India, July 19 -- Chaudhary Mohammad Naim or CM Naim, the great Urdu scholar, teacher and translator, passed away in Chicago last week. We have been friends since the 1960s, and he has helped me on countless occasions. An early incident was in 1968 when I completed my MA and enrolled for a PhD at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the comparative study of progressive poetry in Urdu and Hindi. Comparative literature was a new field of study in those days. I was searching for a competent mentor until someone pointed to Professor Naim, who was in the Urdu department on a sabbatical from University of Chicago. I went to meet him though I had only heard about him from his students, Steven Poulos and Carlo Coppola who had joined AMU's Urdu department a couple of years ago for their research. My first impression of Naim sahab was of a person who was cold, distant and snooty. When I told him about my predicament, he asked me to join him in the evening when he took long walks. That evening he cleared all my confusion and doubts with effortless ease. Naim sahab had come to AMU after a long stint in the US because he felt he needed to give something back to his country. However, things didn't materialise as per his plans. He found the cultural gap between the two university systems difficult to bridge. AMU's conservative ways created a situation where Naim sahab found himself constrained while his colleagues felt threatened and uncomfortable. In one of the research committee meetings, he declined to guide a research scholar who was working on Hali Altaf Hussian Hali saying that he hadn't read Hali enough to be able to guide a research scholar. The department wasn't ready for such honesty. Within a year, Naim sahab returned to Chicago. Naim sahab used to write Urdu poetry under the pen name, Chaman. The pseudonym was an aggregation of the first three letters of his name. He also wrote short stories in English. Even after leaving AMU, he would return to India every winter to meet his mother who lived in Barabanki, UP. In 1974, he told me that he was planning to self-publish his collection of six short stories under the title, Five Plus One. I along with some of my friends helped him in this endeavour. One day I asked him why he had stopped writing in English. His answer left me stunned: He said he felt he didn't know the language well enough to write fiction in it. This was when his colleagues in Chicago thought highly of his command over the English language. He said his thoughts are laboured while writing in English. In 1975, Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency and Naim sahab became its trenchant critic. The administration turned its ire on his short story collection and I too was summoned by the authorities for helping in its publication. In the early months of 1975, I visited the US and stayed with Naim sahab. He lived with his two children in an old but large apartment. He was loath to discuss his personal life but through his students I came to know that he had married an American woman and they were divorced. After a hiatus, they remarried only to divorce again. One day while we were having our dinner, the children started eating before I took my first bite. Naim sahab scolded them for being rude to the guest. I was impressed by his efforts to teach his half-American kids the cultural nuances of Awadh. While in the US, I met many Muslims who were living and thriving in the US but disliked American culture. They wanted to remain staunch, conservative Indian Muslims. Their biggest worry was that their daughters would be influenced by "American ways" such as "dating". I felt if a girl is born in the US and is studying in the same country, she will adopt its ways and culture. It was the subject of one of my stories, Unka Dar (Their Fear), which Naim sahab translated into English. Once when he was in Delhi, Naim sahab wanted to present a research paper on pulp fiction in Hindi and asked me to procure some material, which could be found only in shady footpath stalls. Bookstall owners, uncomfortable with a 70-year-old and a bearded 50-year-old asking for Hindi soft porn books, declined to sell us the stuff. In the later stages of his life, he developed interests in subjects other than literature. History and sociology now interested him more than poetry and fiction, he told me. Everyone accepts that he was a brilliant translator. Critics dub his translation of my story, Lynching, to be an "original work". Similarly, his translation of Mir Taqi Mir's autobiography, Zikr-i Mir, is a monumental work. His contribution to Urdu education is phenomenal. He developed a lot of course material to teach Urdu through English. His greatest gift is that he made all his educational material copyright free. Naim's personality was a beautiful amalgamation of the East and the West. He was a modest person but a straight shooter when he spoke. He was aware of his social responsibilities and he never cosied up to the powers that be for personal gains. He was alert to women and Dalit discourses; Dalit literature was one of his favourite subjects. His dislike for communalism was very evident in his writings. It was always interesting to chat with him as he was full of new experiences and ideas. He was also interested in our bureaucracy and that was the reason he chose to translate Harishankar Parsai's satire, Inspector Matadin Chaand Par (Inspector Matadin on the Moon), into English. Naim sahab will be sorely missed....