I’m still trying to learn Urdu. I like writing about it here because it feels like a way to hold myself accountable, and also because I keep reading poems too beautiful not to share. But learning Urdu feels like navigating a mine field, where I constantly get turned down tangents. The origin of the language is war. Urdu literally means army; it came together as a camp speak so that soldiers in the Mughal empire could understand each other whether they spoke Persian, Hindustani, or Arabic. The East India Trading Company and the subsequent British raj took away Persian’s status as lingua franca on the Indian subcontinent and it was replaced by Urdu. Some of the most legendary Urdu poets, like Mirza Ghalib, wrote poetry during the fall of the Mughal empire and the rise of British colonial rule, during a time when the language was changing so dramatically. This changeling language, slowly dropping Persian, taking on Arabic, taking on Hindustani, still uncertain of its written script, which eventually became Nastaliq, though these days even the script or Urdu is uncertain.

What does this mean for me, as a learner? Do I even learn how to read Nastaliq, which looks like Arabic if it was written in chaotic spirals and had a few extra letters? When I learned how to read Arabic as a child, I learned first on a Nastaliq script Qur’an designed to be read easily by Urdu speakers, but my Arabic teachers preferred Naskh, so that is what we used. No one writes in Nastaliq anymore online. They either use English letters or use Naskh, which is the script used more commonly for Arabic, because it’s more compatible with typing on a computer – the letters don’t look like they’re crawling on top of each other. Instead of grappling with Nastaliq, do I just focus on reading romanized Urdu? Oh, that hurts. It feels like watching a language die, to read and write it only in English letters.

There are poems in Urdu that test my understanding of the spirit. There are phrases in Urdu that have been erased by dictators. There is the grief of distance I feel when I realize how little of it I know, how all the words disappear on my tongue when I try to speak to my grandmother. Before I began grad school, all four of my grandparents still lived. Now she is the last one left, and she speaks English and Spanish and Gujarati better than I speak Urdu, even though she never finished high school. Learning a language again, when you said your first words in it, is such a unique fucking heartbreak. But the rewards…! The poems! The songs! It will take the rest of my life, and perhaps I can live with that.

I still haven’t gotten over that very important hurdle of the embarrassment of speaking it aloud. Hearing my American accent soften the consonants, hearing myself fumble with the grammar. I took a conversational learning class but stopped after a few sessions because my tutor assumed the throne of Auntie (derogatory) and began to ask me probing questions about my marriage (nonexistent) and whether my parents even spoke good Urdu (that was the last straw). She scolded me on my usage of the informal first person pronoun. Use mujhe instead of mereko. I was baffled. I knew of informal/formal second person pronouns in Urdu, very similar to the Spanish usage of tú and usted, but this was the first time I’d heard of it for first person.

When I was home for the holidays, I listened to my parents speak Urdu with each other at home, and I realized that the reason I only know how to speak informally was because this was how they spoke to each other. When we visited my aunt, my father’s older sister, someone with whom they speak formally with, they switched to the formal first person pronoun. They did this without knowing. Baffling! I asked them how they knew how to switch, and they had no idea they were even switching. Frustrating for me, since I would like to speak Urdu without offending, or giving away my lack of knowledge simply by referring to myself. My parents, perhaps trying to comfort me, told me that no one expects anyone of my generation to speak perfectly proper Urdu. They will not take offense.

My dad, thinking about it more, remarked how in all the poems, God is always referred to with the most informal second person pronoun (tu). It is the language reserved for lovers, the highest intimacy Urdu can convey.

Learning this language is infuriating, maddening! Is it worth it if it’s changing all the time? If it only lives unabridged in poems? During my parents’ lifetimes, even the way one says good-bye in Urdu has changed. When they were born, they would say Khuda hafiz in farewell. May God protect you. But “khuda”, the word for God, was Persian. And when Zia-Ul-Haq began his regime in Pakistan and his campaign of oppressive Islamization, it suddenly became common to say Allah hafiz instead, because this was more “Islamic”.

I asked my parents whether they agreed with this change. They were very young when it happened, after all. Perhaps their opinions on it had shifted. Oh, this started an argument! My mom was on the side of Khuda. I think she finds the Persian roots of Urdu romantic. My dad, whose changing relationship with conservative propaganda is an endless ordeal, basically agreed with the Zia-Ul-Haq reasoning. It’s more Islamic to say Allah. “Khuda” is a word that has been used for other gods, he argued.

So was “Allah”, I reminded him. That word has meant God in Arabic far, far, far longer than Islam has existed. Just because it’s in Arabic doesn’t make it more Muslim.

That ended the argument.

I probably won’t start using Khuda hafiz to say goodbye any time soon. By now, Allah hafiz is too deeply ingrained; this remnant of a fallen dictator from the 70s has forever changed the language my family speaks to each other. The Hyderabadi side of my family still says Khuda hafiz when they say goodbye. It’s something I’ve always wondered about. Is it an act of defiance, or of nostalgia?

This newsletter entry is already far too long, and I haven’t even gotten to the poem that began this spiral. It is a qawwali, Sufi devotional music, which is such a fascinating genre of music to me that it really deserves its own newsletter. I’m always in search of new doorways into the soul, and I’m finding it in these songs. They make my heart burst out of all its coverings and swoop. Maybe it’s too early to write about. After all, I still only understand a tenth of the words.