Diaspora's Urdu dilemma

Can expat Pakistani parents keep their mother tongue alive abroad?

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

Are you of the Pakistani persuasion and live in a land called 'abroad'? And in this great wide land of beyond, do you also crave being crowned mother of the year? Then I have bad news for you, because it is a bit like pushing water uphill. With a fork.

Lest we are accused of discrimination, we must point out that, as ever, we are not including fathers in this hypothetical construct because winning father of the year is slightly easier than winning mother of the year. As long as the Pakistani father consents to minding his own children solo for 15 minutes as the mother escapes to buy milk, he can be assured of securing his gold medal in the parenting Olympics. If he also, in this moment of selflessness, also transports a plate from table to kitchen counter, nothing can ever diminish his honour. Fathers, you are already smashing it.

But let us return to mothers. The Pakistani mother whose circumstances have dictated she raise her children abroad has to, unfortunately, put in a bit more effort if she wants her children to retain some semblance of their heritage. That heritage, as you will have doubtless deduced, is in danger of leaking out of their heads the moment they leave the house and spend all day at school with their non-Pakistani peers and teachers. And the first thing that absconds, of course, is their command of the Urdu language.

A mission to protect Urdu

In this, husband-and-wife actors Yasir Hussain and Iqra Aziz have powered themselves to parents-of-the-year status by letting us all know during a recent television appearance that they communicate with their young son, Kabir, only in Urdu.

"Our schools are English-medium, which means that children learn from school and other children," explained Iqra. "In fact, sometimes Kabir comes home from school and uses English words that we haven't even used or taught him."

On paper, Iqra and Yasir's Urdu stance is practically pulsating with common sense. And the mother abroad, bless her heart, tries to enforce this very rule with a burning passion. Fatima, for example, a fellow Karachiite who lives in Ascot in the UK, takes Urdu so seriously that she teaches the language at an American international school an hour away from her house. She does this twice a week, doing her bit to rescue Urdu from the clutches of English for every Pakistani child within her reach.

At home, meanwhile, she and her husband – like Iqra and Yasir – are determined to never let a word of English escape their lips. Every year during trips back home to Karachi, Fatima sources Urdu workbooks for her two teenage daughters, and insists on seeing written proof of their Urdu efforts on a weekly basis.

"They hate it," remarks Fatima. "But you have to do what you have to do."

In her quest to drum the language into her daughters' heads, she also schedules regular Urdu TV. As a result, not only are their children able to speak rapidfire Urdu without a hint of a foreign accent, they are also caught up on the who's who of Pakistani television, and able to write a thesis on Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum and Sunn Mere Dil. All this, despite having spent the past 15 years travelling the world, from Singapore to South Africa to Egypt to England.

"I knew they'd learn English at school, and switching to only Urdu at home is the only way," Fatima tells The Express Tribune. Pursing her lips, instantly proving why she is such an effective teacher, she adds, "My girls don't have the luxury grandparents and khalas and phuppos and cousins around them. They have only us. It's not that hard. You just have to put in a bit of effort."

Diluting through the ages

You will have noted by now that with her teaching career, her diligent sourcing of workbooks, and devotion to Pakistani showbiz, Fatima puts in slightly more than the 'bit' of the effort she has humbly accorded herself. In the defence of mothers who want to hide under a duvet after learning about Fatima's Urdu regime, it helps that Fatima herself identifies as a 'purebred Karachiite' and suffered through years of Urdu homework at school in order to be where she is today.

But for the women who grew up abroad themselves and spoke Urdu only to their parents before finding blessed relief in English at school, the outlook is not looking great for their mother tongue.

It is wonderful when the kids are little and absorb whatever they are being told without the sassy side-eye of a pre-teen (even though no sleep-deprived mother of babies and toddlers would ever classify this part of the parenting journey as 'wonderful'). The niggling truth remains, however, that as they grow older, you are going to need to communicate with them with words they will be able to wield at school, and those words cannot be Urdu words. There is no safety net there of having a gentle Miss Honey-like teacher equally well-versed in Urdu to translate your four-year-old's speech, so you scramble to introduce a bit of English to their life so they are not thrown in the deep end on day one of school.

If English is already your default language, the odds are high that this junction is where your child and Urdu will part company for life (unless, of course, you follow the Fatima route and up your game). Nazia, who grew up in Dubai and now lives in New Jersey, is a case in point. Unlike Fatima, she has no affinity for either workbooks or Pakistani dramas – and she has accepted she is fighting a losing battle. She is in the same boat that so many other expat Pakistani parents find themselves in – the boat where her two young boys understand Urdu, but respond in English.

"Look, I talk to my parents and cousins in Urdu, but my boys aren't growing up in the environment I did," says Nazia. "Honestly, it's just easier to let English become the baseline. I don't want it to become a battleground at home when there are already so many other battles about homework to fight."

Nazia has voiced what so many others – out of fear of being accused of committing base treason – are afraid to say. When parenting is already preloaded with so many instances where you and your child have the opposite opinion – such as much baigan to eat, how many maths questions are sufficient, and picking those blasted clothes up off the floor – intertwining the intricacies of Urdu spelling into the mix is not for the faint of heart.

With so many Pakistanis having moved away, will the art of Urdu taper away? Probably. Can the Pakistani mother doing her mothering abroad do anything about it? If we listen to Fatima, we know that all it takes is a 'bit' of effort. Is that effort easy to come by? Do not answer that question.