One priest who thought he was cheating caned him, but afterward admitted, "There is something different about you, Merwan — something special. Forgive me for beating you."
"What is there to forgive?" replied Merwan. "It is all right. It was a mistake. It is forgiven and forgotten."
For school, Merwan read the works of Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and later John Donne. Merwan had a deep passion for poetry and would ask his father to read the Divan of Hafiz to him and explain its true meaning. Father and son would sit together until late in the night (as Shireenmai castigated Merwan to go to bed). The boy would remember whatever poems Bobo read. Merwan never actually read the poetry of Hafiz himself, but only heard what was read to him in the original Persian by his father — yet he was able to memorize the poems and quote Hafiz to the end of his life. More surprising was the fact that Merwan would recite verses from poetry that he had never read or heard, as if he had committed them to memory by reading them daily. Merwan knew the bhajans of the Hindu Sadgurus Tukaram and Swami Ramdas by heart, as well as the entire Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana .1 Merwan was also fond of quoting Rumi, although he had never read or heard his works, either.
In his spare time, he read books about different religions and spirituality, including the Gujarati writings of Sorabji Desai of Navsari. He did not like romance or love stories, but he did enjoy detective stories. He was a devoted reader of the British weekly magazine The Union Jack , which featured the exploits of Sexton Blake. (Sherlock Holmes was another favorite.) Merwan saved old issues and circulated them among his friends, thus inculcating in them the habit of reading. Merwan once wrote a long letter to the author of the Sexton Blake stories, appreciating his work and wishing him a successful career.2
Merwan also began writing articles in English and Gujarati, which were published in different Indian newspapers under the pen name of Huma .3 Similarly, his poems, shairees (couplets) and ghazals, written in English, Gujarati, Persian, Farsi, Urdu and Hindi under the same pen name were greatly appreciated. With Merwan's permission, Baily mailed one of Huma's Urdu ghazals to the popular Gujarati newspaper Sanj Vartaman (The Evening News) of Bombay, which published it in its Saturday issue. Thereafter, every Saturday issue contained one of Huma's compositions or articles.
Footnotes
- 1.Tukaram (1608–1649) was a Perfect Master and a famous Marathi poet, whose abhangs (devotional songs) are still widely popular in Maharashtra. Swami Ramdas (1608–1681) was another famous Maharashtrian poet-saint, the guru of king Shivaji, and also one of the Perfect Masters of his age.
- 2.There were many different writers creating the Sexton Blake stories at the time, and exactly which one Merwan wrote is not known.
- 3.Huma denotes the Persian phoenix, also called the bird of paradise.