y father, Shan ul Haq Haqqi, was a 13^th generation direct descendent of Shaikh Abdul Haq Muhaddith and a great grandson of Deputy Nazir Ahmed.

His father, Ehtisham ud Din Haqqi (b. 1880) too was a linguist, writer and poet (aka Nadan Dehlavi). He received master’s degrees in Arabic and Persian from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), where he served as a librarian for eight years. Thereafter he moved to Hyderabad Deccan, where he was a full-time editor on the grand dictionary project sponsored by the Nizam. He had also rendered Hafiz in Urdu verse using the original meter. He passed away in Delhi in 1945.

Shan ul Haq was born in Delhi on September 15, 1917. His mother passed away when he was just two and a half years old. He was raised by a paternal aunt in Peshawer, where he finished middle school before moving to Delhi. He studied at the AMU for a bachelor’s in arts and at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, for a master’s in English literature. In August 1947, he migrated to Pakistan. He worked in the Information Department, retiring in 1977 as a deputy secretary. For the last ten years of his service, he was head of the advertisement department for Pakistan Television. In recognition of his services, the government of Pakistan conferred a Tamgha Quaid-i-Azam and a Sitara-i-Imtiaz on him. A public road in Islamabad is also named after him. He passed away in Toronto, Canada, at 4am on October 11, 2005.

Shan Haqqi’s body of work is amazingly large and diverse. Besides being an eminent dictionary editor, he wrote in almost every genre of Urdu literature. As the late Aslam Azhar would say, he was a perfectionist and excelled at whatever he did. This was equally true of his contributions to producing advertisements, compiling dictionaries, translations, research and criticism, fiction, poetry, humourous literature for childrenor to literary experimentation.

One of his most significant contributions was laying down the ground rules for the Urdu Dictionary Board, resulting in the remarkable 22-volume Urdu dictionary. He also contributed by reading hundreds of books without monetary compensation and writing more than 450,000 cards in his own hand that have survived in the Urdu Dictionary Archives. The pronunciation dictionary compiled for the National Language Authority has run into its third edition. Several editions of the Oxford English-Urdu dictionary have been printed, and more than 2.5 million copies have been sold since the first, which appeared in December 2003. He had progressed past 25,000 entries in the 75,000-key word Oxford Urdu Dictionary at the time of his death from lung cancer.

His Qehr-i-‘Ishq is a translation into Urdu verse from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Other translations include Bhagvad Gita, Arth Sahstra, She’ri Tarjmay, Anjan Rahi, Nishan-i-Pak, Soor-i-Israfeel, Nasheed-i-Hurriyet and Teesri Dunya.

His works on literary research and criticism include Nukta-i-Raz, Naqd-o-Nigarish, Aeena-i-Afkar-i-Ghalib, Lisani masayel-o-lataif, Nigarkhana, Maqalat-i-Husn and Intikhab-i-Kalam-i-Zafar.

He also wrote Nok jhonk, Taar-i-perahan, Harf-i-dil ras, Dil ki zuban, Nawa-i-saz shikan, Shakhsanay, Khud nawisht, Afsana da afsana for mature readers and Phool khilay hain gulshan gulshan, Aapas ki batain,Qudrat kay tamashay, Nazmain pahelian nasrparay for children, besides Nazr-i-Khusrav (riddles and paradoxes).

Speaking at a 2008 event organised by the Academy of Letters in Islamabad on the occasion of Haqqi’s third death anniversary, Aslam Azhar recalled that as PTV’s general manager in charge of sales Haqqi used to regularly protest omissions and delays in running commercial ads and point out the loss to the PTV. This, he said, made for some hostility. However, when he was later appointed head of the PTV in 1972, he said, he came to better appreciate the point Haqqi had been making. Thereafter, he said, not only did the working relations improve, but they also became great friends. He said he had benefited a lot from Haqqi’s company, who he said was a very intelligent person, if forgetful at times.

As Shan Haqqi’s son, I do not remember any instance of him falling asleep while reading. He would always mark the last page he had read and turn the light off before he went to bed. He was a man of few words and ate little. He never advertised his work and would not condemn others. The only time I heard him complain about some colleagues was when he told my mother he had found some pages of books they had been paid to read for the dictionary project had not been separated (meaning those had not been read). “Can’t we be honest even in scholarly work,” he lamented. He never identified the colleagues.

