PART ONE
On the Paris metro, a teenaged girl sits next to her mother. Her mother speaks to her in Urdu, reprimanding her softly for something she has done.
Tumhe ye nahin karna chahiyye tha.
Je suis désolé maman.
Agar tumhaare abu ku pata chala tho?
Je ne recommencerai pas.
It’s an exchange I’ve had before, that I’ve seen my sisters and cousins have before. Not the soft chastisement and apology between a mother and her child, no, that is universal. It was the bilingual back-and-forth that struck me, a mother speaking to her daughter in her mother language, passed down generations from mother to daughter, tongue to ear, to this mother’s tongue on this train. But this time her daughter responds in a new language, learned from siblings, school, serials. Her mother understands French, can speak it passably, and yet her comfort lies not in its delicate, nasal noises but rather in the language that was the backdrop to her childhood, its juxtapositions of soft and hard sounds, its histories of Turks, Indians, Arabs.
Her decision to emigrate to this land was undoubtedly a difficult one, fraught with uncertainty and fueled by hope. Maybe she was brought over by a husband who saw this as the path forward, who chose to separate his nascent, nuclear family from the tribe they had grown from. Maybe they found community and camaraderie with other immigrants— not just from those who came from their village or city or country but from others who came from elsewhere, who shared ever-smaller connections to the tangible qualities of shared identity, who instead connected on the basis of ever-broader criteria, like overboard passengers desperately grabbing for any floating debris now that the lifeboats were too far away. Their common humanity was all that seemed to matter anymore in this new home.
But what she may not have anticipated all those years ago was how this new life would lead to a whole new branch of identity. Her children would share her genes yes, but their thinking, their heroes, their tastes would all be different than hers. Perhaps there’s no better representation of this than the divergence in their languages, for so much of thought is molded by language. To think that her body could birth children who could inherit every feature from her except her tongue is a remarkable thing. A historical anomaly if not a genetic one.
Angrez ki aulaad, a common Urdu phrase she might sometimes throw at her daughter, you child of an Englishman. So fitting, and yet digging so deeply. The accents her children sprinkle on their mother tongue can sound as unorthodox, as tainted, as the European dishes she cooks at home taste, frites dusted off with chaat masala, marinara sauce infused with laal mirch, spices the Europeans colonized half the world for and never incorporated into their recipes. It can seem strange to hear the ways her children pronounce words, and sad that they don’t process them in the same way. Ghalib’s couplets may not move them for lack of understanding, an Aamir Khan film may not make sense without subtitles. There’s a loss beyond just the immediate vocabulary that comes with an illiteracy in, or discomfort with, the mother tongue— there’s a severance from the culture and its works, its symbols, and perhaps its values too. Language is about more than the words: it’s the identity, the way the tribe communicates, the movement its members put out into the air to find connection with their own.
It is not an unnatural phenomenon for a language to evolve, no language survives time. But to consciously be the end of the chain carries a certain weight. The asabiyyah that held together her ancestors would splinter with her, giving way to hyphenated identities and bonds built on other dimensions. She might imagine, from time to time, what a reunion of her grandparents with her grandchildren might be like; she wonders if she will pass enough on to her children that such a meeting could be conversant and jubilant, or if perhaps it would be more akin to the first meetings her grandparents may have had with the foreigners who sailed to their shores…
PART TWO
On the other side of the carriage a man sits with his son, eyeing the woman nervously and observing his teenage boy, who eyes the teenage daughter.
Papa, puis-je avoir de flouze?
Le mot est argent. Et pourquoi en as-ti besoin?
Pardon. Je voualis sortit avec mes sahbis.
The man shakes his head. The boy has never lived anywhere his ancestors did not; he schooled not far from where his grandfather signed up to fight with the allies, he’d take dates to a cafe on the block where his great great great grandparents were told to eat cake, he grew up playing football on a field his serf ancestors used to till once upon a time.
And yet, he was much more a global citizen than his father could ever understand. He would overhear his son use loan words from Arabic when he played Xbox up in his room— Sahbi and flouze he’d weave into conversation with his North African friends, InshaAllah he’d tell his mother sometimes when he had no intention of completing a chore. He prefers ful mudammas to foie gras, talks of vacationing in Sharm al Shaikh over Saint Tropez.
