Mama:
I am afraid of reading the world without my mother. She is my portal of entry into a realm in which Urdu and Punjabi dance without missing a single step. There has been no word too hard, no sentence too dense, no book, play, movie, or show that mama has not been able pull down from its perch and sing back to me in a tune my ears can make music of. The Urdu I speak carries me across conversations, but its deeper waters — its dense foliage and complex chemistry — I cannot tread without oar, without my amma’s wooden frame hauling us through and beyond its depth.
Our closeness, the intimacy of our mothering and daughtering, perhaps lives most simply in the breadth of this thought: I’d argue that my mother can even translate my silences. She taunts me for my misspellings and my inability to count higher than 30 in a language she has aged in, my inability to name her age in a language she named me in. My mother is an Urdu teacher, and she teaches me sentence after sentence, a geography of words that slowly come together to form the land upon which I stand. The subjects of her sentences are my siblings, the verbs are all iterations of love, the tight connections she draws populate my understanding of Urdu through my understanding of us.
Punjabi is what my mother speaks to her mother in. It is the language that threads them together and the language I cannot drape myself a home in. Mama jokes in Punjabi, fides and scolds in Punjabi. All her quips are in Punjabi. Her reactions, her surprises, her wit is in Punjabi. I can take its name. I can understand what she is saying, feel the sting of the scold or the poke of the joke and wince or laugh. But my responses back to her in the language hold no heart, no weight, no density, because my grasp of Punjabi slips when I try to clasp more than a line or two, is even weaker than my Urdu, is the beginning of a barrier across which I cannot see all of my mother; I cannot make her feel fully seen. It is the distance between admiration and participation — I can hoist myself up and peak over the wall, but I cannot climb across it.
That distance — that wilderness of words between us — scrapes and slashes and draws blood; it hurts to not be able to give back to her the world in three languages that she has given me. But there is a fear that cuts deeper. To lose her, to be far from her, is to be left with only my tongue.
Baba:
On this road that stretches through main sea view boulevard in Karachi, the radio is on. Baba is driving, mama next to him is focused on the road, my youngest siblings, Haniya and Ismail, fighting over something they’ll forget about by the end of the drive.
اے ابرِ کرم، آج اِتنا برس
اِتنا برس کہ وہ جا نہ سکیں
Aye abre karam aaj itna baras
Itna baras ke wo ja na sake
“Hani, what do you think this lyric means?” Baba says, trying to distract them before this fight ends in hot tears. She tries and misses, we all try, and we all miss. Baba is kind and patient with us. He sings it back and in a valiant effort to stitch the poetic meaning into lyrics. Masking it with the simplicity it needs for our virgin ears, he translates:
Oh clouds please rain
Rain so hard that they cannot go.
I’m not sure who he sings this to. I like to fantacize that I am the subject here, and discreetly he is asking me to stay in the home he built me in. My baba appreciates poetry and song. He listens to songs that are soft, and slow. The wording and rhyme of which he can physically feel and step with. He tells us about poems, qawalis, stories of hope, liberation and faith that are sung to this day in South Asia. They’re the best kept method of preservation. Love stories, tunes against the forces of oppression, calls for equality and chords of freedom are kept shut tight in these stanzas. The seals have worked so perfectly that messaging and intensity have been safeguarded for years.
لے آئی پھر کہاں پر قسمت ہمیں کہاں سے
یہ تو وہی جگہ ہے گزرے تھے ہم جہاں سے
Ley aai phir kahan par qismat hamein kahan se
Ye to wohi jagha hai guzre they hum jahan se
From where has destiny brought us again to this place?
This is the same place where we had passed through before.
The first time baba heard me listening to this song, he assumed I had my heart broken. He joked at the intensity of the pain that allowed me to understand the feeling behind the song that soundtracks the lives of so many heart broken lovers, a song that might have furnished the air the first time my Baba felt his own heart break. He tells me about that feeling in the only language I know that can capture it. And somehow, inside that lilt of Urdu, I come to understand that what he feels I felt before I even existed, and how he will feel a nostalgia about this pain in the future as my future will too.
Hello, is it me you're looking for?
I can see it in your eyes
I can see it in your smile
Baba listens to Hello by Lionel Richie, and tells me about his boyhood. The hearts he would apologise to if he could, decisions he would make differently. He is cheery when he sings, but follows up with remarks on how he wishes his English was better. Wishes he was quicker in it. My father is an eloquent man, smooth with his compliments, interesting with his questions and simple with his needs. His charishma translates in Urdu, Punjabi and English. He is inquisitive, kind, intelligent and loving in all those tongues, yet he weighs his brilliance in proportion to his English vocabulary. Commenting on how he needs subtitles when we watch some movies as if it’s something to be ashamed of. Reflecting directly on my own shame when I am unable to respond in Pujabi or the transliteration I need when reading Urdu literature. A shame stemming from the opposite ends of a colonial hangover, split on the lines of nations and colonies.
رنجش ہی سہی دل ہی دکھانے کے لئے آ
آ پھر سے مجھے چھوڑ کے جانے کے لئے آ
Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhane ke liye aa
Aa phir se mujhe chhod ke jaane ke liye aa.
Let it be anguish, even to torture my heart, come
Come even if only to abandon me to torment again.
