The currency of separation

Rose Dakin

Last Updated: July 31. 2008 2:14PM UAE

In Urdu literature, it sometimes seems there are more words for separation and loneliness than there are words for love: alehda, faasilah, firaaq, judaaee, farq, furqat, hijr, tanhai, akelepan, be kas, soona, wahshat. The word for the “pain of separation of lovers,” furqat, was often used in Urdu ghazals – sung poems – to glorify the concealment of love and to deepen and darken the intense longings of romance. That culture of self-denial and sacrifice continues to today for some in the Emirates: many of the 19th century poet Ghalib’s ghazals could be sung for the labourers and taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi (or, as they pronounce it, Abu Zabi), who have come to better their family’s fortunes from afar.

Inhabitants of this city speak many languages, and taxi drivers often speak four: first Pashto, then Urdu, then Arabic and finally some Farsi or English. Almost all the drivers I’ve met learnt Urdu after they arrived in the UAE, even though most of them came from Pakistan. Confronted with the diversity of immigrants here, they learnt a South Asian lingua franca that hadn’t been necessary in Peshawar or Balochistan.

Spoken Hindi and Urdu are practically the same, and Urdu has many loan words from Farsi and Arabic. So it makes sense that Urdu has become the Esperanto of the Emirates. In my first week in Abu Dhabi (only two short months ago) I even met a Moroccan man who spoke a smattering of Urdu. I have also spoken Urdu with Iranian drivers, Afghan interior decorators and Keralan grocery store owners. (It was a departure from the norm when I met a young Pakistani taxi driver who speaks a smattering of Tagalog. First sheepishly and then effusively, he told me how it was his “passion” to learn “Pilipina”.)

Urdu isn’t my first language either. I am an American of British and German descent who grew up speaking English. My grandfather, a German exile who fled Berlin just before the Second World War, devoted his life to learning languages. He practised various scripts – Chinese, Japanese, Arabic – in the margins of all his books, and he practised the various tongues on countless unsuspecting strangers in his adopted city of San Francisco. In my own small way, I followed suit, learning Hindi and Urdu in my late 20s. Now Abu Dhabi’s taxi drivers are my unsuspecting strangers.

Once our common “lingua Urdu” is established, the drivers often tell me about their families at home. This would be a natural topic of conversation in any circumstance, I think, but it’s especially apt in my case, since I am eight and a half months pregnant. Once introductions are through, they ask about the baby obliquely, since it is considered rude to refer directly to a woman’s pregnancy: “Do you have any children?” they say. “It is coming soon,” I reply, and they exclaim “Acha!” as if it were a complete surprise. Then they tell me about their own wives and children.

One man had just returned from his wedding in Lahore; it will be a year before he sees his bride again. Another, nervous and proud, said that his third child is due in a month. A particularly self-possessed driver offered to provide me protection against the Taliban if ever I go to Peshawar, saying that if I stay with his family no one will dare to touch me (“If they even look at you,” he said, “they will get a bullet.” I half believed him).

Several have described the dangers of childbirth in remote villages, in areas where the mother dies in more than two percent of births, and how nervous they are as the date approaches. For me it will be different. Not only do I have hospitals and midwives close by, but my husband is with me. He will be there in the delivery room through labour, and he will never have to spend a long time away from the baby and me. No ghazals will be sung for us.

A ghazal’s couplets (or shirs) are supposed to be complete in meaning, each a self-sufficient unit. One couplet’s mood or meaning may directly oppose the next one, and so when they are sung the dramatic tensions in the poem are mirrored in the changing mood of the music.

One taxi driver I know, a neighbour named Bahadur (which means “the brave”), once told me: “Making money is not enough to make your heart happy. It doesn’t matter how much you make. You eat and bathe, and that is a life like an animal’s. A family makes you happy.”

Then, as if following the changing moods of a ghazal, in the next breath Bahadur the brave was again cheerful. He has two children at home in Pakistan, he said, one in elementary school and one in high school, and he’s proud to be able to support their education. He also helps his parents and his brother’s family with money.

If Ghalib were writing ghazals today, “remittance” might be another word in his lexicon of separation.

Sitting in the backs of taxicabs, I am often reminded of how fortunate I am compared to my fellow speakers of Urdu as second language. Not all drivers are as polite as Bahadur. Despite the etiquette South Asian Muslims normally reserve for pregnant women, one man asked repeatedly to touch my belly; another demanded to see it. There are costs to having family on the mind but not nearby.

The Persians brought the ghazal with them to India in the 12th century, and gradually the languages of Farsi, Arabic and Hindi melted together and evolved into Urdu, a language spoken by the people around Delhi and Lucknow, the seats of the Moghul empire. The mixing of cultures from that period gave rise to a metaphor: The Ganga and Jamuna are two rivers in India that meet at Allahabad, a few hundred kilometres east of Lucknow, where I lived and studied Urdu for a year. The rivers are different shades of green, and for a distance after they meet there is a visible line in the middle of the joined stream that demarcates their separate origins. As the river flows onward, the colours blend, and this is the basis for the metaphor, the “Ganga-Jamuni tehezeeb”, which describes a gracefully mixed culture with elements from different sources.

Are there the beginnings of such a culture in the Emirates? Between me and my fellow Urdu speakers, there is a still a line in the water: I have my family with me, and theirs is far away.

Rose Dakin is a writer and consultant living in Abu Dhabi.