Bonding beyond words over Urdu

Charanjeet Singh Minhas

What are millions of people sitting at home doing with each day that brings the news of lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, and deaths around the world from the coronavirus? In the pre-virus days, individuals and families planned their weekends, especially holidays, and how to maximise their days off and coordinate children’s school schedules. The coronavirus has put an end to such concerns for most Americans. The first few days at home for many may not have been a challenge, but what effect will confinement, without an end in sight, have on the homebound? What will they do?

I, for one, will tell you what I am doing. I am ‘Urduising’ this furlough. Separated by centuries, the Urdu language and I were both born in India. But that isn’t the reason why I love it. It may seem strange, but I never learned to read, write or speak the language, although I can understand it somewhat. Why love it then?

Gulzar saheb, whose Jai Ho song won an Oscar, in an Urdu poem about the language a few years ago, said, ‘You get a high speaking Urdu,’ and ‘you taste a delectable pleasure when Urdu touches the throat, as if a sip of a fine drink seeped past it.’

My daughter is an undergraduate student at a university in Pennsylvania. Like schools across the US, all students were asked to vacate the campus and were informed that the remaining classes would be held online.

So, when we went to bring our daughter home, we took on an extra passenger. My daughter’s Pakistani friend had stayed with us during last year’s spring break. Given the global reach of the coronavirus, we were able to convince her parents in Islamabad that for reasons of safety, and to preempt the academic disruptions that international travel may bring, it would be better for her to stay with us.

Now, for the past few weeks, I have been her student. And she is a great teacher. She has set up an easy, but methodical approach to introduce me to the alphabet.

Our circumstances take me back to Gulzar’s poem, in which he invokes Mirza Ghalib and Meer Taqi Meer — the Urdu parallels of William Shakespeare and John Milton: ‘If travelling somewhere, sometime, someone recites a couplet from Ghalib or Meer’s poetry, even though he may be a total stranger, it feels like the person is my countryman.’

I marvel at the irony it entails. My father knew Urdu well and often used it. It never struck me at that time to learn it from him. My affinity to it has grown since his death in 2008. Maybe, Gulzar has a line about second chances in one of his poems.

So, as challenging as living in an unfamiliar, cloistered environment may be for most of us, it affords an enriching opportunity to pursue something new, or something old we thought we had lost. And that just might be worth staying inside for.