control of the capital city, Kabul in 1929. Kalakani rejected any kind of innovation, forced the reformist Amanullah Khan to abdicate, usurping the throne for himself. Pazhwak's father, Judge Abdullah, joined the resistance against the usurper and amidst anarchy and chaos, Pazhwak's progressive older brother, Judge Hafizullah, was murdered in Shamali, where he had been appointed as the judge, at the hands of unknown anarchists. At the end of Habibullah Kalakani's interregnum, Pazhwak attended the Habibia High School, which was among the first famous modern schools in Afghanistan. The school trained a whole section of the country's open-minded educated elite in the twentieth century. Among Pazhwak's teachers in Kabul were two prominent poet-scholars: Sufi Abdulhaq Bitab (1887–1969) who taught at the Habibiya High School, and Ustad Khalilullah Khalili (1909–1985), who was Pazhwak's part-time private tutor. As a result, a lifelong friendship was forged between Pazhwak and his ten-years-senior teacher, Ustad Khalili. At this time, the poet laureate Bitab and the equally-learned poet and diplomat Khalili were widely and highly valued for their Dari literary prose. This was also the key reason explaining why Pazhwak, whose first language was Pashto, was able to stand out as a Dari writer whose work was testimony to the author's sensitivity to the subtleties of the Persian language. English was taught as a foreign language at the school and this in turn played a significant role in Pazhwak's subsequent career as a diplomat. His knowledge of English already came useful to him at a young age enabling him to read and translate into Dari the works of English language authors. Scattered pieces of Pazhwak's first poems and essays appeared in the Afghan press in the first half of the 1930s. At the time the young literati used various pen-names: first Wafa, then Marlaw, and finally Armanjan. It was only towards the end of the 1930s that the aspiring young literati permanently settled for the pen-name Pazhwak which means ‘echo’ in both Dari and Pashto. After high school, Pazhwak was designated to study medicine but felt compelled to interrupt his studies due to lack of interest in the field and the loss of his father who was the bread-winner of the family. He decided to join the workforce, starting his career working as an English translator for the academic institution of the Kabul Literary Association, Anjuman-i Adabi-yi Kabul. Pazhwak subsequently made a career in Afghanistan's information