I didn’t realise I still had my mother tongue in me – until I spoke Urdu in my sleep

By the time we moved to Australia, English had embedded itself so deeply it no longer felt borrowed, writes Saman Shad. Urdu, meanwhile, began to slip out of easy reach. Photograph: Stuart Freedman/In Pictures/Getty Images

As someone who speaks in English, thinks in English and has published two novels in English, it is strange for me to think that there was once a version of me who could not speak a word of it.

Until I was about five, my world had been in Urdu. It was the language of family and home, childhood and comfort. Then, just before I started primary school, we left Pakistan. One of my clearest memories is of being told I would be going to a British school. I remember the panic of it. How would I speak to anyone? How would I learn? How was I meant to survive a place where I did not have the words for myself? In her usual no-nonsense way, my mother told me I’d figure it out.