It fills his father with the same trepidation, the same sense of loss, as the woman reprimanding her daughter softly in Urdu across the aisle. It’s ironic that those who emigrate as well as those emigrated to are filled with the same anxiety, an anxiety over change, the loss of what was, the unfolding unknown.
Perhaps it’s even more paralyzing for those emigrated to, since they had no direct say in the matter. They did not choose the neighbors who moved in next door, and yet their neighborhoods are changing around them. Those emigrated to were proud caterpillars, who built cocoons to sleep in, and one day woke up to find that they are not the same, that they are metamorphosing, a process filled with untold pains and perhaps some pleasures, but one that they did not ask for, do not control, and cannot reverse.
(In fairness, the choosing of dark-skinned people to come to these places is the result of decades of destabilizing foreign policy, centuries of colonialism, the compounded effects of capitalism weaponized and unleashed on warmer climates in ways they were not ready for. But this father had no influence over the decisions of his forefathers, just as he has no say over who buys his neighbor’s house, or from where they come. He is impotent against the butterfly effects of history, as we all are.)
This anxiety erupts in confusing ways, like a malaise that compels the body into sweats and shivers, and covers it in strange rashes. It looks like populist leaders who are unafraid to speak their mind, who are honest about their bigotries. It looks like immigration policies that favor walls to windows, screaming fetal curls on the floor to inviting, loving embraces. It looks like the repetition of history; no new stories under this sun, but new to us, unique to our moment in time.
And so he does what he can; he chastises his son to speak proper French, to not borrow words that will carry a heavy interest. But he cannot help but notice his son’s glances towards the girl across, and he knows a browning is happening, and his is the flavor that will be burnt off.
PART THREE
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” a philosopher once quipped. She thinks on this as the train pulls into Saint-Michel Notre-Dame station, and both parents make their way above ground with their children, unbeknownst to each other.
She had grown up with words like tameez, adab, hayaa. How could she even attempt to explain them in her daughter’s tongue? Respect? But no, it’s broader than that. Propriety? Sure, but that word emanates of straitjackets, it lacks the elegance of the words she grew up with. Modesty? Maybe, but there’s a refined, self-assured quality that dies in translation.
And yet, none of these words were virgin birthed into the Urdu vernacular; one borrowed from Persian, another emigrated from Arabic, a third born of both and evolved to mean something different.
She looks up at the birds which chirp in a nearby tree. Do the fledglings ever miss out on the meanings of the words? Do the chirps change? When they spend the winters in Africa, do the fledglings adopt the language of the local birds? Do they forget who they are, from where they came, how they must conduct themselves? Do they ever lose their direction home?
Both sets of parents walk along the Seine, looking up at the Notre Dame. The man ponders on how great France used to be; his forefathers being the ones who built the world’s most iconic cathedral, a great world power, a consequential democracy.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité– the language has stayed the same, but the ways his son understands the words are different. To him they don’t mean assimilation into the French way of life, he does not care about the preservation of the French spirit. Why shouldn’t liberty to wear anything extend to all types of clothing? Why not wear burqas beyond the Banlieues, why not wear headscarves in schools? Why shouldn’t a police mistake result in the trashing of the city?
He thinks about the birds too. When they come to a place, do they change the place? Do the local birds adopt the chirps and mannerisms of their visitors? Do the visiting birds ever get so engrained in the scenery that they forget to go home at winter’s end?
Young migrant workers work on the restoration of the Notre Dame. They joke with one another in Arabic, they hail from the lands whose architectural techniques made the Notre Dame possible. Had their and this man’s forefathers not mingled, exchanged ideas, learned from each other, perhaps nothing of note would stand on the little island in the middle of the Seine today.
There’s a hollow promise, a siren call to purity. To purify by stripping away, not realizing the essence of what made something so may be lost in the process. It’s like pulling at an errant thread in a sweater, only to realize that removing it pulls up another errant one. Before you know it you are left with a mess of threads, pure and untangled, but nothing to fend off the cold, sans sweater.
She turns a corner with her daughter, and the man and son continue, both pondering what may become of their progeny. The world of their children will look different than they would have hoped. But perhaps it will not be a total loss, perhaps there may be good in it.
Obaid Farooqui 