I groaned softly as I stretched after climbing down from the weathered jeep. The long drive up into the mountains from the airport in Islamabad had worked its way deep into my bones. For a moment I simply stood there at the outskirts of my village, listening to the wind move gently through the trees overhead.
Coming home after so many years felt less like returning to a place and more like stepping back into a memory—tree branches arched lazily overhead, uneven stone paths worn smooth by generations of footsteps, the faint scents of pine and wood smoke drifting through the mountains.
I often wondered whether my memories had dulled with age, but standing there looking down at our valley, I found everything exactly as I remembered it—the quiet beneath the trees, the houses in the village radiating outward from the masjid, and the village’s teacher, Ustaadh Ji’s workshop next to it. From where I stood, I could see his weathered wooden door, propped open like it always was in the afternoons, letting in the alpine breeze.
Seeing it pulled me deeper into memory. Everyone in our village greeted him with warmth and respect, for almost all of them had once studied under his gentle tutelage. More than once each year, the entire village would gather in celebration when another of his students completed reading the Qur’an from beginning to end for the first time, the young reader’s voice trembling with both nervousness and pride while Ustaadh Ji listened with the calm satisfaction of a gardener watching a tree he had planted finally bear fruit.
I remembered my own khatam day. I had sat cross-legged before Ustaadh Ji in the masjid, my small finger pointing at the page, trembling as I read the final verses. As the last words finally left my lips, the room erupted with cheers and prayers. I remember Ustaadh Ji pulling me tightly against his chest after he placed a topi embroidered in gold thread on my head–his gift to every boy who finished reading the Qur’an from end-to-end—his face radiant with the same quiet pride I had seen him offer so many students before me.
I remembered my father. The way his eyes shone as he hugged me before pressing a crisp thousand-rupee note into my palm while the other men of the village laughed, congratulated him, and slapped his back in celebration.
Smiling to myself, I made my way slowly through the village streets, passing stone walls softened by time and small groups of elders seated beneath the shade, their conversations carrying lazily through the mountain air. Somewhere nearby, meat sizzled inside the walls of a clay oven while children darted between the narrow paths with the same restless energy I remembered from my own youth.
Nestled in the shadow of Pakistan’s northern peaks, beneath low-hanging clouds, a narrow lane lined with apricot trees led down from the main road into the village. I had just begun walking along it when I heard the call to prayer begin, drifting softly across the valley and pulling me into yet another memory.
Few in the village could remember a time before Ustaadh Ji’s door had stood open to all of us children. For decades he had sat in that same sunlit room, guiding small, uncertain hands through their first letters—alif, ba, ta—until the shapes that once felt foreign began to flow naturally from the reed. Entire generations had passed across that woven mat before him.
It had been so long since my last visit. While my own life had become consumed by distance and noise, this village had remained here enduring quietly beneath the mountains, carrying on without me. I found myself wondering how much of it I had failed to preserve simply by being gone.
With every step, the years between my leaving and returning seemed to loosen their hold on me. Familiar sounds began rising gently from the village like echoes surfacing from deep water—the distant bleating of goats along the hillside, the creak of wooden shutters shifting in the breeze, the faint murmur of Qur’an recitation drifting from the direction of the masjid courtyard.
As I arrived in the village center, I passed my family’s home without stopping and continued instead toward the masjid. Only later would I realize that something within me had already begun searching for Ustaadh Ji long before I consciously intended to. When I finally reached his workshop and peered through the open door, everything was exactly as it always had been, as though time itself had simply passed around it.
Afternoon light slanted through high windows, falling in bars of gold and shadow across the stone floor. Dust motes drifted lazily in the warm air, rising with each subtle movement and settling again as if the room itself were breathing. In the corner, seated cross-legged on a woven mat, was our Ustaadh. His white beard caught the light like frost on a winter branch, and his hands—veined and weathered over the decades—moved with a precision that belied his age.
Before him lay a small bundle of reeds, cut to equal length, their yellow-brown husks catching the light. Beside them was a single piece of paper, a clay pot of black liquid that shone like obsidian, and a small wooden box no bigger than a loaf of bread.
The blade whispered softly against the reed. Slice. Pause. Turn. Another careful cut. Each movement was deliberate, unhurried, as though the reed itself had a rhythm that Ustaadh Ji was listening for.
As I waited, my mind wandered to the peaceful rhythm of life here. The smell of fresh roti drifted from clay ovens through the village’s stone walkways, mingling softly with pine and woodsmoke in the mountain air. From somewhere high above the village came the piercing cry of a Shaheen falcon as it announced itself with a scream before dropping into a sharp dive.
