It is 2pm, and a seven-year-old boy sits in an after-school Urdu remedial class, his fingers tracing the unfamiliar curves of the words before him. The sentence on the page seems simple enough: “Yeh ...
“Urdu is a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Turkish words formed with the intermingling of invading Muslim armies and local Hindi-speaking Hindus. It’s a Turkish word which means Army camp, hoard, etc.” ...