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.
And I did. Perhaps a little too well.
Before long, English was everywhere and then it was in me too. By the time we moved to Australia, it had embedded itself so deeply it no longer felt borrowed. It felt like mine. It became the language I used at school, then with friends, then at uni and at work. Most importantly, it became the language of my imagination and the language I would use on the page. English stopped being something foreign and quickly became the language I instinctively reached for.
Urdu, meanwhile, began to slip out of easy reach. We still spoke it at home, so I never lost it altogether, but the language of my earliest years grew less certain on my tongue. I would find myself pausing mid-sentence, searching for the right Urdu word, translating frantically in my head, then surrendering and replacing it with the English one. It is a familiar migrant dialect, that hodgepodge of mother tongue and adopted tongue, stitched together out of memory and convenience.
It was not until I returned to Pakistan for a visit recently that I realised how much of Urdu had remained intact, lying somewhere underneath all that English.
What startled me was not just that it came back, but how quickly. From the moment I landed in Karachi, Urdu rushed in from all sides. Airport officials. Family waiting outside. Drivers, shopkeepers, waiters, relatives, neighbours. My brain did not ease into it. It simply switched. I fell into the rhythm of conversation almost immediately, and if I hesitated for even a moment, my family was right there to accuse me, with great delight, of losing my Urdu-speaking ability.
Soon, the opposite started happening. Urdu embedded itself so fully back into my mind that I began to struggle for English words. I would be speaking to my children, who only speak English, and find myself stuck midway through a sentence, trying to translate the Urdu thought already forming in my head.
One night while travelling in Islamabad, I woke up and asked for the heater to be turned on (it was the middle of winter). The next morning my husband told me I had said this in Urdu. He, being Scottish, speaks only English. Half-asleep, my brain had apparently decided this was beside the point.
What I realised then was that despite leaving Pakistan so young, my mother tongue had never truly left me. It had been buried, muffled by years of distance, but it was still there, alive and waiting. There was something instinctive about it, like a current pulling me back towards the language of my parents and grandparents, and towards the version of my earliest self.
My relationship to the idea of home has always been complicated, but language offered a kind of belonging that geography alone could not. It reminded me that home is not always a place you can point to on a map. Sometimes it is a sound or a way of being understood before you have even finished your sentence.
There is, of course, plenty of research showing that bilingualism may benefit the brain. It has been linked to improved decision-making and in one study, to reduced brain ageing. But in ordinary life its gifts feel less clinical and far more intimate. Speaking Urdu as I travelled through Pakistan enriched every interaction. It allowed me to talk to people I might otherwise have smiled at politely and passed by. It gave me access not just to conversation, but to texture, humour, intimacy, nuance. It made the country feel less like somewhere I had come back to visit and more like somewhere that still knew me.
Most of all, it gave me connection. It helped me bridge the years with family I had not seen in a long time. It allowed me to feel tethered to a country I left at five, but which had never fully left me. It reminded me that language is not only about communication, it can also be about inheritance.
• Saman Shad is an author of two books and a mother of three children. Her books, published by Penguin Australia, can be found here
