When my uncle passed away during COVID, we weren’t able to cross the border for the funeral. In Pakistani culture, we gather immediately when someone dies. There is a tradition of visiting grievers, bringing food, and sitting with them in afsos, or sorrow. Even acquaintances will make the trek to pay their respects. It felt so unnatural not to be able to drive down, as we had done almost every other weekend for years, to see family and friends.
I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table, watching a Zoom call on my dad’s laptop as someone filmed our relatives digging and preparing my uncle’s grave. I stood over my dad’s shoulder, watching the moving pixels forming images of brown dirt, shovels, the shoulders of familiar men.
Around that time, my mom was on the phone with my aunt when she said something I have thought about since: “Agar hum saath hote, toh kamazkam hum dukh baant lete.” If we were together, we could at least share/distribute the grief. I imagined us sitting in someone’s house, passing around the platter of grief and taking our share.
That phrase in Urdu and that image of distributing grief have stayed with me, especially since my dad’s passing. Grief could be portioned out, passed around, taken home by the people who came to sit with you. The person who had lost someone would still be grieving, but everyone else had a piece to take with them, or at least hold for a moment. In that sentence, I heard a way of understanding grief that was unfamiliar to me in English, but embodied in the customs I had grown up around. In English, we say “I’m so sorry for your loss”. In Urdu, we distribute the grief.
For me, Urdu phrases, South Asian music, and the mannerisms of Pakistani and South Asian people can be so deeply comforting and familiar. Hearing a sorrowful Urdu verse often sets off a deep reverb in me and allows me to feel emotions that I cannot describe in English. It’s incredibly satisfying to understand some of the poetry my dad used to read and actually get the meaning. I get excited when I pass by someone on the street speaking Urdu or Hindi to a loved one on the phone. For a brief moment, I am not in Toronto but sitting in my uncle’s living room in Washington, looking out the window and studying the swaying green trees against the grey skies to the rhythmic lull of my family’s chitter chatter in Urdu. My aunt screeches something absurd from the kitchen as she warms up food, but is still totally loveable. My uncle responds back. I can literally hear their voices ring in my ear now—and I wish I could crawl back to that time for one more moment.
Sometimes, we can feel deeply in our mother tongue, but not use it to talk about our personal experiences. I think about this particularly with things that might feel taboo in the culture of origin, like sexuality, shame, and perhaps even mental health. A person might know the words in their family’s language but prefer to explore those experiences in English. I find that tension interesting: wanting the familiarity of a language, while also needing some distance from what it carries.
Today, I was scrolling Instagram and came across an Urdu poet reciting shayari. The cadence of his voice, the flow of his speech, and the familiar repetition of lines struck me. He sounded so much like my dad. I was taken back to sitting in my parents’ living room, my dad on the sofa across from me, asking “mein aik shayari sunao?” and the internal groan but feeling obliged to say yes. His big smile, and the nostril flare he always did when he was about to sing or share poetry. I realized in that moment that I would never hear him recite again. At least not in this lifetime.
I am losing my mother tongue. I have been losing it since I was a child. I can no longer speak it fluently, and my words don’t flow beautifully or naturally. It is as though the tension between English and Urdu, and between the Western and Eastern roots in me, is audible in the cacophony of my tongue. But alas, it is a cacophony my dad was fond of. He found joy in seeing us succeed in this land.
If I close my eyes right now, I can imagine the words he might say to me after reading this blog post. His subtle accent is like a thick blanket wrapping around each word, and also reaching out to me. “Muniya, I read your blog post, and I have a few thoughts...”