I had read somewhere that they could live for nearly twenty years, and I found myself wondering if this was the same one I had watched soaring above our home when I was a child. I remembered afternoons spent sitting on a large rocky outcrop just outside the village with my friends, our legs dangling over the edge as we watched the valley below, cheering when we spotted the lethal bird streaking across the sky like an arrow. We would point wildly towards the sky, arguing over who had seen it first, our bickering carrying into the wind.
Dust tickled my nose, interrupting my reverie, and I watched as another shaving curled away from the reed and floated gently downward, landing soundlessly among the others on the folded cloth.
Watching him work, I became suddenly aware of how clumsy my own hands were. Even the stillness of the room seemed disciplined in a way I was not. I had arrived, carrying years of distance and noise inside me. For years my days had been measured in schedules, traffic, and glowing screens, and now watching Ustaadh Ji work in peace, I felt all of it evaporate at once.
Ustaadh Ji did not look up.
I remained where I was, leaning lightly against the wooden frame of his doorway, watching. And after a while, the waiting itself became peacefully comfortable. The small sounds of the room began to settle into a quiet pattern: the faint rasp of the blade, the soft fall of another shaving, the slow creak of the woven mat as he shifted his weight. Without realizing it, I found myself breathing more slowly, matching the gentle cadence of his work.
Only when the reed had finally taken the shape he wanted, did Ustaadh Ji pause. He set the blade down beside him and turned his head slightly toward me.
“So,” he said, as though I had just arrived. “You have finally returned. I’d wondered if you’d forgotten about us. ”
As he spoke, his fingers continued to move carefully, deliberately picking up each shaving fragment, examining it and placing it carefully into the wooden box, where it joined the remnants of many past reeds.
Unable to hold my curiosity, I asked, “Ustaadh Ji… what are you doing? And why are you keeping the shavings?”
He paused, looked up, and smiled the way a grandfather smiles at a child asking why the stars twinkle. His eyes were deep and soft, reflecting the light of the window like pools of calm water.
“Ah,” he said, turning the reed in his hand, “you have noticed.”
He lifted one of the shavings with the tip of his blade and held it to the light. It was thin as a strand of saffron, curling naturally into a tiny spiral.
“Every calligrapher who wanders this path,” he said, “knows that the qalam is not merely a tool. It is a witness. It is the bridge between the soul and the page. With it, we write the words of the Almighty, the poetry of civilizations, and the names of those who will be remembered long after our bones are dust.
“These shavings…” he gestured to the cloth, “…are a testament of that work. Each curl fell as I prepared the instrument to bear something sacred. One day, these shavings will rest with me in the earth. They will one day whisper that I once served as a scribe in devotion to the Almighty.”
He reached for the wooden box, its lid carved with a simple geometric pattern of interlocking squares. Opening it, he revealed hundreds of tiny shavings layered like pressed flowers, each one a silent fragment of time.
“This is many years of pens,” he said softly. “Every qalam I have cut, every single one that I have used, every mistake, every perfection. All saved, for when I return to the One who gave me these hands and these eyes. We will go together, the qalam and I, and these shavings will one day bear witness that I did not waste the gift.”
I said nothing. My chest tightened with the unspoken weight of him leaving us—a heaviness I prayed I would never have to name.
For as long as I could remember, that room had seemed as permanent as the mountains beyond the valley. The thought that the mat might one day lie empty, the blade resting silent beside untouched reeds, felt almost impossible to hold in my mind. It was difficult, imagining that the workshop could exist without him in it.
I had allowed myself to live as though it always would. Years had passed between my visits while I buried myself in the noise of another life, deceived by the foolish certainty that men like Ustaadh Ji would simply always be waiting where I had left them. Sitting there now, watching his weathered hands gather the shavings into that small wooden box, I felt the quiet shame of realizing how much I had taken his presence for granted.
I watched him place another shaving carefully into the box, and for the first time since returning, I understood that my longing to remain near him was not merely nostalgia. Somewhere within me was the growing fear that I had already spent too many years away from the things that truly mattered. The village would always be here, but would he?
I watched him in silence for a few moments before I finally found the courage to speak.
“Ustaadh Ji…” I said quietly. “Would you teach me?”
For several moments he said nothing. I watched as his thumb drifted along the lid of the box, tracing the small nicks and imperfections time had carved into it, as though he remembered the story behind every single one.
