It was late in the evening when I called Aftab Yusuf Shaikh. His voice carried a certain warmth, the kind that makes you feel like you’re in the company of an old friend. I had just finished reading his novella, Waiting for Father, and the emotions it stirred in me were still raw. It was a stirring, emotional read — one of those stories that stays with you long after you’ve finished. I told him that if I had been younger, I probably would have cried.

“I’m glad you cried,” Aftab responded with a quiet laugh. “That was the mission of the book. If you cried, it means it made you feel something.”

We spoke about the themes of the novel — family, friendship, loss — and about the personal nature of the story. He had dedicated the book to his father, and I noticed in the acknowledgments that his mother, though not highly educated, had ensured he was admitted to an English-medium school. That led me to ask him, “Is Shams you? Are you Shams Ansari?”

“Yes, of course, it is me,” he admitted. “The first four or five chapters are exactly me. Whatever happened to him happened to me.”

His original intention had been to write a memoir, but then he came across a story — one about a friend of his father’s, someone who had experienced a tragedy similar to the one that unfolds in Waiting for Father. Aftab wanted to tell that story too. Eventually, the two narratives merged, and the book took shape. “I had to push my experiences back in time. The events in the novel are set in 1992, but what happened to me occurred much later.”

Waiting for Father is a young-adult coming-of-age novella set in early 1990s Bombay. The story follows Shams, a young boy living a simple life with his barber father and homemaker mother. His biggest concerns are school grades and childhood conflicts with his best friend, Qamar. Shams has a natural talent for poetry but soon realises that talent alone is not enough in life. As he navigates adolescence and struggles to connect with his father, the city erupts in riots, abruptly exposing him to harsh realities. The book, based on true events, marks the award-winning author’s first venture into young-adult fiction, exploring themes of family, identity, and societal conflict.

The name ‘Shams’, Aftab explained, is the Arabic word for “sun”, which makes sense, given that his own name, Aftab, comes from Persian and means the same. Aftab explained how Shams’s best friend in the book is called Qamar which is the Persian word for moon.

The warmth of the father-son relationship in the book stood out to me. Many of Shams’s friends grew up fearing their fathers, but his own father, despite being reserved, was a source of quiet strength. I asked Aftab if his real-life relationship with his father had been the same.

“Yes,” he said. “My father is still with me, though I lost my mother three years ago. When I look back, I realise he didn’t say much, but somehow, I always felt he understood me. My mother was more straightforward, more practical, but my father… I think he got the way my mind worked. He didn’t need to say a lot — just a sentence or two would be enough to push me in the right direction.”

Aftab grew up surrounded by words. His father, a poet, wrote in Urdu. Though Aftab didn’t understand Urdu at first, he was drawn to the rhythm of poetry. “I wondered if I could do the same thing in English,” he said. Writing became a way for him to carve out his own space in the world. He recalled a pivotal moment in his childhood — watching a classmate receive applause for his achievements. “I wasn’t good at studies, not good at sports. So I thought, what can I do? And I just wrote a poem. I don’t even know why I chose to write about an old Greek man — it just happened.”

That first poem changed everything. His classmates showed it to the teacher, who praised it. The class monitor — someone special to young Aftab — looked at him with admiration. “That was the moment I realised this is something I can do.” By the age of eight, he had his first poem published in a newspaper.

Life, however, took its turns. Aftab failed his Class X board exams. No one scolded him. No one hit him. He was given space to try again. Around that time, he discovered Malgudi Days on television. “I started imagining the scenes as they must have been when R.K. Narayan first wrote them. That’s when I started writing stories,” he recalled.

It was Helen Cross, a British author, who gave him the best advice of his writing career. At the time, he was writing stories about characters with names like John and David. She told him: “Write about who you are. Write about what you see. Nobody wants to see England through your eyes —they want to see your world, the way you see it.” That advice shaped his writing.

His choice to write young adult fiction was, in a way, inevitable. “I was young when I started writing, so I wrote about people like me,” he said. “And now, I teach — I’m always surrounded by young adults. I relate to them.”

Apart from being a writer, Aftab is deeply engaged in teaching. He has taught English and history, but his special interest lies in comparative religious studies. His research-driven approach to storytelling is evident in Waiting for Father. Though he was only a child during the 1992 riots, he pieced together the historical context from newspapers and oral accounts. “I wanted to make it my own piece,” he said. “I wasn’t there, but I wanted to understand it deeply.”

His next project followed a similar path. “I’m working on a young-adult novel about Jallianwala Bagh and Qissa Khwani Bazaar. These events have always stayed with me.” Another upcoming book is a picture book set in Srinagar, a companion to Letters to Ammu, his earlier children’s book.

I asked him what he hopes readers take away from Waiting for Father. “When my readers finish the story, I want them to feel uneasy about what caused this tragedy — hatred. Whether it’s between communities, ideologies, or identities, hatred destroys families. The people in the book are not bad people. The father, the mother, the son — they are not harming anyone. Yet their lives are torn apart. I want my readers to hate that hatred. I want them to understand what it does,” he said.

His son, only eight, has read the book. “He likes it, but he’s too young to fully grasp it. Maybe when he reads it again, he’ll see it differently,” Aftab felt. “For now, he enjoys it because it’s his father’s story.”

When asked about his favourite authors, he smiled. “I was never drawn to mysteries or romances. My first novel, The Library Girl, had elements of romance, but even that was deeply personal — it was about my experience of being diagnosed with leukemia at 20.”

His writing, at its core, is always personal. It’s about looking at the world through his own lens and telling stories that matter.

Waiting for Father is published by Litkanmani and is available on their website and Amazon