Urdu calligraphy and pens. Letters are now a nostalgic pastime. The “art of letter writing”, we call it wistfully, mostly because we detest the brief, auto-prompt sentences we write today.

Abdul Ghaffar inspects the line of Urdu I have written and then bursts into laughter. “To me, people like you who know how to read and write Urdu in normal script are padhe hue (literate). Not ...