Hindustani

Wherever Sara Suleri writes Urdu, substitute Hindustani (rather than 'Hindi')… and she could be writing about all of us who claim Hindi as our mother tongue, but think/dream/write in English…

Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in only one place at a time. When I return to Urdu I feel shocked at my own neglect of a place so intimate to me: like relearning the proportions of a once familiar room, it takes me by surprise to recollect that I need not feel grief, I can eat grief; that I need not bury my mother but instead can offer her into the earth, for I am in Urdu now…