I have often wondered how a language can be wonderfully expressive and yet strangely evasive. Urdu can give us a thousand ways to describe longing. Vasl. Qurbat. Lams. In its classical poetry, the Ghazal and Nazm seamlessly blend the spiritual, the romantic, and the deeply erotic; suggestively charting the beloved’s eyes, lips, absence, and the unbearable sweetness of waiting. Yet, a stark hypocrisy emerges when we test these boundaries.

 A language that feels entirely comfortable being intensely sensual is suddenly paralyzed when asked to name structural violence. Ask this same vocabulary to describe crimes against women, girls, and children plainly, and something breaks. It retreats into formal caution, wrapping itself in bureaucratic euphemisms as if the sentence itself actively wants to protect someone’s "honor" instead of naming the violence.

Where did the artistic nakedness of poetry go? For decades, I have worked on gender-based violence, and in that time I encountered several modern Pakistanis, educated, many even Ivy League-trained who resisted even naming violence. Senior officials became angry when I suggested it was not some abstract concept imported from elsewhere. I was told, more than once: this does not happen here.

Once, I asked a high-ranking police officer what the Pashto equivalent of “incest” was. “Dr Sahiba, incest doesn't happen here, so there is no word for it in Pashto.” I tried to explain that the absence of a single, precise word is not evidence of the absence of a crime. And, to be fair, Pashto is not uniquely placed here: incest does not necessarily have a single, sharp everyday equivalent in Urdu or  other Pakistani languages either. I say this with affection for Pashto. I have worked for decades in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Ghani Khan is part of why I love the language's music.

Some of those same men later claimed........

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