Essay: I Grieve in Urdu

An oral historian and theatre artist writes about the language he grieves in and a recording he never made.

I didn’t realise this until I tried to do it in English.

It was during an oral history session, not my own grief but someone else’s, which is mostly what I work with, and the woman across from me switched mid-sentence from English into Urdu, the way you might step off a pavement without thinking because the pavement has run out. She didn’t excuse herself. She didn’t translate. She just moved, because the feeling had grown larger than English could hold, and Urdu was waiting there, the way it always is, like a room you were raised in.

I understood then that I do the same thing. That I have always done the same thing, without knowing it was a thing being done.

I am a theatre artist, which means I have spent years thinking about what the body knows that the mind doesn’t. Stanislavski believed emotion lives below language, in muscle, in the nervous system, in the reflex that precedes thought. He was right, but only partially. Because I have found that emotion also lives in language, coiled inside specific words like a spring, and that the language you reach for when feeling overwhelms you is not a choice so much as a falling.

I have cried in Urdu. I have never cried in English.

I have prayed in Urdu, argued in Urdu, whispered to myself on bad nights in Urdu. English is for the world. Urdu is for the part of me the world doesn’t see. And the part of me the world doesn’t see is, I have come to understand, the larger part.

What alarmed me, when I finally understood this, was not the division itself but its consequence:

there is an entire interior life that can only be accessed through one door. And that door, I notice more every year, is one my children will not fully inherit. They understand Urdu. They speak it carefully, with the pronunciation of people handling something fragile. But they dream in English. I know this because I asked. My grandmother looked at me like it was a strange question. Maybe it was.

On stage, we say that a performer who cannot access their instrument cannot reach the audience. I wonder sometimes what my children will reach for, in extremity. What room they will find themselves stepping into, without thinking, when the feeling grows too large.

I work in an archive. My job, at its root, is to hold things that would otherwise disappear, to press record before the last person who remembers walks out of the world. I have sat across from elders who carry inside them versions of Pakistan that exist nowhere else, in no library, on no map, and I have believed, I have had to believe, that recording is the act of saving.But there is a recording I never made.

My grandmother spoke a register of Urdu I have never heard anywhere else. Formal in one sentence, tender in the next, threaded through with Persian words that exist now mainly in classical poetry, words that were already archaic when she used them, that she had inherited from her own mother the way you inherit a particular way of holding your hands. I didn’t record her. She wasn’t a subject. She was my grandmother, and I assumed, the way you assume about the people closest to you, that she was permanent.

The irony is not lost on me. I am a professional preserver of voices, and I did not think to

preserve hers.

She is gone now. And when I try to remember her voice, the Urdu I reach for is slightly wrong. I have her words but not her music. I have the language but not the specific frequency she moved through it in, the cadence of a woman who learned to speak in a city that was partitioned away from her before I was born, who conjugated her grief into the grammar of wherever she ended up, and called it home.

That frequency is not in any archive. I was there, and I didn’t think to preserve it, and now I am the only place it exists, an imperfect vessel, already forgetting, already translating her into whatever fits inside my diminishing memory.

There is a word, yaad, which is Urdu for memory, but it is also the word for missing someone. The same word does both. Mujhe yaad hai: I remember. Mujhe yaad aa raha hai: I am missing. The distance between remembering and longing, in Urdu, is just a verb tense.

English needs two words. Two separate states, two different rooms. As though you might

remember someone without missing them, or miss them without their memory arriving, as though grief were a choice about where to stand.

I don’t know what it means that my language of grief refuses this separation. I have been

thinking about it since my grandmother died. I think it means something about how Urdu was made, by whom, under what kind of loss. I think it might be the most precise thing I know, and I cannot say it in English. I can describe it, the way I am describing it now, but a description of grief is not grief. Translation is always a description. Something escapes, every time, and you cannot go back for it.

After she died, someone asked how I was doing. They were kind, and they meant it, and they were asking in English, which meant I answered in English: I’m okay, it’s hard, she had a good life, the portable phrases, the ones that cross borders without losing too much.

What I meant was: mujhe yaad aa raha hai.

What I meant was: she is in my memory and she is missing and in my language those are the same word, and I am standing in a language where they are not, and something is leaving through the gap right now, as I speak, and I am an archivist. I know, better than most, what it means when something cannot be recovered.

The author works as Senior Project Manager at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan. He is also a theatre artist and oral historian. This essay is his own.

Submitted For © Kosh-E-Lughat 2026