“So you paint,” a poet asked an artist over a cup of coffee at the Arts Council in Karachi last Tuesday. The artist laughed, “Well, I have used paints, but I also work with video, photographs, words ...” he responded, with a chuckle.

I often notice that speaking of art in Pakistan is akin to discussing philosophical concepts: images are in service to, or harnessed by, a nexus of ideas. We had visited the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture to see a spectacular new installation by innovative artist Sajjad Ahmed. My Bangladeshi colleague Sadaf Saaz and I had met him in Islamabad last April, and we were impressed to see, as Sajjad showed us around the campus, that traditional schools of printing, painting, pottery and sculpture seemed to exist in equity with iconoclastic or postmodern trends. It was a pleasure, too, to see a confident, committed new generation of artists — modern or conventional, and, perhaps by chance, mostly female — working away under the tutelage of their mentors who were all of them practising artists, some of them hardly older than their students.

At the Karachi Literature Festival, which began that evening, the two-day trajectory gave room to both words and images, though the prevalence of parallel sessions made for difficult choices (Fascinating, though, how writers are more interested in art than artists in literature. Or am I mistaken?). At my own event, a discussion with novelist Bilal Tanweer inevitably morphed from the language of fiction into the languages in which stories are written. As a multilingual, I observed that I was guided by images when I wrote more often than by sentences. I wondered whether writers — particularly bilingual ones — really thought in any one language.

As if to follow up this discussion, writer Peerzada Salman asked me — at my exchange with my literary colleagues Fatema Hassan and Asif Farrukhi, entirely in Urdu, at the Karachi Arts Council the night before I left — about the difference between my writings in Urdu and English. He felt that in English I seemed to write with care and precision, whereas in Urdu my words simply flowed. Actually, the process is quite the opposite. In English I’m assailed by a barrage of words (in many languages) and the subsequent shedding of superfluities is the greatest part of my task. In Urdu, I patiently reach out for words to match the images I see — a flooded field, a cityscape of towers, a bridge in the shadow of a church; words, usually in Urdu or in Persian, follow such images. Visuals come unbidden. It’s the verbal music I have to search for.

I was asked about the doyenne of Urdu literature, the late Qurratulain Hyder. I spoke of how one of the major elements of her career was her effortless bilingualism; how she could recreate her texts so that they become mirror-images of each other, neither identical nor entirely different, rather like fraternal twins. Blasphemy to say this, perhaps: and I won’t attempt textual comparisons, but in my particular case her English writing (or rather some of them — The Exiles, Fireflies in the Mist and My Temples, Too) have had almost as great an impact on me as her Urdu. And her English rendition of River of Fire is on every list of the best recent works of Indian literature.

Chatting to artist Fazal Rizvi later, I reminded him how, just a few months ago, how resistant I was when he’d asked me to read from a comic essay I’d written at an exhibition of his work at Gasworks, a London gallery at which he’d done a summer residency. (Fazal works with words as well as images and knows the bilingual dilemma from the inside. He spoke at the KLF on the final day, straight after attending my session, but by some complete miscalculation, I missed his panel discussion. At my Arts Council session, he was accompanied by a Polish friend who spoke to all of us in fluent Urdu!) My essay was, in a sense, about my lifelong struggle to master Urdu and my eventual, tentative entry as a writer into its hallowed halls. I had already told him how I’d trembled when I’d had to speak in Urdu in public, for just a few minutes, at the Arts Council in 2012; I didn’t know if I could repeat the experience. And now here I was, gabbling away, entirely unprepared, in my mother tongue in front of an audience who spoke it as their vernacular. Fazal smiled quietly, in amicable disagreement: I really hadn’t needed that much persuasion, he seemed to imply.

But I couldn’t help but feel a little smug at how in the space of just over two years I’d conquered my disability — the tongue that knotted when I tried to speak in my native language — when I read a report of my talk on the way home, which reported my words quite accurately and failed to mention that the entire conversation had been entirely in Urdu (save, perhaps, for the very occasional lapse). I also wondered whether it was time for me to draw the debate around this particular topic to a close, just as I have done with exile, diaspora, post-colonialism, 9/11 and Pakistani writing in English. But as long as some young would-be writers from Pakistan (and Bangladesh, too) continue to struggle with English, feeling it’s their only way to reach their intended audience, my own example remains relevant.

I remembered, on way home to London, sitting at the Karachi airport waiting for the departure of my very delayed flight to be announced, that while I spoke about the importance of translation I’d neglected the effect Arabic literature in translation has had on me throughout my writing life. It’s with my Arab friends that I’ve lived through the dilemma of language, colonialism and representation — particularly those from countries in which French had demarcated an elite education. Until then, I’d taken my Anglophone status for granted, even though I’d been passionate about my Persian studies and loved Urdu poetry. Later, reading the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Algeria’s Assia Djebar, both francophones, had radicalised my attitude to English, making me increasingly aware that, as I wrote in my borrowed tongue, I could draw from the canons of the many languages I read in and that were available to me in translation. And Djebar’s lament for lost languages had also awakened in me a longing for my own, with a very different result — instead of mourning its loss, or, more accurately, its absence — I studied it in depth, read in it, wrote about it, translated it, and eventually wrote in it, unlike Djebar.

But there is also a question of love. Djebar had a lifelong love of French which perhaps would have always kept her captive, however much she might have tried to return to the language of her Muslim heritage. Her fellow-francophone and compatriot Rachid Boudjedra, for a time, turned to writing in Arabic, but then felt, I imagine, compelled to rewrite himself in French. I, too, found myself rewriting, or passing on for translation, my Urdu stories for an audience that would never reach them in their original versions; primarily my South Asian audience in India and Bangladesh, which is where these translations were first published.

I am not going to make this text an elegy for Djebar, who died last week. Her generous oeuvre is a living monument to her unique gift for language and discursive narration. I’d rather celebrate her genius and the troubled legacy of torn tongues she’s left us. As I conclude this piece, I ask my friend, the Bangladeshi writer, Maria Chaudhuri, about her relationship with Bangla: she has an easier foundational relationship with her mother tongue, which she writes with some dexterity, than Djebar or even I. “Bangla is the language of comfort for me, but English is the source of my creativity. I really admire writers who write in multiples, but am glad I don’t: writing in two languages is like having two loves in conflict.” We agree, though, that common cultures are as stalwart a bridge as mother tongues: we can’t, after all, read each other’s vernacular scripts, but relate without barriers to each other’s writings.

Maria pauses on the phone, but that, perhaps, is the time lapse on the line from Hong Kong, where she’s speaking from. “Interestingly, if I’d ever sung in public, I’d have wanted to sing Baul or Sufi music in Bangla, Urdu or another South Asian language,” she muses. And then, in her next phrase, she echoes Djebar’s search for that intricate layering of mother tongue and borrowed language. “But so much of what I write in English comes from all that Sufi music makes me feel.”