Well, I live in Hyderabad and my dad's family is also from around here. I can speak/read/write Farsi because my maternal grandfather was actually from Iran, from a place called Mazandaran he then came to India during the independence and married and settled here later onwards. My mother ended up adopting Farsi as her first language/mother tongue and hence I know Farsi fluently because of it.

Apart from my mother and her siblings, I've literally never seen anyone who knows Farsi, here in Hyderabad even though in Pre-independence era Farsi was the lingua franca in the Nizam ruled Hyderabad state. Farsi literature is the toughest one to crack, especially the classics. One cannot even comprehend the difficulty of the original works of Rumi and Saadi Shirazi in Farsi. Most of the translated works of Rumi just takes away the soul of that work.

Thanks for the advice :) I'll try to stay away from the classics for the time being and read some contemporary stuff. Btw, how do you know about Premchand? Are you from India?