Hello! How are you? Welcome to my blog!

I am writing this with a new song about to go out into the world, and this one asks some of the hardest questions I have ever put into a song.

Ma Ki Zabaan (Mothertongue) premieres on YouTube on Friday 31 July at 1pm UK, and this is the story behind it.

It is one of the very first songs I ever wrote. I was living in Norfolk, estranged from my culture, surrounded entirely by English. At the university, English. In the streets and shops, English. On the television my son watched, English. And Urdu, the language my parents spoke to me, the language I sang in before I even knew I was singing, began to slip away from me.

How can I speak to my mother without my mother tongue?

Here is the part I have not often admitted. By then I could not even write Urdu properly, except in Roman script. My grammar was poor, my vocabulary limited. Urdu poetry is an old and refined tradition, and it did not belong to people like me. I had no training, no lineage, no permission. 

I wrote in it anyway. Words and music, however basic, were both mine. Choosing to write this song in my endangered mother tongue was an act of reclamation, a rescuing, an assertion that this inheritance was still mine to use.

And the last line of the song I wrote somewhere very particular. I was sitting on a wild rocky beach on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, a place of healing for me, watching the waves pound the stones. And I found myself thinking of the Bradford I grew up in. Enoch Powell's rivers of blood. The National Front marching on the waste ground by our house. And the line came:

Kaat kaat puthuron ko leher thuk gayi
Is khoon ke durya me upna jahaan nahi

Even waves tire of pounding the shore. There is no place for me, in these rivers of blood.

I wrote that decades ago. I am singing it now because those rivers are rising again, here and everywhere. A song written that long ago should not still feel this urgent. It does.

To lose a language is heartbreaking, but it opens onto something larger: the experience of loss itself. I had lost my mother. Now I was losing my mother tongue. This song is about all the other losses these two make visible.

The song itself

Ma Ki Zabaan is a ghazal: rhyming couplets in the old refined Urdu tradition, each verse landing on the same falling rhyme. Naheen, nahi. No, not, none. That refrain is the engine of the song. A ghazal circles its wound, returning again and again to the same word, and here the word it keeps returning to is a negation. Every verse ends in loss.

The first verse holds the whole song in four lines. 

Ye jo zabaan meri thee, meri yahan naheen: this language that was mine is not mine here. 

And then the question I could not answer: ma seh kaise baat, ke ma ki zabaan nahi? How can I speak to my mother, without my mother tongue? 

Notice it is not "how can I speak Urdu." It is "how can I speak to my mother." The language and the woman are the same loss.

The second verse widens the circle from language to home. 

Aas paas khurrai hae, ye gharwale loag: all around me stand the people who belong. Gharwale, literally the people of the house, the ones who have a ghar, a home. And then: mera ghar kaha hae? Bus ye putta naheen. Where is my home? I simply don't know. I don't have the address of my own belonging.

The third verse turns inward, from home to self. 

Kia thi meh, kia bun bayi, mujh se na pooch: what I was, what I have become, don't ask me.

 Aisi budul gayi hoon, ke koi nisaan naheen: I am so changed that no trace remains. 

This is what losing a language does that nobody tells you: the self that lived in that language starts to vanish with it. There was a girl who thought and dreamed and was loved in Urdu. No trace remains.

And the last verse turns outward, to the country itself. That is the verse from the beach. 

Cutting and cutting at the rocks, even the wave grows tired. In this river of blood, there is no world of mine. It is where the private grief of the song meets the public one: a country that would not let me belong, whatever language I spoke.

So the song falls like this: I have lost my language, I have lost my home, I have lost myself, and this country's rivers of blood are why. Four verses, one widening wound, every one of them ending on that same rhyme: naheen.

The sound carries it too. My voice and tanpura underneath everything, that constant drone which in our music is the note the world rests on, still sounding while everything else dissolves. Sianed Jones's violin, harmonium and extraordinary second vocals, cris cheek's clarinet and bass, Sukhdeep Dhanjal's tabla, and now Camilo Tirado's 2026 remaster, which has lifted a quarter century of dust off the recording and left the ache exactly where it was.

The writing of the song 

From my diary, around 1995: the first verses finding their order, one crossing-out at a time. This is what "I wrote in it anyway" looked like. Pencil, a borrowed page, no training, no lineage, no permission. I read that last line now and it makes me cry. 

And the English, being found the same way. That tongue which was mine, is not in this place.

A word about the film.

The visuals carry the meaning too. Since the song is about losing language, I wanted the loss of language to be present in the artwork itself. Not just described, but enacted. The Urdu is rendered in the script my mother tongue lives in, and across the film the words shimmer, mist and dissolve. 

Alongside the words there is my face in profile, focused on the mouth, the body part the language belongs to. Hands reach, search, dissolve. And there is the sea, at San Sebastián and at Holy Island, where the water froths, forms and reforms across the surface. To me this looks like language. Changing, moving, reforming.

But more - it reminds me that everything is as if it were written on water. Things are illusory, Maya. We think we are living this life, but the sages and saints and visionaries remind us that it is all illusion. You put letters on the surface, and they disappear like foam. Everything changes, shifts, moves. The transitoriness of all things. Trying to hold on to anything is like writing on water.

The song is newly remastered by Camilo Tirado, from the album The Colour of the Heart (Remastered 2026), with Sianed Jones, cris cheek and Sukhdeep Dhanjal, my Garam Masala band of the 1990s. It is the second single from Azaadi | آزادی | A Journey To Freedom, my three year project supported by Arts Council England.

The premiere is Friday 31 July, 1pm UK, and I will be in the chat at: https://youtu.be/-vyJ4n3qAPI

Tap Notify Me so you don't miss it.

LYRICS: Ma Ki Zabaan (Mothertongue)

Original Urdu followed by English translation:

URDU:
Ye jo zabaan meri thee
Meri yahan naheen
Ma seh kaise baat
Ke ma ki zabaan nahi?

Aas paas khurrai hae
Ye gharwale loag
Mera ghar kaha hae
Bus ye putta naheen

Kia thi meh kia bun bayi
Mujh se na pooch
Aisi budul gayi hoon
Ke koi nisaan naheen

Kaat kaat puthuron
Ko leher thuk gayi
Is khoon ke durya me
Upna jahaan nahi

ENGLISH:
This language that was mine
I am losing my mothertongue
How can I speak to my mother
Without my mothertongue

All around me
Are people who belong
Where is my home?
I don't know where I am from

What I was, what I have become
Don't ask me I don't know
No trace remains
What I was is gone

Cutting these rocks
Even the waves are tired
In this river of blood
There is no home for me

And tell me, because I read and answer every message: do you have a language you are losing, or one you fought to keep? I would truly love to know.

With so much love,
Samia x