Salma Mahmud launched her book ‘The Wings of Time’, a biography of her father Dr Muhammad Din Taseer, at the Royal Palm on Thursday. It narrates her journey of rediscovering her father, an eminent poet, critic, teacher and administrator. She is the oldest child of Dr Taseer, the first Indian to obtain a PhD from Cambridge University. She was educated at Kinnaird College in Lahore, and then at the University of Edinburgh, from where she obtained a Masters in English Language.
The biography relates the circumstances of Taseer’s origins and how he was orphaned at the age of three, when his entire village in Punjab was wiped out in an epidemic of the bubonic plague. He was sent away to Lahore to be raised by maternal aunt, Muzaffar Begum. During his distinguished career, Taseer preferred to spend time around a group of brilliant intellectuals, who filled an existential void that existed within him because of his loneliness.