All this brings me to the weeks of hustling I did to investigate this rather arcane area in the digital world, where web development and foreign languages converge.

Because I own an iPhone, I started by contacting Apple. I asked them why their smartphones did not have an Urdu keyboard and why Urdu speakers were forced to use the Arabic keyboard, given that Urdu has 39 letters in their alphabet and Arabic has 28. (Try writing English without a letter as ubiquitous as the E).

Apple, obviously, did not respond. I tried over and over and got nothing. This prompted one of my British-Pakistani friends to sardonically quip that Apple was imposing Arabic-supremacism on the rest of us, given that Steve Jobs had been part-Arab. (I thought it was a good joke).

Interestingly, at that early moment in my investigation, I hadn’t yet become concerned about the distinction between naskh and nastaliq. I was simply desperate to have some way of writing in Urdu on my phone and probably would have accepted it in any script. It was only when I kept getting stymied by Apple that I investigated this arena more and got obsessed with the naskh versus nastaliq divide. So I suppose Apple’s inscrutability had a benefit, namely, this article.(There I go, Apple fanboy apologizing for Apple).

After rejection by Apple I called up Microsoft. Instead of limiting my question to whether the Windows Phone would have an Urdu keyboard, I went further and asked if they were going to do something about offering nastaliq.

While Microsoft’s press team did act like I was a human, I got caught up in some bureaucratic Byzantium where I kept writing and rewriting and recording my basic question, never to get a response.

But Microsoft wasn’t a dead-end. Asking and re-asking the same question made me more attuned to hitting the correct keywords, and this resulted in the online discovery of the blog of a Microsoft developer named Michael S. Kaplan. He was the first techie I had found who seemed to have a full grasp of the fact that Urdu speakers didn’t want to read or write in naskh. And, more than that, he was on the inside.

Kaplan’s blog was where I made my first major breakthrough. It was about Windows 8. Apparently the newest version of Windows would have the “first widely available Unicode font to support nastaliq.”

When I read that, when I saw Urdu’s script being recognized as autonomous, it was a moment of sublimation. After my weeks of disappointments and dead ends, here was hope! Who would have thought that Microsoft, of all the companies in the world, would offer the first wide-scale support for Urdu nastaliq! It was like reaching the end of an exhausting journey to find that there was someone there to pull some water for you out of a well.

I hope I one day get a chance to meet Michael S. Kaplan and tell him how amazing he is.

But as game-changing as this discovery was, by now I had also realized that I would have to temper my excitement. Making Urdu nastaliq popular on the web and in social media, where the two-pronged domination of naskh and Roman Urdu was so thorough, would be an immensely difficult task, if not impossible.

I learned this when I talked to the International Development Team at Twitter; the first time that any major tech company indulged me on this issue at length.

Apparently when Twitter had set out to develop Urdu for their platform, they had wanted to offer nastaliq. But then they discovered that it was not a standard font on Windows or Macs and on mobile platforms. As a result they opted for offering Urdu in Tahoma, which is essentially naskh. Sad trombone. In fact, Twitter’s Urdu translation project, spearheaded by young people out of Pakistan, is almost all in naskh. Do they have any idea that they are taking forward a mutated (or evolved) version of Urdu? Do they care? Is it all too late?

When I spoke with Twitter, they did sound open to the idea of offering Urdu in nastaliq in the future, but that openness seemed predicated on more demand from Urdu speakers. And judging by Twitter Urdu, it does not look like that demand is forthcoming. A language getting left behind by its people. Someone cue the funeral march.

This lack of interest from Urdu speakers is a chicken-and-egg situation. Simply put, if smartphones don’t offer an Urdu keyboard and tech companies don’t offer nastaliq then Urdu speakers won’t be inclined to create more demand for nastaliq, because somewhat viable alternatives already exist, particularly Roman Urdu and naskh. It all bodes very badly for nastaliq. It may never get to see the light of day on the web.

My request, then, to the myriad tech companies out there, particularly the big smartphone makers, is to please allow yourself to feel a moment of linguistic humanitarianism and offer us i) an Urdu keyboard in our smartphones with all the letters and ii) to let us render the Urdu in nastaliq. If even then we fail to make Urdu a popular online language, then the onus for its death will be upon us.

We would have been unworthy of its beauty.