n the world of literature, the travelogue genre has been developed to share the writers’ experience of new places, people, cuisines and cultures. In contemporary Urdu literature, Mustansar Hussain Tarar has invested much energy and intellect to produce voluminous accounts of his travels to diverse places in and outside Pakistan.

Tarar’s accounts of his travels can be placed under the conventional category of travelogue that is centred on one particular place and people. Textually, it is often a detailed description of a traveller’s observation of a singular (sub)culture. It is a rarity, both as a travelling experience and its textual description, to find works, especially in Urdu, that highlight multiple places, people, ideas and identities and cuisines and cultures in a single, concise volume.

The recently published Toronto, Dubai aur Manchester by Shahid Siddiqui is such a book. Dr Siddiqui is a renowned scholar and educationist with extensive experience in teaching, research and educational administration.

Siddiqui has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Toronto. He has worked at Aga Khan University, the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute, the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the National University of Modern Languages and Allama Iqbal Open University. Currently, he is the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Media Studies, Art and Design at the Lahore School of Economics.

The book contains travel stories the author has put together following social and educational interaction with people, places, books and authors in three cities from three continents:

The author left Pakistan in the early 1990s to pursue a PhD in linguistics from the University of Toronto on a Canadian Commonwealth scholarship. He was enrolled in the doctoral programme at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a centre of excellence for education and training in critical learning, curriculum design and the development of critical pedagogical skills.

After earning his PhD, the author chose to return to Pakistan. Since then he has served at Aga Khan University, the LUMS and the LSE, as a teacher, researcher and administrator.

In 2022, Dr Siddiqui decided to visit his alma mater, the University of Toronto, 30 years after his first arrival. The account is thus filled with nostalgic recollections of the bygone days by revisiting the same places, though not the same people. The chilly weather and the orderly metropolitan welcomed the man who had resided, socialised and studied there in a distant past.

Being super excited to see the OISE, the university and the family apartment located at 35 Charles Street West where he had spent five years with his wife and two children he rushed to the much-missed places on a rainy day with his son, Shoaib, now studying at the same university. The OISE building had not changed much, but most of the people he had worked with, particularly his PhD supervisor, Keith Stanovich, had moved on.

Prof Siddiqui then decided to write about his cherished memories of his time spent in the city. He revisits some of the places he had first explore with friends and colleagues. These include the Philosopher’s Walk, Lake Ontario, Niagara Falls, Toronto Island, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery.

He visits an art exhibition based on the work of famous post-impressionist Dutch painter Van Gogh. “The world dubbed Van Gogh a lunatic. He lived a miserable life. At 37, he died amid harsh conditions in a mental asylum. He received universal applause posthumously when his paintings were ranked high in artistic value. Many critics regard him as a genius.”

Walking through the windy streets of Toronto, the traveler recollects memories made with some of the city’s finest souls. He pays homage to a Pakistani couple, Zahoor-ul Akhlaq and Sheherezade, who rose to prominence as gifted painters.

“I visited Toronto after thirty years. The city has been through numerous transformations. Who knows what happened to the Toronto [of 30 years ago] earlier? Sitting on a sandy beach, I wonder if time is a flowing river. It never returns to a point it has crossed,” concludes the narrator while winding up the account of his sojourn in Toronto and heading to Dubai, where he explores places such as Al Manzar, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai Marina and the
Dubai Frame. The latter serves as a cultural point of reference.

Being a modern city surrounded by sea and desert, Dubai impresses the traveller with its broad roads, high-rise buildings, customer-friendly cafes and busy shopping malls. The presence of famous bookstores such as Kinokuniya and Shakespeare and Co reflects Dubai’s multicultural milieu.

Finally, the author explores Manchester, where he spent memorable days pursuing a master’s degree in English in the late 1980s. A professor of sociology from south India had been his mentor here. Raj, to whom this book is dedicated, was a very learned, well-mannered, widely published, easily accessible person. Above all, he was a humble human being.

Raj’s students often had long conversations with him about pedagogy, critical learning, social theory and metaphysics. Siddiqui remembers his wonderful walks along Oxford Street with Prof Raj and some fellow students, including Sania and Jamila. It was his professor, Raj, who inculcated the love of learning, the significance of critical thinking, the dignity of work and the respect for all identities and ideas in a young Siddiqui, who, in turn, has shared these values with his students in Pakistan for the last 40 years.

Indeed, an ethically and logically oriented legacy is never lost. “There are two types of PhDs. There a type of person who gets a PhD to establish social superiority over others. Then there are people whose personality and action justify their PhDs,” Raj once said.

The book is a must read for those interested in learning about other cultures, people and places. Its reader-friendly style and modern syntax also make it a valuable addition to Urdu literature.

Toronto, Dubai aur Manchester

Author: Shahid Siddiqui

Publisher: Book Corner, 2024

Pages: 208

The reviewer teaches at the Lahore School of Economics. He can be reached at ejaz.bhatty@gmail.com