“Why?” he asked at last, setting the box down.
The question caught me unprepared.
“Because it is beautiful,” I answered.
He gave a faint smile, though his eyes remained fixed on the box as he set it down.
“Beauty alone is not enough. The world is already full of beautiful things.” He gestured to the door with his head as he picked up his qalam and turned it gently between his fingers. “Many admire our art. But few are willing to surrender themselves to it.”
The room fell quiet again except for the distant murmur of wind outside the workshop.
“This craft,” he continued softly, “demands patience from the impatient, humility from the proud, and discipline from the restless. The qalam records all of it. Every trembling hand. Every hurried line. Every moment the heart wanders from its intention.”
He looked toward the wooden box beside him.
“And if you learn it properly, then one day its preservation will also become your responsibility. You will carry it the way others carried it before you.”
His gaze settled on me then, calm and searching.
“Tell me honestly,” he asked, “are you prepared to serve something that may never reward you except in silence?”
I lowered my eyes, suddenly aware that I did not truly know the answer.
And perhaps seeing that uncertainty in me, Ustaadh Ji finally nodded.
“Good,” he said softly. “A man who answers without thinking has not understood the weight of the question.”
Then, at last—“Come,” he said, gesturing for me to step closer. I knelt beside him, the mat rough beneath my knees. The faint smell of ink and dried reeds filled my nose, strangely calming.
He held up the reed he had just cut. Its tip was wide and flat, a chisel ready for work.
“Do you know why we shape the qalam this way?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Kufic,” he said, and the word itself seemed to settle into the room like a stone in a still pond. “The oldest of our scripts. It was born in Kufa, by the river, where the call to prayer echoed through the desert. It speaks with strength and silence. The horizontal stroke is the earth beneath your feet. And the vertical stroke is the finger that testifies to the heavens. To write Kufic is to erect a monument on the page. A weak pen will betray the letters, so we cut the qalam with care. Its strength becomes the strength of the letters.”
I looked at the reed in his hand. Until that moment, I had only seen a tool. Now it felt almost sacred.
He dipped the reed into the ink and drew a slow horizontal line across the page. It was perfectly even, thick and confident. He then rotated the nib slightly and drew a vertical stroke, slim and sharp as a sword.
“You see,” he said, “Kufic is not written. It is built. Crafted. It is a constructed city of letters, and every letter is a pillar. When I write, I am building gates, courtyards, and walls. The letters stand with each other. They breathe together.”
He ran his thumb gently along the reed. “But this is true of more than calligraphy.”
He gestured faintly toward the village beyond the window. “Our life is built the same way. Carefully and patiently. One line,” he drew a line on the page, “beside another. One generation beside the next. Your grandfather laid a stone, your father raised a wall, and perhaps you will only be entrusted with repairing a doorway before your own hands grow old.”
I felt suddenly small hearing him speak that way—not diminished, but humbled. I had spent so much of my life thinking about what I might build for myself that I had never once considered the dignity of simply preserving what had already been entrusted to me.
His words settled heavily inside me as I stared at the page, at the two lines he had drawn. They already looked like foundations.
-v-
Over the next weeks, I returned to the workshop every day, stepping over the same threshold worn smooth by years of students passing through. Ustaadh Ji’s workshop was a place of tranquil discipline. The morning light always crossed through the windows the same way, allowing me to settle into the quiet familiarity of the room before our lesson began.
At first, I only observed as Ustaadh Ji’s hands moved with ritual precision: soaking reeds to soften them, cutting nibs at careful angles, testing the ink’s thickness on scraps of paper. He explained that Kufic is not for those in haste. It requires a mind emptied of noise. Discipline and patience are virtues held dear by its practitioners.
For all its stillness, the room awakened my senses: the sound of reed shavings being brushed aside, the way Ustaadh Ji tested a nib on a scrap of paper, his habit of tapping the qalam gently against the ink pot, and even the smell of ink thickening in the afternoon warmth.
As Ustaadh Ji’s rhythms became familiar, I began to help with small tasks around the workshop.
I would carefully sweep his reed shavings into a small pile at the far corner of his mat. I’d place fresh paper beside him while carefully mixing the ink with water to his preferred texture and consistency.
As the days turned into weeks and I continued to return without fail, he began to trust me with his knife, one that had been gifted to him by his own teacher many years earlier. I took great pride in honing the blade to a razor-sharp edge and laying it beside a pile of fresh reeds waiting for him to begin crafting every time.
