Many years ago, the late poet, critic and broadcaster Qamar Jameel scribed his poetry collection Chahaar Khwaab [Four Dreams] for me and wrote: “Khwaab mein jo kuchh dekh raha hoon, uss ka dikhana mushkil hai/ Aaeney mein phool khila hai, haath lagana mushkil hai [What I see in my dream is hard to show to others/ A flower blossoms in the mirror which is hard to touch].”

This couplet immediately came to my mind when I picked up Ghalib: Flowers in a Mirror, A Critical Commentary by Mehr Afshan Farooqi, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Random House, India.

There is another association between Jameel and Farooqi’s illustrious father Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (in English, they choose to spell the surnames differently). Jameel, himself a modernist and somewhat critical of my proclivities singularly tilted towards social-realism in those days, encouraged me to read Faruqi’s works in both Urdu and English and introduced me to the Urdu literary magazine Shabkhoon [Night Ambush] that Faruqi edited and published for many years from Allahabad, India. Faruqi and I established contact through email before I had the privilege to meet him in person a few times in Delhi, Lahore and Karachi. Later, it was an honour for me to be published in Shabkhoon.

Besides Faruqi’s other works that fall under the categories of literary theory and criticism, language history, translations, his original fiction and poetry, one exceptional work he produced is Sher-i-Shor Angez [The Uproar........

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