My paternal grandfather was an advocate—someone I never met, yet perhaps the one whose presence I feel most strongly in my reading life. I inherited his large collection of books, once lining the walls of his office: volumes of AIR (All India Reporter), leather-bound encyclopedias, and stacks of Reader’s Digest. My father often tells me that after long days of preparing cases and finishing his newspapers in English and Urdu, it was Reader’s Digest he turned to. Among the collection were also his own handwritten books of poetry, resting quietly beside the law.
My paternal grandmother belonged to a different world of reading—one rooted in faith, repetition, and devotion. She was deeply immersed in religious scriptures, reciting duas and wazifas with a quiet intensity that filled the house.
I vividly remember winter Ramzans, when the cold still lingered in the early hours. After sehri, and before the fajr prayer, she would gather all of us grandchildren around her. Sitting close, half-awake and wrapped in shawls, we would listen as she recited dua-e-sehar aloud, asking us to repeat after her. Our voices, uneven and drowsy, followed hers—steady, certain.
At the beginning of every year, in those crisp January mornings, we would gather again—this time in the aangan of our house. Her cot would shift with the sun, moving slowly from east to west through the day, always chasing warmth. Seated there, she would take out the Nizami Jantri and begin reading our fortunes for the year ahead.
“Saal-e-nau ki pehli timahi mein sayyara-e-nahal haavi rahega… saal-e-nau ki doosri timahi aapke liye khushiyaan layegi...”
We listened as if it all truly mattered, as if our futures were unfolding in her voice. We would interrupt her often, asking the meanings of unfamiliar words, trying to make sense of what lay ahead. And when she paused, my uncle would pick up the Jantri and continue from where she left off, as though the rhythm of it must not break.
She also had her own kind of library—less of books, more of sound. A stereo set, and a collection of audio cassettes: recordings of majlis by Allama Talib Johri. She would play them and make us sit through them, listening—sometimes attentively, sometimes restlessly—but always together.
On my mother’s side, reading was softer, more intimate. My maternal grandmother read herself to sleep—afternoon or night, it didn’t matter. But before that, she would gather us, her grandchildren, around her and read aloud. Stories of Gog and Magog, of Dajjal, of the Seven Sleepers and their dog—stories that felt both distant and immediate, frightening and comforting at once. During summer vacations, we would wait for her to finish her afternoon prayers, seated beside her namaz ki chowki, and settle onto her bed. That was our time. Those stories have stayed with us far longer than the summers themselves.
After reading to us, she would gently shoo us away, rest her head on her large feather pillow, and ask me to massage her legs. Then she would pick up Pakeeza Aanchal, her ritual before sleep. She could not sleep without reading—it was her quiet medicine.
My mother inherited something of that ritual. She was not deeply into books, but she had a love for shayari. She and my father would attend mushairas, or watch them late into the night on television. Like her mother, she too kept a book—Mahekta Aanchal—always near her pillow. Before sleep, whether at night or during an afternoon nap, she would pick it up and ask one of us to gently scratch just behind her ear, at the base of her neck—that precise spot she claimed held her “sleep button.” With the magazine in hand and that soft, absent-minded comfort, she would drift off, sometimes still wearing her reading glasses.
I read because they read.
