So, I had then wondered if I was hearing things! Embedded in a thickly WASPish (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) population with residents bundled up in a bridge-and-tunnel vision, as the latest edition of Oxford Dictionary would have us know on American suburbanites -- provincial and insular--the sound of Urdu had been strange to hear, to say the least. Urdu, which means 'camp', derived from the term ‘zaban-i-urdu' or the 'language of the camp'--born when the Turko-Persian armies came to India and mingled with the Hindi-speaking Indian in the camps. Spoken, on the other side of the world from me, by about 50 million Muslims in India, it is the first language of about 10 million in Pakistan (with a further 80 million speaking it fluently as a second language).

Sohrab and I now speak Urdu whenever our paths cross. It's an event in itself. Always refreshing and reassuring. The mailman and I have exchanged titbids on each other. He's from India and went back seven years ago to marry a girl from his hometown of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, bringing her to live here in a joint family of aging parents, brothers with wives and kids, all looking for that evanascent American dream.

Owning his language, even though Sohrab breaks into Americanese whenever he runs into other residents, makes him a minority among the ABCD's (American Born Confused Desis) who insist on speaking English even if they butcher the grammar.

The other month, I called up a Pakistani-American who had lost a friend-- the only son of a widow, shot and killed at the gas station where he worked. The Edhi Foundation in New York performed his last rites and arranged for his body to be sent to Lahore for burial. I merely wanted to inquire if the 24-year-old Pakistani was a victim of hate-crime. Barely able to make sense of his syntax, I tried to break into Urdu with my interlocutor only to be suitably snubbed from the other end. The chap merrily forged ahead in an English only he could understand!

What's wrong with Urdu? Even the Oxford Dictionary embraces the usage of yet more words spoken in South Asia in its 11th edition unveiled just recently. Words like dicky (car boot or trunk), batchmate (classmate) fitna (unrest or rebellion), jihad or jihadist, niqab, and punditocracy are now perfectly legit (as the Americans call it) to use as pucca English.

Not to be left behind is an editor at The Washington Post. In his book The Elephants of Style - A trunkload of tips on the big issues and gray areas of contemporary American English, Bill Walsh wrestles with troublesome lexicon: 'Although the people of Pakistan are Pakistanis, the people of Afghanistan are Afghans. The word afghani refers solely to the country's main unit of currency. To call an Afghan an afghani is like calling an American a dollar.' Which, come to think about it, might not be a totally bad idea.

Thus it was that Indians and Pakistanis romancing the past, while glued in hoary time zones and hazy spaces, arrived in America for a conference déjà vu. Poets and scholars; literati and critics; editors and ex-diplomats; journalists and novelists; playwrights and politicians; bureaucrats and freelancers; men and women; old -- ancient actually-- and not so old, set up a Urdu fest to stir fry their own unique flavours that they brought along with them, seasoned over decades.

Urdu Times, North America's first and largest weekly published simultaneously from coast to coast, was the sponsor of the three-day "World Urdu Conference" at Edison in New Jersey, coddling litterateurs from Pakistan, India, US, Canada and UK. While most of them may be unknowns to a lot of people in the South Asian subcontinent, most have a celebrity status in the Urdu-speaking-and-writing universe.

Among the glitterati was Gopi Chand Narang, president of the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi; Prof. Fateh Muhammad Malik, Chairperson, National Language Authority, Islamabad; Zahid Ali Khan, editor of Urdu daily Siyasat, Hyderabad, Deccan; Prof.

David Matthews, head of Urdu Department, University of London, and Karamatullah Ghori (Canada) former Pakistan ambassador to Turkey who now has jettisoned his former diplomatic life in favour of Urdu lit.

Among the heartthrobs were Dr. Shan-ul-Haq Haqqi & Razia Fasih Ahmed(living in Canada), Ahmad Faraz & Munno Bhai (playing hooky that day), Shakila Rafiq; Amjad Islam Amjad and Hamayat Ali Shayar.

Among the live wires were the Urdu Times owner Khalil-ur Rehman; Dr. 'Abdurrehaman 'Abd (NY), Dr. Syed Taqi 'Abedi (Toronto); columnist Vakil Ansari; BBC veteran Raza Ali Abidi (London); Tariq Khawaja, Chicago Times bureau chief, Hameedullah Khan, chairman, Pakistan federation of America Chicago and Farzana Khan, former Daily News reporter (Canada).

Here it was instructive to listen to Gopi Chand Narang (who, unlike some of big names in Pakistan such as Ahmed Faraz, Amjad Islam Amjad, Attaullah Qasmi & Iftikhar Arif, is that celebrated rare intellectual who has spurned the lure of office to pursue his scholastic work) as he reminded his friend Faraz: "Do not monopolise and politicise a language. Urdu is one of the national languages of India and not a natural language of even a single region of Pakistan from Karachi to Lahore and Quetta to Peshawar. The litterateurs of the two countries must interact with each other."

Indians are touchy when chauvinistic claims on Urdu are made by Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular.

"Urdu in Pakistan, tinged as it is with Punjabi, Balochi, Multani, Sindhi or some North West Frontier Province dialect," is "pathetic", and so according to Indian diehards, "the real Urdu speaking people are in India alone"!

But David Matthews, the Londoner with flawless Urdu and oodles of charm, tells me: "One of the most animated topic to surface was ‘Urdu ki nai bastian', that examined the status and future of Urdu in America and Europe. Those of us who work for Urdu in the 'diaspora' are acutely aware of the fact that members of the younger generation, living outside the homeland of Urdu, due to pressures of modern life, experience great difficulty in maintaining their interest in their mother tongue and its literary traditions." And isn't that true, I think, for the mother tongues of all the immigrants from South Asia, for Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, and so on!

Matthews is the man who translated Quiver: Poems and Ghazals by Shabana Azmi's hubby Javed Akhtar; recited movingly by legend Amitab Bachaan and lauded by Gopi Chand Narang, at its launch some three years ago in New Delhi.

And so on till Toronto, next year, when the same saints will go marching in to the Urdu Conference 2005!

Anjum Niaz is a correspondent for Dawn newspaper in the United States.