The Unforgotten Tongue: How Urdu Resurfaced in My Sleep
As someone who speaks, thinks, and writes novels in English, it feels strange to recall a version of myself who could not utter a single word of it. Until the age of five, my world was entirely in Urdu—the language of family, home, childhood, and comfort. Then, just before starting primary school, we left Pakistan. One of my clearest memories is the panic upon learning I would attend a British school. How would I communicate, learn, or survive without the words to express myself? In her no-nonsense way, my mother assured me I would figure it out.
And I did, perhaps a little too well. English quickly became omnipresent, then internalised. By the time we moved to Australia, it had embedded itself so deeply that it no longer felt borrowed; it felt like my own. It became the language of school, friends, university, work, and, most importantly, my imagination and writing. English ceased to be foreign and became the language I instinctively reached for.
The Slow Fade of Urdu
Meanwhile, Urdu began to slip out of easy reach. We still spoke it at home, so I never lost it completely, but the language of my earliest years grew less certain on my tongue. I often paused mid-sentence, searching for the right Urdu word, translating frantically in my head before surrendering to English. This created a familiar migrant dialect—a hodgepodge of mother tongue and adopted tongue, stitched together from memory and convenience.
It was not until a recent visit to Pakistan that I realised how much Urdu had remained intact, lying dormant beneath layers of English. What startled me was not just its return, but the speed. From the moment I landed in Karachi, Urdu rushed in from all sides—airport officials, family, drivers, shopkeepers, and neighbours. My brain did not ease into it; it simply switched. I fell into the rhythm of conversation almost immediately, though my family delighted in accusing me of losing my Urdu-speaking ability at the slightest hesitation.
A Surprising Reversal
Soon, the opposite occurred. Urdu embedded itself so fully back into my mind that I began to struggle for English words. Speaking to my children, who only know English, I would get stuck mid-sentence, trying to translate Urdu thoughts already forming in my head. One night in Islamabad, during winter, I woke up and asked for the heater to be turned on. The next morning, my Scottish husband informed me I had said this in Urdu. Half-asleep, my brain had apparently decided his monolingualism was irrelevant.
This episode revealed that despite leaving Pakistan so young, my mother tongue had never truly left me. It had been buried, muffled by years of distance, but remained alive and waiting. There was something instinctive about it, like a current pulling me back towards the language of my parents and grandparents, and towards my earliest self.
Language as Belonging
My relationship with the idea of home has always been complicated, but language offered a belonging that geography alone could not. It reminded me that home is not always a place on a map; sometimes, it is a sound or a way of being understood before finishing a sentence. Research shows bilingualism may benefit the brain, linking it to improved decision-making and reduced brain ageing. However, in ordinary life, its gifts feel less clinical and far more intimate.
Speaking Urdu as I travelled through Pakistan enriched every interaction. It allowed me to converse with people I might otherwise have smiled at politely and passed by. It granted access not just to conversation, but to texture, humour, intimacy, and nuance. It made the country feel less like a place I was visiting and more like somewhere that still knew me.
Most of all, it provided connection. It helped bridge years with long-unseen family and made me feel tethered to a country I left at five, but which had never fully left me. Language is not only about communication; it can also be about inheritance, a legacy that endures beyond borders and time.
