By Irfanullah Farooqi
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935-2020), easily the most iconic figure of the Urdu literary world in the past five-six decades, died of post-Covid complications on December 25 at his home in Allahabad. So many of his admirers have written obituaries that inform us of Faruqi’s unrivalled contribution to Urdu literature. Not a single one of these misses out on pointing out rather categorically how Faruqi’s death marks the end of an era, one, if I may add, created by Faruqi himself. Recently, his elder daughter Mehr Afshan Farooqi has written a moving piece that, for the most part, educates the reader on the not-so-well-known aspects of Faruqi; his love for smoking pipes and tea, his medication routine, dogs and birds as his companions etc.