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My Missing Tongue

Aamer Hussein

 

1986, I think. Qurratulain Hyder, Urdu’s leading novelist, was on a visit to London. I had known her since I was 13; I called her Annie Khala (Aunt Annie). She was sipping tea in my parent’s sitting room overlooking St John’s Wood Road (which she’d written about in one of her famous novels.) She knew that I’d studied Urdu and Persian at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which was an unusual choice for someone of my anglophone education. It was, I suppose, inevitable that she should ask: ‘So, do you write in Urdu?’

I didn’t; I don’t think I’d ever tried. I’d lived in Karachi until I was 13, but English was the language we siblings studied at school and spoke at home. As a child, I struggled with the Urdu script and could barely read it. 

Was Urdu my mother tongue? My paternal grandfather’s language was Sindhi, my mother’s father spoke a hybrid dialect from Kathiawar. Both grandmothers’ home language was Persian, but my father was most comfortable in English and my mother in Urdu. For two years at school in India I had to learn Hindi – which was an entirely different, phonetic script – to get through my exams. Five years after arriving in London, I studied Urdu privately for an A level, to study languages at SOAS. To my surprise, I gained top marks. 

At university, I attended seminars on our canonical Urdu poets, but my focus for two years was on Persian grammar. I’d also acquired an aural knowledge of contemporary as well as classical Urdu poetry, which helped my progress. We studied some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works of prose, but I wasn’t impressed by the selection of modern stories we were expected to read on our own. During and after my degree I’d read fiction in Italian (in which I’d acquired fluency almost by osmosis), and French (mostly self-taught, after attending classes at the French Institute). I explored Chinese, Japanese and Arabic fiction in translation. Not Urdu. The only stories by Aunt Annie I knew were those she’d written in English. 

Yet, just a few months after that encounter with Annie, I began to plough through modern Urdu fiction. I also taught Urdu as a foreign language to students at SOAS, where I suppose it was my proximity to the library that encouraged me to read anything in Urdu that seemed enticing or promising. I became aware that I’d never considered Pakistan’s Urdu literature as a separate category. But by 1992 I had discarded my ignorance to become aware of a thriving culture of contemporary writing in my homeland. Annie’s advice helped me. I embarked on editing an anthology of contemporary Pakistani fiction in translation.

The following year, in 1993, at the request of a publisher, I put together the stories I’d written in English over about seven years. I can detect the formal and thematic influence of Urdu writers – Hyder, of course, Ismat Chughtai and Intizar Hussain – on (perhaps) two or three of them; and because I heard the Urdu language in my ear as I wrote, those stories were, above all, an attempt to capture its nuances in English. Mirror to the Sun (1993), my first story collection, was published later that year. Interestingly, the Pakistani press picked it up and I, who considered myself a foreigner everywhere, and in every language, had a new identity: ‘Pakistani anglophone writer’ – occasionally hyphenated to British-Pakistani. In England, I wrote fiction only when commissioned, mostly concentrating on teaching English Literature, and reviewing British and international fiction for the TLS and the New Statesman.

In 1996, controversial and flamboyant Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz invited me to Pakistan to discuss my book and my growing interest in Urdu literature and language. I met at least three of the writers I most admired. While I could conduct a reasonable conversation in Urdu I couldn’t, to my consternation, speak it in public. The circles that invited me to address them in three major cities were of Urdu writers; at the time, there was no English language fiction to speak of on home ground in Pakistan. I remember engaging in a public conversation with one of my favourite writers, the late Khalida Hussain; I spoke in English, she in Urdu. At dinner later, we did speak in Urdu. She told me she was reading García Márquez and Milan Kundera in English translation.

I didn’t go back to Pakistan until 2010. There was now a growing international audience for what critic Muneeza Shamsie designated, in the anthologies she published in the 90s, as ‘Pakistani literature in English’. Pakistani writers such as her daughter Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and others were now known to foreign audiences. The Karachi Literature Festival – I attended the 2010 inaugural event – was to start a trend for similar festivals in Lahore and Islamabad. By then, I was overseeing translations of my stories into Italian. Speaking my third language (Italian) in public helped me to gain some confidence in addressing audiences in Urdu. In 2011, on a panel with the late and wonderful Pakistan-born, US-based memoirist Sara Suleri Goodyear, we were asked about our relationship with Urdu. Sara, whose ambition (later fulfilled) was to translate the great nineteenth-century poet Mirza Ghalib from the Urdu, said that though she only wrote in English, she couldn’t do without Urdu. I commented that writing in Urdu – though I longed to – was a dream that would not come true.

