Craving Creativity

In Pakistan there were two kinds of schools: those where every subject was taught in Urdu, with English as a second language, and you’d study for a matriculation certificate; and those affiliated to the University of Cambridge where students could sit O- and A-level exams – such as St Michael’s, where I’d recently moved to from Foundation Public School. At these schools, classes were in English, and Urdu was the second language. While I grew up being able to speak Urdu fluently, because of my obsession with English literature, I treated it as a bothersome subject that I had to pass. Whenever I couldn’t find the right Urdu vocabulary, I’d just slot in English words, like most affluent Pakistanis did, and speaking this hybrid language left little need to master the language for its own sake. Many years later I would regret not paying more attention to Urdu, leaving me with a superficial knowledge of my own mother tongue; I also missed out on its beauty, its literature and poetry.