Mom, I Can See You Now......

That hoary, old diary was an eyesore. I had seen it lying unattended on an obscure shelf at our home at Galway in Ireland, where I was born. I told my father time and again to get rid of the obnoxious diary, but he always turned a deaf ear to all my entreaties. 

Frustrated, I stopped pestering him, but it remained an enigma why he didn't just throw away a diary with jottings in Urdu, which were Greek to my father and me, at that point in time.

After sometime, I left Ireland as I didn't get along with my stepmother Annett and went to London and Cairo for further studies.

Years rolled by and in that time, I never visited home. By then, I had become proficient in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Turkish. One day, when I was at the world-renowned Al-azhar University in Cairo, I got a phone call from my father's secretary Mr Randall. He requested me to come to Galway immediately as my father was pretty unwell.

I had to go. The home had undergone a sea-change. Everything had been re-arranged, except for that diary, which was still there in the same position.

This time, the sight of it didn't exasperate me. I picked it up from the shelf, dusted it and started flipping through its well-nigh torn pages. It belonged to a woman named

Shagufta, who had penned, at times pencilled, down her stray thoughts in neat and chaste Urdu. I began to read, "I would not like my child to belong to any religion, caste, class or creed. He should belong to the entire mankind and humanity would be his only religion." All of a sudden, it dawned on me that
I was reading the diary of my late mother, who came from Pakistan and was not very educated. That a semi-educated Muslim woman could possess such modern thinking 30 years ago, made me all the more proud of my mother, whom I had never seen and who died when I was just an infant.

In no time, that diary became my greatest possession, and I felt a sense of gratitude to my father, who had never dispensed with it.

Today, it's my Gita, Bible, Quran and Avesta. What she wrote in her diary summed up the teachings of all religions and faiths. She taught me to be a good human being and I've been striving to justify her lofty ideals in my own humble way.

I doff my hat to her. Mom, this is my tribute to you. I don't even know who you were and how you looked. But, you must have been as beautiful as your thoughts. I love you, mom.