‘How much Urdu do you know?’
‘Very little.’
‘Then why learn now?’
I did not answer the question of my prospective Urdu tutor, a junior in college. My mind was already elsewhere, looking back to the day’s morning— an affair of chai, chaat, and Coke Studio’s Mujhe Pehli Si Mohabbat, the voices and the verses taking me further back to my mother’s dusty and drifting recollections of Faiz.
‘You must know Urdu then, as a Muslim?’
‘No, I am Muslim but also an Indian. I only know Hindi!’ I lied, too young and naive to comprehend the falsehood of my affirmation. I was afraid. There were so many things people at school did not understand. There were so many things I did not know enough to explain to them. The Kaaba, the Quran, the kalma. They once called my God, Allah Tallah, a door lock. They once asked me to recite Surah Fatiha and laughed at the strange, foreign Arabic words. If they come to know I know Urdu, they will think I am a Pakistani. But I was not a Pakistani. I was an Indian! I loved India and I wanted to prove it.
Forgetting your mother tongue is a strange process, less like erasing a language from your memory, more like the insides of your intestines being slowly corroded by the acid it produces. You hear a word like tea leaves kept on a high kitchen shelf, out of reach, reminding you that it will soon be too late to brew them. Relearning your mother tongue is an even stranger process, like climbing the hard, cold slab of the kitchen and falling back hurtfully, but with the tea leaves clasped in your hands that you can now bring to a boil.
I remained Indian, much to my childhood fears and thanks to my coursework on identity and politics, as I progressed from aleph and bay to writing down the lyrics of the song Bewajah, from reading an Introduction to Urdu Grammar Volume One to reading Faiz. I wrote in ink the words of my mother that I had grown up with, the lessons of sabr and maqtoob, the stains of violence and abuse. And then I discovered Hum Dekhenge.
For the world the nazm is a hundred different things, for me it was the song of my childhood. I first sung it on a chilly night in October beside a fire, protesting against a tyrannical hostel Provost on the outside and the tanashahi of my father in my heart that was pulsating after all his efforts to choke it. I sang of his zulm turning into wisps of cotton, I sang of the earth shattering beneath his feet and the thunder bringing the wrath of God upon him. I waited for the day of his dethronement— sab taaj uchale jaenge, sab takht girae jaenge…
I waited. A fascist government took the crown and the throne twice. Coke Studio avoided the verses from their rendition of the nazm. Fascism’s claws became sharper, penetrated deeper— lynching and lying, killing and occupying. The taaj and takht continue to be occupied by the tyrants, the Shahs and the Modis. But they will be thrown up in the air, they will fall. And hum dekhenge…
Glossary:
Chaat: roof
Sabr: patience
Maqtoob: what will be will be (literally); destiny
Tanashahi: tyranny
Zulm: torture
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