Fatima's Archives

Ishtiaq Ahmed was a great Urdu fiction writer who passed away yesterday at Karachi Airport. He was around 71 and died of a heart attack. He was known all over Pakistan for his books, especially his detective series. He has written over 800 books, mostly mystery novels. He is well known for his ' Inspector Jamshed series ', which he started writing long ago; they used to be available even when my parents were kids. He has also authored an ' Inspector Kamran Mirza series', and a ' Shoki brothers series'. They are all mystery novels, where the main charters have a very confusing different case to solve each time. You have to rack your brains thinking who would be the actual culprit, and often, the culprit is someone who seemed least likely to be one. I and my sister really love to read novels from his 'Inspector Jamshed' series. In fact, it was his novels which brought me closer to Urdu language. After reading some of his novels, I also started reading ...

I visited Javed Manzil, or Allama Iqbal Museum, as it is also called, in October this year during a trip to Lahore. The museum used to be the house of the renown Poet of the East; Allama Muhammad Iqbal.  The place was constructed a few years before Iqbal's death, and he constructed it on his own expense. However, he dedicated the house to his son, Javed Iqbal, thus calling it Javed Manzil. Since he had given the house to his son, and he had to live in it as well, he actually paid his son the rent for the four rooms he occupied in the house. A few years after Iqbal’s death, the Government of Pakistan bought the house from Javed Iqbal to turn it into a museum. The museum was opened for the public in 1984. Once inside the museum, a guide showed us around and told us lots of things about the house. In one corner, Iqbal’s prayer mat was laid out the way it used to be during his life. Hanging above it were some verses of his poetry. Many of the rooms of his house had been tur...