But it did. On a summer’s day in 2012, I found myself writing in Urdu: one story followed another until there were six. I was encouraged by the poet Fatema Hassan to ‘write the way I spoke’. I couldn’t. The first two pieces were cloaked in metaphor, often inspired by modern Persian poetry. I realised, though, that I thought in images. I reached out into the air to pluck the words that would fit those images. (English flows from my fingers; Urdu doesn’t.) The stories weren’t set in Pakistan. They were about expats and economic migrants. Urdu was my language of displacement, but also of an intimacy not available to me in English.

The late Asif Farrukhi, himself a bilingual writer and critic, was a formidable presence in the growing culture of literary festivals in Pakistan. He published my stories in Dunyazad, the Urdu literary journal he edited. They were received with no less acclaim than my growing body of English work. By 2015, when I published yet another story in Urdu, I’d acquired enough confidence in what I considered the missing tongue that I’d regained – no, not regained but reclaimed, from an aching void – to lecture in public with ease. Yet I continue to feel that Urdu, snatched from me by my primary education, often slips away from beneath my feet. English is always here.

I published two collections of English fiction in Pakistan, where I felt my real audience was. These were linguistic hybrids as they included fiction I’d written in Urdu, translated by others or co-translated with me. One of these, Hermitage (2018), was commissioned by an innovative Karachi-based publisher, Shahbano Alvi, who was also a visual artist and beginning to write her own stories in English. I attended the launch of my collection in three cities in the autumn of 2018.   

The following spring, when I was bedbound with a broken leg, Shahbano suggested I write some fables in Urdu for a series she was editing for children. But, I said, I don’t write for children. Then write about children, she said. In my half-world of codeine-induced reverie, I moved away from private matters to write about youngsters, and swans and pigeons, too. You have an Urdu collection nearly done, Shahbano said. 

That autumn, still hobbling, I made three trips to Pakistan, one with a crutch. On my return from one of these, I wrote a story in Urdu about ageing and death and visual art which became the title story of the book. The title translates as Before Life. The missing, or unspoken, word is death.

For the first time ever, I also wrote an English version of this story. Before the year’s end, I had a manuscript of the mere 60 pages I’d written in Urdu together with translations of stories into Urdu by other hands, including Asif and Fahmida. Fahmida died when I was completing work on the book. I returned to Pakistan for her memorials. In February 2020, Asif launched Zindagi Se Pehle… in Karachi. The title story was prophetic. My sister was dead, my mother ailing. I had been diagnosed with cancer. But presenting a book in the city of my birth, in my own language, seemed reason enough to go home, as I had now begun to think of Karachi.

A few months later, Asif too was dead. I wrote a story from the cavern of my grief – for sister, mother, friend, the world in flux. Writing fiction in English after a long gap loosened my mourning tongue. I was relinquishing hope of ever returning to Karachi. (I had been visiting regularly, sometimes five times a year, for a decade.) But I did go back, as soon as I could travel, to launch the book of memoirs and autofictions I’d completed in English (including some of my own self-translations) during the pandemic.

I’ve been to Pakistan four times since the pandemic, but by 2023 I’d spent a year and a half away from Karachi and homesickness, perhaps, compelled me to write in Urdu again. I set the story in the Karachi of my past, reliving a childhood romance, conducted on the phone, in the language I have learnt to love best.               

 

Aamer Hussein

Born in Karachi in 1955, Aamer Hussein moved to London in 1970 and has divided the last decade between London life and working in Pakistan. He is the author of several collections of short fiction, including Insomnia, 37 Bridges, Love and its Seasons, and Zindagi se Pehle; two novels including Another Gulmohar Tree, Restless, a sequence of autobiographical pieces, and most recently What is Saved, a volume of new and selected stories. His work is published in Great Britain and all the countries of the subcontinent. Also an essayist and columnist, Aamer writes in both English and Urdu.  

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