Illustration by Khadeeja Farooqui and Joaquin Kunkel
Punjabi Twang
How a Pakistani self-perceived outsider found himself more attuned to his mother tongues and national symbols than others around him.
Nov 5, 2016
On the eve of my family’s departure to Pakistan, my mother tried to moderate my excitement.
“It’ll be difficult,” she told me.
She reminded me that unlike the Maldives, where I spent five years of my life, Pakistan had a critical shortage of electricity and an equally critical surplus of bloated egos. I was not having any of it.
First day of class in Lahore, I realize I’m in the wrong class. I don’t sit on the chair assigned to me; I collapse.
An antic like that would have gotten laughs back home, I thought.
Wait. Home is Pakistan now.
I eventually make my way to the class God had destined me to be a part of for the next year, according to Ms. Sabiha. We both chuckled. She reminded me of my grandmother.
I was ready for eighth grade. I was ready to be the cool foreign kid. I was ready for all the questions the curious Pakistani audience was going to ask.
Questions were asked and sometimes I lied.
“Yes,” I lied, “there are many Christians in the Maldives.”
Statistically, there are no Maldivian Christians because the constitution prohibits conversions.
I lied because non-Pakistani Christians were more exotic and, in my eighth-grade imagination, well-off. I never corrected anyone afterwards.
One day, I let slip my Punjabi accent. The hai at the end of the sentence became a haiiiinnn. That day I was assured that my Punjabi accent would hang over my entire school life.
Punjabi is my ethnic language. Urdu is my national language. There’s a clear hierarchy of languages. English is for the most sophisticated, and is also known as the burger prime. Urdu is for the educated but not too educated, the burger subprime. Punjabi is reserved for the peasants and street banter, the shami kebabs.
In the Maldives, the only exposure I had to my native tongues was through my brother and parents, and my parents exclusively speak Punjabi with each other. I did not have friends from the upper-middle Lahori class to teach me how to contort the letter r in a word and hold back the twang at the end of a sentence. My Urdu was contaminated by my Punjabi.
I was supposed to be the foreign, exotic kid. Now I was more Punjabi than everyone else.
The feeling of being more Pakistani than people who had lived in Pakistan their whole lives bothered me. I excelled in Urdu class. Ms. Attiyah was a fan. How was it possible, I wondered, that I could perform better at studying a language I hadn’t read or written in for more than half a decade than people who had been living in Pakistan their whole lives?
Here I was, a person who thought of himself a semi-foreigner, an outsider, and I was more attuned with my mother tongues and national symbols than everyone around me.
The first day in Pakistan, I also experienced my first blackout in Lahore. The electricity was gone for two hours. No TV. No air conditioning. No Wi-Fi. I didn’t even have a laptop then. I almost lost my mind.
But then I walked outside and saw my neighbors playing football. I almost never went out in the Maldives. I couldn’t communicate in my native language there. Now, I could communicate in three different ones. And I cracked jokes in Punjabi all day long.
Muhammad Usman is a contributing writer. Email him at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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