It was sometime in late fall of 1999, a few months after I had arrived at the University of Chicago, that I first heard of Professor CM Naim – or Naim sahib, as some of my fellow students called him. He was a prominent scholar of Urdu literature and literary tradition, and had taught Urdu to hundreds of students at the University of Chicago over the years. His reputation was, as was conveyed to me by those in his class, of a serious instructor with exacting standards. It was perhaps my own residual trauma of instructors with exacting standards that I had encountered in Pakistan, and my own ignorance of how important it is to spend time with scholars of literature, that I never sought to meet him. I heard plenty of stories about his classes and his encyclopedic knowledge, his insistence on proper pronunciation, and his attention to every single word in text. I learned from friends that he was also the organiser of Friday afternoon chai which, among other things,........

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