ‘Lady Changez Khan’, an obituary of Ismat Chughtai by Qurratulain Hyder. (In those pre-internet days, I was obliged to search for good Urdu books in local libraries.) I didn’t discuss Urdu books with Shah Sahib; I was working long hours as an instructor of Urdu in the SOAS Language Centre but never saw him in the library. At a chance encounter on a platform at Edgware Road Station, I’m sure I wanted him to take some pride in me for publishing fiction and criticism, but his greeting was frosty. He began an impromptu lecture on some aspect of religion. I slipped away from any confrontation.

Today, retired from university life after supervising a number of doctoral candidates, I recognise the drifting apart that seems to characterise so many student-teacher relationships. I still wonder, though, why I never asked more questions about Shah Sahib in those years that I read so much Urdu and wrote English stories about migrants and exiles.

There’s a parable somewhere which says that each of us has nine — or is it 12? — teachers who guide us to our goals, including a hidden one. I often forget mine after counting six: my teachers of English; my uncle Malik Sardar Mohammed Khan; Mrs Lakshmi Sinha; Christopher Shackle, who taught me to interpret Sachal Sarmast and Khwaja Ghulam Farid in Seraiki; Emmy Van Deurzen, who introduced me to existentialism; and Qurratulain Hyder. Shah Sahib might be among the hidden ones: since I completed my own collection of Urdu stories, I have come to appreciate his practical contribution to my development, and ruefully imagine him frowning at my fiction.

He died on a visit to Agra, probably at the start of this century; someone said he was still in his 60s. The last time I saw him was in December 1997; I’d said goodbye to teaching Urdu and lectured in a department of English. He condoled with me in the courtyard of the Regent’s Park mosque after my father’s funeral, which he must have attended, though I didn’t notice him in the congregation.

The columnist is a London-based author of novels and short stories

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 12th, 2020