“Ajj Akhan Waris Shah nu kitoon qabraan wichon bol

Tay ajj kitab-e- Ishaq da koe agla warqa khool” Amrita Pritam

I grew up listening and reading to the poetry of my grandfather, Molvi Zafar Hussain Ashk, Amrita Pritam and Sahir Ludhyanvi.

My father, Khalid Hussain always talked about my grandfather as a poet. He was an author of a couple of books in Persian and Urdu. He was a Magistrate by profession in Kapoorthala state and owned lands there and in Uttar Pradesh. He migrated to Lahore with all his family members after partition in 1947. Their first stay was at the Ice factory where they spent a few nights until they found a proper house.

“We were very tired. We slept in an ice factory on the first night in our independent country. There was no bed so I put my head on a brick and slept on a mud floor”, my father once told me. My grandfather started his job as a magistrate in Lahore and later served as a custodian in the rehabilitation department in Sargodha. After coming to Pakistan, he never asked for any compensation for the land he had owned and lost in pre-partition India. He spent his life serving and helping people.