Saniyah Salman

A note on the poem

Migration, displacement, exile. Whether forced or out of will, leaving one’s homeland is an overwhelming experience. In a time where bombs and missiles are falling every hour and minute, reading this poem by Adil Mansuri led me to a realization: that everyone just wants to live in their homelands in peace. For ages people have reminisced about their homelands, the scenic beauty, the weather, the fruits, the food, the people, the culture. For ages, people have loved their homelands dearly. And yet, for a multitude of modern problems like jobs, education, conflict, partition, war, genocide, they have had to leave their homes against their will. Adil Mansuri himself was born in Ahmedabad, India, migrated to Karachi, Pakistan after the Partition, moved back to India eight years later, and spent the last years of his life in New Jersey, USA. ‘Male Na Male’ (pronounced as malay na malay) is a Gujarati poem about moving to a faraway land, parting from loved ones and desperately holding on to the memory of home. At a time when people are displaced like pieces on a board game, when cities that once held ordinary people’s lives and memories are erased and reduced to debris, when AI is used to make and sell high-precision missiles and drones, and when far too many rich and powerful people believe that their homeland must be protected at the cost of burning the others, we are forced to think: for how long have people just wanted to go back home? It is a heart-wrenching and gut-twistingly strange question to ask.

A note on the process

The title of the poem can be literally translated as ‘milay na milay’ in Urdu without losing meaning from its original title ‘Male Na Male’ in Gujarati. Admittedly, we had assumed that a Gujarati-Urdu translation project would be an easier task than a Gujarati-English translation because of how close Gujarati and Urdu are as languages compared to English. However, we were proven wrong due to many reasons and in the grand scheme of things, one of the reasons is migration. Coming from a Gujarati family from Surat, India my grandparents migrated to Rangoon, Myanmar, then Dhaka, Bangladesh and finally to Karachi, Pakistan. As they could only carry so much, they carried the language on their tongues but left the script behind. And now two generations down the line, with all four of my grandparents gone, I can understand Gujarati completely, speak it brokenly, but not read it at all. Simply because Gujarati has its own unique script. Having never formally learned the language in Pakistan, I primarily relied on the Rekhta Gujarati website to romanize the text for me to be able to understand it. The nuances with which one can understand literature in a language they speak on a day-to-day basis and have formal training in is unmatched for someone like me who only speaks it as a broken code-language with her mother while bargaining with a shopkeeper. Although there are plenty of Gujarati speakers in Pakistan,  it was hard for us to find anyone who could read it and be able to translate a poem. Which is why this column is possible because of the contributions of two translators from India, Meena Desai and Rohee Dholakia. You may read the translations of our contributors below.