He would always mark the last page he had read and turn the light off before he went to bed. He was a man of few words and ate little. He never advertised his work and would not condemn others. 

I do not remember a Sunday or other holiday he had while away at home. He slept little and worked for 14-15 hours a day. I remember days when he’d return home from Urdu Board at 4-5am. I knew because my room was next to the garage and the noise of the car engine at the quiet hour raised me from sleep. Prof Sahar Ansari once told me that he would sometimes offer him a ride back home following a poetry recitation or other literary sitting. Invariably, he said, he would then excuse himself “for a few minutes” at the Urdu Board to finish some urgent work. The few minutes would never be shorter than four/ five hours.

While my father was known as a serious person, the person barely concealed a light-hearted mischievousness. Once on returning home, he found that all timepieces in the house – from the wall clock to wristwatches – had wound down. This was the age of mechanical clockwork when all timepieces needed winding up at regular intervals. Rather than showing annoyance, he told my mother, “the children, if their life depended on winding, I guess, would be lying dead here and there.”

Once, our long-time domestic help Abdul Ghafoor wanted an extended leave to visit India. Considering he had a significant role in sustaining and looking after the family and my mother was a working woman, she told Gahfoor sahib she’d need to talk to my father about it. When he arrived home in the evening, she said to him that the servant wanted a three-month leave. I distinctly remember that Abba did not move his eyes away from the newspaper he was reading. “Don’t stop him,” he said.

The Karachi chapter of Aligarh Old Boys’ Association organised an event to celebrate his 75^thbirthday. He read some verses on the occasion saying among other things that the joy of the auspicious occasion could not obviate the pain of being separated from some of the people he loved best; that sobering insights rather than passionate longingswere what he valued most in life; and that he did not wish to survive the naïvechild in him. That there is a child hiding inside every human was a recurring theme with him. One of his books for children carried the words: for children aged five to ninety-five.

He could be quite forgetful but never forgot his responsibilities as an honest and dutiful public servant and he could not even think about wrongfully benefiting from his position.

When he underwent surgery in January 2005 on account of lung cancer, I was with him for about three weeks, and we talked and talked. I recalled that his father and father-in-law, India’s first Muslim postmaster general, were well-off people. So why had my parents filed so lean a claim that we had had to incur a House Building Finance loan for our house? In a voice gone a little harsh, he said they had only filed a claim for the property for which they had documentary evidence and that they had migrated to Pakistan to serve the country, not to gain valuable property.

He was not used to telling us off. The only time I remember him being angry was after receiving an unexpectedly high bill for the official phone installed at our house. Direct dialling had been introduced recently, and some visitors had made long-distance calls. Call details did not figure on the bills those days. The next day, he put the phone under lock and key. He alone used the office car.We could ride for as long as we were headed in the same direction. Then we’d get off and get on some bus or rickshaw. Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, speaking at the launching ceremony for Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary had said, “they no longer make the moulds used to cast people like Haqqi sahib.”

In August 2005, two months before he passed, I arrived in Toronto with my wife and children to visit him. He mentioned intense back pain to my wife, a doctor, saying he had been avoiding painkillers for fear of their harmful side effects. She told him to take the painkillers. The next night he told us the pain had subsided, allowing him to sit up and work on the Oxford Urdu Dictionary for six hours. When I was leaving a week later, he gave me a large envelope to pass on to the Oxford office.

On September 22, I distinctively remember the painful day, I was again in Toronto when a doctor came and told him they were moving him from the cancer ward to the palliative care ward. She also said, possibly in line with professional ethics, that patients with a life expectancy of no less than three weeks were moved into palliative care. There was a stunned silence after the doctor left. My father stared at the wall opposite him. For a while, I did not dare meet his eye. When I finally looked at him, he looked disappointed and helpless rather than scared. In an attempt to change the mood, I said, “actually, nobody can predict the length of anybody’s life.” He said, “how I wish there were more time so that I could finish the Oxford Urdu dictionary.”

Eighteen days later, he passed away. I then recalled that about ten days ago, he had read the Zauq’s verse, “if ever the lover got to narrate the joys of death; even the Christ and the Khizr would wish to die.”

The writer is a former airline captain