The Voice That Raised Mine

Remembering a broadcaster, a mother, and the woman who taught me the power of voice. Before I understood what storytelling meant, I was already sitting inside it. Some of my earliest memories are not of playgrounds or classrooms but of the studios of Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation. Cool corridors. Heavy doors padded with soundproofing. The quiet hum of equipment and the faint smell of warm tape machines and paper scripts. And above the studio door, a small red light.

On Air.

My mother worked at Radio Pakistan as a producer and broadcaster. On most of the days due to a lack of a trusted baby sitter, she would take me with her to the station, and I would sit quietly in the studio watching her speak into the microphone, her voice travelling far beyond the walls of that room to people we would never meet. Before every broadcast she gave me one clear instruction. “When the red light turns on, you stay absolutely silent… until it turns off.”

At the time it felt like a rule. Looking back, it was really my first lesson in media. In voice. In understanding that once words enter the world, they don’t quite belong to you anymore. My mother understood that instinctively. She was vibrant, far-sighted, opinionated, the kind of woman whose presence filled a room even before a microphone amplified her voice. A true woman of the “media”.

In those years, a woman’s voice in media still carried its own quiet defiance. Broadcasting was not simply a profession, it required confidence, presence, and the courage to occupy public space with authority. My mother did it effortlessly.

(About the photo :This is a photograph I often return to My mother sitting amongst her colleagues after recording a radio play with my brother beside her looking at the camera. It captures something very powerful, motherhood and career side by side. In those days when few women worked in broadcasting it took certain fierceness to make a mark like she did.)

To me she was simply my mother, but looking back I realise she was also part of a generation of women who helped shape the sound of storytelling in our region. Women who stepped into studios and made their voices impossible to ignore.

But beyond the broadcaster people heard on radio, she was also the person who quietly shaped the way I understood courage, vulnerability, and imagination. She was, at heart, a romantic. Not in a fragile sense, but in the way people are when they believe deeply in love, in resilience, and in the idea that life’s hardships are not simply endured but transformed.

My mother had faced her own share of life’s battles, many of which she never chose. Yet I never saw her defined by them. If anything, hardship seemed to deepen her empathy and sharpen her resolve. She believed deeply in courage, not recklessness, but the willingness to step fully into life.

Once she said something in Urdu that stayed with me long after the conversation ended “Girtein hain shahsawar hee maidan-e-jung mein.” Only those who ride into the battlefield are the ones who fall. It was her quiet way of reminding me that falling is not failure. It simply means you dared to try. Growing up around a woman like that leaves an imprint.

Strong women rarely try to create smaller versions of themselves. Instead, they teach you how to find your own voice even if it trembles at first. They show you how to face pain honestly without letting it define you. She wished she could cushion every hardship for me with love. But she knew life doesn’t allow that.

Towards the end, she lost her voice. For someone whose life and identity were rooted in broadcasting, that loss could have been devastating. But even in silence, she remained unmistakably herself. Her presence still filled every room. Her smile still carried warmth and the lessons she had spent years giving me continued to echo louder than any broadcast.

Women like my mother leave something behind that is difficult to explain but impossible to erase. They become the quiet voice in your mind when you face uncertainty. The steady presence reminding you who you are when the world tries to make you forget.

Years later, when I found myself holding a microphone of my own and working in media, I realised something quietly profound. Every time I stepped into a studio, every time I wrote a story meant to travel beyond the room it was created in, I was continuing a conversation she had started.

And somewhere, in the space between memory and voice, the woman who first taught me how powerful words could be is still there. Still speaking, still guiding, and reminding me that some stories never really disappear they continue in voices that come after them. That’s what women and mothers like her do they raise voices, courage and other women. And long after they are gone, the voices they raised continue to rise, carrying their strength forward into the world.

Article by Sarah Ahmad

Multimedia storyteller and strategist focused on the ethics of marketing and the role media plays in shaping visibility, influence, and power.

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