I had spent the last several years hearing one man talk about his roots, the stories of pain and separation during Partition, and his mastery over four languages. This was a man I would come to hold in an even greater regard a few years later.AdvertisementMeet my grandfather, Sardar Jagat Singh Khurana. A Sikh man from the fort city of Bannu in Northwest Frontier Province, present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan’s most restive province.Also Read | Hindi and Urdu, a common tongueHe was born there on April 4, 1936. “I am finally a super senior citizen,” he had told me gleefully on his 80th birthday. “This means I no longer have to stand in queues at the CGHS dispensary or at the bank.”A simple man, with simple pleasures.If only I had known that would also be his last birthday — but that is the thing with time, you never know what surprises it might hold for you.AdvertisementJust like a young Jagat Singh did not know he would have to leave his home at the age of 11, travel miles away to a land he must now call his home and build a new life in, and toil day in and day out just to make ends meet. He certainly did not know he would also have to leave his culture behind, and unlearn all he had learned till then to learn the new lessons taught in the new schools decided by politicians from lands even further away.It meant that a script he grew up learning was no longer relevant in this new land. This was the Nastaliq script, used in Punjab for centuries where Persian was once the official Court language.When the Arabic-Persian script is used to write Hindustani, we call it Urdu; when that script is used for Punjabi, we call it Shahmukhi — of the Royals. Gurmukhi — devised by the second Sikh master, Guru Angad Dev Sahib — became the standard Punjabi script used especially by the Sikhs, given how perfectly it intertwines with this beautiful language.Both Persian and Gurmukhi co-existed in the royal courts of Punjab for centuries — until Partition rendered the former “useless” for the many heirs of the land who had learned and embraced it.So, when my grandfather finally took admission in a government school in Faridabad a few years after Partition, he, like many of his peers, was asked to sit in Class 1. Some of them were reading in Class 5 back in NWFP, others in Class 4 or 6 and so on. But none of them knew Devanagari — the script used for Sanskrit and what we today call Hindi.Their knowledge of Persian and Gurmukhi scripts was rendered useless in a new ‘Hindi medium school’. But they persevered, because that is what the children of Partition knew: How to survive, somehow, in a new land.They started school afresh, but none of them forgot the Urdu script. In Class 6, they learned English as well. My grandfather studied till Class 10, or matriculation, as it was then called, considered equivalent to today’s undergraduate degree.But he did not have the liberty of just studying alone. Once hailing from a rich family, he now had to do manual labour to make ends meet and repay the loan for the house they were allotted in Faridabad.I have never liked the word “refugee”; these are the people who built this city, brick by brick. It used to be barren land, and now thrives as a beautiful industrial hub — the story of many Partition refugee settlements.Fast forward to 2016, I have just finished my Class 10, having learned only the Devanagari and Latin scripts in school, and Gurmukhi at a local Gurdwara.And I wanted to learn this fourth language that my grandfather kept talking about — he was the only one in the family who knew it, at least during my childhood.So I started learning it from him, or at least made a small effort. I wanted to take out more time from my busy schedule, but couldn’t. His 80th birthday was his last — there were no more queues he had to stand in, and he would not be here to skip them, either.My grandfather passed away soon after I asked him to write down the Urdu/Shahmukhi alphabet for me on a piece of paper.you may likeI often think if he were still alive, he would have enjoyed reading my work — he was the only person in my family who read English and Hindi newspapers every morning. Sometimes I also saw him reading the Urdu and Punjabi dailies that he would get hold of from his friends.I am now looking to learn Shahmukhi again. For now, I must preserve this one-page primer he wrote for me. I have kept it safely with my old journalism notes.The author is Deputy Copy Editor, The Indian Express, jaspreet.singh1@expressindia.com