Everything I know about kindness I have learned from my baba. When I miss him I listen to Ranjish Hi Sahi by Mehdi Hasan, which is a lot. He told me once it was his favourite song, and I want it to be my favourite song too. The influences that made him who he is, I want them to be mine. The sweetest things he says to me, those I can only think of in Urdu, I want them to be mine too.
Nano:
My summers were spent in my Nano’s home. She is not just my grandmother. She is my mother’s mother. My aunts’ and uncles’ mother. And the hearth around which everyone would sit together to eat a palau only she can make and vegetables only she can make taste good. Wit and playful mocking whizzing around the room too quick for me and my cousins to grasp. Inside these summers, Nano is my translator. I tug her when everyone bursts into laughter after a tough battle of banter between siblings, she bends down to my height and lets me in on the secret.
Mama says that things feel incomplete unless she shares them with Nano. When something noteworthy happens, or when they are together after months, they talk for hours. Mama taking her advice, nano listening and giving her notes. As much as I’d like to delay it, there will be a day when Nano won’t be here and with her gone and my horrible Punjabi I wonder who mama will share with. Will her stories, thoughts, ideas lose their wings? Will they fall to the floor of Urdu and flatten to its dimension, losing charm, meaning and weight? Will I ever be able to pick them up? What will be lost in translation?
Mama translates the world for me, but nano translated the stories, the jokes, and the anecdotes when my mother was too busy being someone’s sister, daughter and cousin. She read the world for me when my mother goes back to being who she was, before I was. When she’s on break. When she can go back to a home where she is a sister, daughter, cousin, neice and more than just my mama. I’m not sure who learned from who to fill this role in my life, but I love that they can tag team it. Mama for the fall, winter , spring and nano for the summers I get to be with her.
Chachu:
Baba’s youngest brother Sajid Chachu also loved to sing. He too, just like baba, wasn’t any good but thought he was great. Often, he would ask me to send him a voice note of me singing Bachana, sometimes I’d forget and sometimes I’d remember. He was also the funniest man. His nickname was boota, which means plant and I don’t understand why everyone called him that but it seemed fitting in a way I cannot explain in English. There is a form of lame humor I subscribe to called Bongis, the closest translation I can offer is, unusual, silly and affectionate. If someone could be crowned as the inventor of this sect of humour it would be my Sajid Chachu. He made us all laugh by saying the strangest and most lighthearted things. Playing on language, distorting the names of my celebrity crushes just to irk me, inserting the most final and dramatic quotes by my cousins or me when we were in the crux of our teenage angst. The best bongis were in Punjabi, medium ones in Urdu, and the lamest yet silliest ones in English, but only because they made the least sense. His humour echoed the hierarchy of language that exists in me, repeating itself outside.
Two years ago Chachu got blood cancer. I don’t know the Urdu word for cancer, no one I know has ever used it. Maybe its foreignness would sting more, or take him away sooner. In all his pain his bongis never stopped. In moments where we should have been making him laugh he was making us laugh. A few weeks ago I lay next to him, surrounded by all the medicines we administered minute by minute, transfusion equipment and pillows on pillows to keep him comfortable. Convincing him to fight his cancer, as if convincing him would be enough, I told him to hang around the world a little longer, spill out the bongies a bit more, long enough for me to get married, because I could only ever see him officiating my wedding. He sang me a song and read me a poem on the nikkah in Punjabi. Three days later he passed away as all of his nieces, nephews and children surrounded him, holding onto his life here and now. Since then, I have been combing my brain to remember the stanzas he spoke, and so far I have not been able to recall more than one sentence.
In my grief, I have dishonored his memory with my faulty Punjabi. My inability to recall bits of our final conversation stands symbolic of the confusion I feel when I try to picture the world without him. I wonder, if he had spoken them in English would I have them ingrained in my memory? If I don’t remember, and write them down somewhere this feeling will haunt me for as long as I remember him, which will be till I see him again in the hereafter. When I speak about him, or speak about his absence now, English fails me. How do I tell stories about him, or quote him in any language other than the one he was funniest in?
Zainab:
The irony is, when I grieve, I can explain my feelings best in Urdu. It’s fair to say that I argue the best in English, and the worst in Urdu. English, however, fails me when I try to argue for the presence and process of grief. English has been a language I dialogue in, drive points in, but it’s not the tongue that has allowed me to spell out the leftover love I have for those I am physically far from, those who still walk this earth and those who don’t. It holds me back from describing the guilt of enjoying something I can’t share with my sisters, small ant-bite-like stings of longing in my chest when I remember the smell of my mother’s cabinet of dupattas, the pauses in my speech when I can’t grapple with the helplessness of watching my father lose his brother.
I feel constricted, tongue and chest.
If grief is proportional to unconsumed and unexpressed love then this dilemma makes sense. I was raised in the tenderness of Urdu. Even swear words, like uloo ki pathi , were said with a fondness I cannot translate. Now, my self-made terms of endearment stem from Urdu words. Paru from the word pyar meaning love, Mithu from the word meetha meaning sweet. My family is my ground, I have learned patience and kindness through their words. Love and affection when they have watered me, adorned me, and cherished me. Adjectives in English seem too narrow for the copious and spilling feelings of leftover love I have. In this chapter of my life it seems that only my mother can translate what I truly feel, a tool given to her by Nano, enforced by Baba and implemented by Chachu’s early departure.