KARACHI: Today, Sept 4, is Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s 95th birthday. One can’t be sure about how he would have reacted to the day had he been alive (he died on June 20 this year). But the writer, for sure, wouldn’t have let the day pass without treating his admirers to a biting quip or a snarky remark.

Yousufi had developed this particular style of constructing a sentence in which he would put together two or more contrasting objects or living beings, and top the sentence off with a punch-line in which their contrast was highlighted with a similarity brimming with wit. For example, “Ijaad aur aulaad ke lachhan pehley hi se maloom ho jaya kertey to dunia mein na koi bacha honay deta na ijaad” [if the disposition of a child and the disadvantages of an invention were known beforehand, then no one in the world would have invented anything or produced a child]. Of course, a lot gets lost in translation because each language has its linguistic nuances. In the above-quoted sentence, the words aulaad (offspring) and ijaad (invention) rhyme in a way that their auditory sameness adds to the funny conclusion that the distinguished humorist has drawn.

Yousufi was born in 1923 in Tonk, Rajasthan. Though Rajasthanis have a distinct way of using the Urdu language, reading his books or listening to him would make the uninitiated feel as if he belonged to those parts of India that lexicographers and linguists claim Urdu originated in. Perhaps it did originate in Rajasthan and its adjoining states.

Yousufi’s death shook literature lovers and the writers’ community to the core. He was a towering figure: extremely well-read, eloquent and creative. It rarely happens in the literary world when your contemporaries sing praises for you. Yousufi’s did. One of them called their era the age of Yousufi. It’s no mean compliment.

Yousufi authored five books, and save for the last one, Shaam-i-Sher-i-Yaaran, all of them met with critical and commercial success. After his death, a critic called his penultimate publication, Aab-i-Gumm, a book having the attributes of a novel. While some can debate about the claim, it is a testimony to Yousufi’s tremendous creative potential and his learnedness.

Another observation about his art made by a poet also generated a fair bit of discussion. The poet opined that after Ghalib, Yousufi was the greatest prose writer in Urdu. Again, argue as much as you want, but it goes to show that his writings were of a very high quality.

And quality is the operative word here. We live in an age where individuals with superlative qualities are disappearing, and it is increasingly becoming difficult to separate the mediocre from the abysmal in every sphere of life, leave alone literature. The reason for it is not that hard to know: people, especially those who dabble in creative arts, lack the depth and wisdom that Yousufi’s generation had.

Published in Dawn, September 4th, 2018