Languages: A Vehicle For Lost Bodies

Artwork by Nina Gruteser

In my mouth, there’s an apology where my tongue should be, or so I learn, as I’m sitting in on my first Urdu lesson, too afraid to make a sound. 

Meera nam Abrar hai. Aap se milkar khushi hui. 

My name is Abrar. Nice to meet you. 

The greeting is simple, but I still can’t bring myself to say it out loud. Even in my room, with nothing but sheets and floorboards to take in my voice, the words still stare back at me from my laptop, teeth bared and asking the question, “Are you not ashamed?” Ashamed of how my name has never felt so lost gliding between my own teeth, or maybe just the look on my father the day after I asked him to buy this Urdu class for me. We had decided to go to Costco after praying Jumaa, and I couldn’t help but catch his eyes in the rear view mirror, darting between the road and my face, his back ever so slightly curved upfront in concentration and his fingers tapping at the wheel. We meandered aimlessly through the aisles as we always did, undoubtedly picking up countless items my mother would scold us for buying once we returned home in a thick and unbecoming silence. Only after he put a smoothie in my hand and a churro in my mouth had he mustered up the courage to say what was on his mind. What I would soon learn had been on both of our minds. “I’m sorry,” he said so quickly it had hardly taken him a breath to let it out. “I’m sorry,” he repeated as if that were his explanation. As if an explanation were necessary at all. 

It was the uselessness of this apology that had made it so magical, or rather, how in that brief gaping moment, it had found a way to escape its own language. Being understood before being uttered, it wasn’t that my father had somehow broken from the human need to verbalize emotion, but more so that this guilt was not just his, it was ours. These emotions are an inherited technology that both my father and I have taken from our parents and nurtured moving from one foreign land to another: becoming vessels for a trauma that had long predated us both. 

The first time my family had to settle into foreignness was after the Colonial Era in 1947. After almost a hundred years of British occupation in India, our people were finally free. But even with this victory, violence still loomed over the subcontinent, stealing away a celebration and peace that had been long overdue. The British might have been gone, but the tensions they sowed between Hindus and Muslims in order to divide us certainly did not, and this forced my grandparents to make the decision between staying in Hindu-majority Agra where our family had resided for generations, or moving to the newly formed Pakistan where they were guaranteed safety and their lives. So they moved, knowing all the relatives they would never feel the company of again and the land they would no longer call their own. But in truth, keeping any of these was never an option. There is no choice in survival, only the cruel timeless need for more, leading one to whatever destination necessary. And perhaps survival is a force that strives for its own absence. That in moving from India, my Dada and Dadi were bargaining for the assurance that their own children would never have to feel the weight of their own livelihood, to know of nothing but the warmth of static protecting them from movement and “new beginnings.” In the end however, whatever it was that they wanted didn’t matter, because even the greatness of what they sacrificed was not enough for migration to begin and end with them. My father would also forgo the city that had birthed him and would go from London to eventually America, where with time, his 6 other siblings would also search for home. “For you to live the life you get to have right now,” I’m sure he’d tell me if I asked him why he left, which I can only understand as being the relief of knowing that whatever is left in your leaving is left untouched. A superior remnant of yourself, maybe even a little more joyous.

So by choosing to learn the language, not of what we have but what we’ve lost, I fall back into a fluidity it is in my ancestry to fight against. If adaptation is the art of hardening then to be liquid is forgetting how to let go. Not to be ignorant, but to turn towards what you know you cannot keep and remain there for as long as you can, pushing against the flow. With every word I can’t pronounce and every conversation I don’t understand, I’m reminded of how far away India is from my family. Every reminder is a testament to how memory has always been our greatest enemy. It’s only memories that have kept Karachi and Agra alive with us, and alongside them, all of the pain my family has endured for so long. But for me it is not pain that I feel, at least not the same pain I see in my father, my aunts, and my uncles. The kind of pain that will drown a person in quiet and hold their eyes gazing at anything other than your face. The kind that could even make a father regretful before his own child, barely able to say I’m sorry. It’s not that, but for me, it’s a wave that comes and leaves behind nothing but a desire to return home. Whether that be physically or in spirit, I’m ready to reclaim what has always been a part of us. For now, that means taking things one Urdu lesson at a time.