As kids we often made fun of our father because he could not read Hindi. He’d grown up in Lahore and moved to Delhi during Partition, when he was twelve. Like many such others, he had learned Urdu, not Hindi, as his second-language. Of course he spoke Hindustani, which mixed Hindi with Urdu. But he leaned towards Urdu and couldn’t read the Devnagri script.

Illustration/ Amit Bandre