How a Pakistani Novelist and Translator Learned to Love Dictionaries

The Books He Once Saw as ‘Villainous’ and ‘Unwieldy’ Helped Him Introduce Children to Urdu Classical Literature

An image from a winter morning in Hyderabad, Pakistan, when I was four, forms my earliest memory of literacy.

Bundled up in layers of sweaters, I am reciting from an Urdu newspaper as I sit astride my neighbor’s pet goat. I am certain that the sequence of words or their relationships to each other made no sense to me. But my prowess in reading individual words made the exercise as meaningful and empowering as the ability to ride the goat.

That pride, perhaps, explained my ecumenical approach to reading texts …