tinyletter #002
Urdu first came to me much in the way stray animals become pets; I found it hanging around my neighbourhood, then my home, until it gradually became a familiar fixture, something I did not know but enjoyed walking around. And then, somehow, like cats or religion, it became wholly essential to my life, providing relief in the lull of an afternoon or in the face of a calamity. It is the rhythmic and familiar something I curl into when the world feels gathered in shadows.
Shrouded in shadow is precisely how I felt when I returned, against my will, to Washington D.C for a year. I viewed the city through a lens of disinterest and sought a ligament of sorts, a flexible but sturdy link which would bind my old life to the new one. With its delicate cursive Urdu became this. Without concrete reason I love its sloping script, each letter folding other the other like waves, lapping at each line. And each line like a proud row of peaks and valleys, the language itself telling the story of its birthplace’s landscape in this way. It is not like Hebrew, whose letters stack neatly like bricks, rebuilding the temple again and again. No. Urdu, it is softer, lemon coloured, the heat rising from biryani I make in a Dutch oven whenever I feel sad or lost or jubilant or romantic. It is an entire history and a people, cast out from the East and the West and all local governing bodies, packaged up into symbols like knapsacks. Perhaps I love it because I seek to do what it does; to carry myself fully wherever I go.
To choose Urdu is a direct rejection of my own culture, my own language. It is a dismissal of the familial Italian I grew up with, the clamorous physical affection, the assumed casualness with which Italian American families conduct their lives. There are only so many evening hours in a life, only so many minutes to learn a different grammar in between loads of laundry, sick visits, morning yoga. To choose Urdu over Italian is to prefer someone else’s history, love someone else’s great grandfather’s poetry. When it had chosen me, before I chose it back, this was an unspoken point of contention for my family and me. I had a habit of inviting Pakistani-Canadian friends over to the apartment I shared with my father above a French bakery. We would order takeout and drink London fogs until midnight while they explained the rules of cricket, which I still do not understand. My father was always mindful to engage in discussions on Benazir Bhutto or US foreign policy but I suspected this was the one way in which he wished I were different- perhaps concerned, however mildly, that I was being lured into some love affair which would only end badly. This is, of course, precisely what has happened.
Two Eids ago I sat on a sofa, wedged between the armrest and an ailing grandfather not my own. He had just returned from abroad and was not expected to live through the year. He took my hand into his, intertwining the forearms, bringing our bodies together in a closeness that was intimate in a way I have never experienced with anyone not labeled a lover. I could feel the humidity of his breath on my face when he spoke. He inquired about my education, pressed hundred dollar bills into my palms that I was told I could not refuse, while assuring me I was beautiful and blessed in a prose so flowery I blush even now when I recall it. Later, in the car, I explain to his grandson, my partner, that the conversation felt humiliating. I felt naked, shameful; similar to the way he expressed he did when members of my family kissed his face, laughed loudly in public, spoke openly of sex with their husbands, wives. It was only then that I realized it, the nakedness in Urdu, a surprising result of the formality of the tongue.
Birthed from conservative Muslim and South Asian culture the language is vulnerable, erotic, out of pure necessity. When physical touch or the assumption of familiarity between non-relatives is frowned upon it is formality that creates suppleness, an intimacy so soft it makes the sunlit sexuality of Italian appear brutish. The juxtaposition still jars me, challenges me by forcing my hand; in Urdu I must speak truly, honestly, from the guts of my being. It forces me to be kinder, more genuine, more fully the type of woman I aim to be.
I meet with a tutor twice a week for several hours. I take the subway to the other side of the city and we sit across from one another in a cold McDonald’s booth sipping Styrofoam cups of coffee.
I tell him that I am a writer, that I do not want to learn the words for apple, desk, sink. I tell him that my friend Khateeb told me reading Kishwar Naheed translated into English is a waste. “Learn the language or don’t bother,” Khateeb said flippantly. I tell him I need him to teach me how to speak in ghazals only. He gives me an exasperated laugh. “Is this why you want to learn Urdu? To write sad poetry?” It is not. But I cannot tell him the real reasons.
I cannot tell him that sometimes, most times, a seeking is really an abandoning. A leaving behind of all which we no longer wish to define us in an attempt to make space for what could. What should. If I am only ever become more fully myself than it is in this language that I find the truest parts. The fragrant and delicate ones. The ones with which I do not even trust myself. This language is a plot of land in a country I have loved but to which I have never belonged. To learn it is a home coming. To learn it is a home building. I want to grab my tutor’s hands and whisper, “Abbas, it is you alone that sees this part of me. That knows me in this way.” I do not, of course, as it would mortify us both. Instead I tell him I want to learn it for work, and this is not entirely untrue.
My day job is in sustainable manufacturing for a Canadian company with supply chains throughout South Asia. My projects aim to employ art to create a dialogue between product consumers and the artisans that craft them. Urdu proves indispensable in such a profession. In my personal business I am a writer currently preoccupied with translating Pakistani feminist writers into English, a massive undertaking. One might find several male Urdu poets such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Adil Mansuri, and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi translated, but it is the work of women like Kishwar Naheed which I seek, which speaks to my rebellious American heart. The lines of “Talking to Myself” shout:
Punish me for I have been the challenger of the crucifix of hatred
I'm the glow of torches which burn against the wind
Punish me for I have freed womanhood from the insanity of the deluded night
Punish me for if I live you might lose face
And the soft, internal revelations in Azra Abbas’ “Tum Vahin Ho” (You’re Where You’ve Always Been):
Cigarette
earlier touching my lips
now floats in the Thames
Does the river know
the feel of such a touch?
Touches are never forgotten.
In the midst of chilly, gusting winds
standing before a poster of Marilyn Monroe
Unbidden I salute her beauty.
Beauty mustn’t die.
Beauty must abide for all time.
But no-
I see the young man coming along
Eyes slip away from the poster
to behold beauty in motion.
If
Time hadn’t propelled me so far forward
I would have kissed you.
I light a cigarette
and drop it in the Thames
so the river might extinguish it.
The last of the cigarette-gone-dead bobs
as though smiling at me saying:
“You’re where you’ve always been.
Time-
Look! It stands behind you.”
They speak to me, whisper of a quieter, wholly female revolution I can join, if only I learn the words.
Abbas places his pen upon the table, sighs, rubs his temples. “I would rather teach you Punjabi,” he says. I laugh and remind him that Punjabi is less useful to me professionally. He insists it is more useful for my political and poetic endeavours. For this he teaches me words I will never use in casual conversation. .باز .ورثہ .پھل .آذادی .بھائی چارے .نوحہ .خون Falcon. “One’s own love.” Heritage. Fruit. Freedom. Brotherhood. Lamentation. Blood. It is the vocabulary of a man who worked for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran for more decades than I have been alive. It is the vocabulary of one who has seen much and knows more. And so, I resign myself to never being able to maneuver easily around Lahore, knowing the trade off is the ability to navigate a regional conflict between stanzas, to know and be known in a new and dangerous way. With only that same thin ribbon of curious hope that first bound Toronto to DC to guide us, I let him take me there.