“Each letter is an invocation,” he’d explain as he worked. “If your hand is restless, the letter will wobble. If your heart is heavy, the line will falter. The qalam feels everything you feel. You cannot hide from it.”
One morning, he let me cut my first reed. I held the small blade awkwardly, conscious of his eyes on my hands. The first slice was too deep, the second uneven. A jagged shaving fell onto the mat.
“Keep it,” he said, picking it up and placing it on the cloth. “Mistakes are part of the journey. This fragment will testify that your hand was learning.”
He then adjusted my grip, rotating the reed slightly in my hand. “Again,” he ordered, not unkindly.
By the end of that week, I had a small pile of shavings beside me. My lines were crooked, pillars faltered, and my horizontals slanted like tired walls.
I remember staring at the ruined tip in my hands, embarrassed by how quickly they had betrayed me. What had looked effortless in Ustaadh Ji’s hands now seemed impossibly delicate. I was beginning to understand that perfection was not born from talent alone, but from a discipline I did not yet possess.
But Ustaadh Ji only nodded. “Kufic is patient,” he said. “It has endured for centuries. It will wait for you.”
Months passed. Shadows lengthened across the workshop floor, and the air grew cooler, heralding autumn. What was meant to be a brief visit home had stretched far beyond my original plans. The demands of my other life lingered somewhere beyond the mountains, distant enough to feel almost imaginary. Each morning, I found myself drawn back to Ustaadh Ji’s workshop as though some deeper part of me already understood that this time together would not come again.
One afternoon, almost as if by accident, Ustaadh Ji wordlessly reached for a reed I had cut instead of preparing one himself. He tested the nib against the paper once, then nodded almost imperceptibly before continuing his work. That small gesture filled me with a pride I carried for weeks.
And within all of this persisted the quiet ritual of the art: the scent of reed and ink, the soft sound of the knife, the stillness that wrapped around each session like a cloak. I had since acquired my own small wooden box to carry back with me when I eventually returned abroad, and I watched my own pile of shavings grow with each session. I was learning that Kufic was not merely an art, but a discipline.
One evening, as the sun sank and the workshop turned amber with fading light, I watched as Ustaadh Ji placed the remnants of that day’s work carefully into his wooden box. I thought of the hundreds that lay there already, remnants of a life spent in devotion.
“Ustaadh Ji,” I said, “when you are gone, who will continue the city you have built?”
The qalam rested lightly between his fingers. “Most people think legacy is something grand. A monument. A name carved into marble. But often it is quieter. A discipline passed from one hand to another. A verse remembered correctly. A craft preserved long enough for another soul to inherit it.”
He looked down at the page again. “That is why we honor our qalam. Without it, the city cannot exist. And when my hand is gone, perhaps the city will still stand, but these small pieces,” he gestured toward the wooden box, “and I will rest together, satisfied with what we helped build.”
He looked at me, his smile gentle. “Perhaps you will continue it,” he said. “Perhaps not. The city does not belong to me. It belongs to the Almighty. I am but His servant.”
Then he placed the reed in my hand. “Cut,” he said.
The room fell quiet as we worked, though the silence wasn’t empty. There was simply nothing more to say. Later that afternoon, I shook his hand and made my way back to my family’s home, but his words lingered in my ears long into the night.
-v-
Many years later, in my study on the other side of the world, I reflected as I whittled my next qalam, Ustaadh Ji’s knife resting familiarly in my hand. He had gifted it to me during one of our last lessons together. I remember holding my breath as he’d handed it to me.
“My own teacher gave this to me,” he had said quietly, almost reverently.
Only later did I realize that the knife would never truly belong to either of us. We were both mere caretakers, each entrusted by our Ustaads with a brief moment to lay another stone for those who would come after us.
Even now, whenever my blade would begin its slow work, I’d sometimes feel as though I could hear the faint rasp of another blade beside mine, as though the quiet of his workshop still lingered somewhere in the rhythm of my craft. I’d occasionally find myself wondering how many other hands across the valley still remember the patience he taught us.
Somewhere behind me, I heard footsteps pause briefly at the doorway of my study, but I did not look up immediately. This reed was not yet ready.
A final curl fell into my own box of shavings on the desk. The small wooden box beside my hand was beginning to resemble the one I had first noticed resting beside his mat so many years before.
I exhaled deeply as my qalam met the page, the first stroke rising like a minaret against the open sky. In that quiet moment, Ustaadh Ji’s lessons returned to me:
“Each letter, a monument. Each stroke, a supplication.”
