I HAVE discovered a whole heap of people who are as culturally confused as I am out there. I met them at my new Urdu evening class a few weeks ago, after I decided it was shameful that I spoke in my mother tongue with the same ability as a five-year-old.

I had met another linguistically challenged British Asian woman at a dinner party and we both decided we regretted how far we had taken that youthful desire to fit in too far when we distanced ourselves from anything "effnik" and now we wanted to reconnect.

She had a three-year-old from a mixed relationship and was concerned he would grow up to be a Brit rather than the Asian-Catholic-Brit that was part of his parental heritage. So she decided she wanted to learn Urdu to teach him.

I, on my part, had felt a bit rubbish ever since I'd gone back to Pakistan for the first time as an adult a few years ago and couldn't communicate with my cousins, aunties and uncles or had to rely on their broken English if I wanted a conversation. I think they had regarded me as a peculiar sort of "brown memsahib" and had never met a women who looked the part of an Asian but didn't act it.

I had imagined I was the only one to speak broken, infantile Urdu until I arrived at my first lesson and realised I was nearly top of the class.

It was full of successful Asians who had obviously accomplished lots by assimilating, perhaps at the cost of leaving their parents' cultural pasts behind. If I thought I spoke bad Urdu, these lawyers, bankers and executives couldn't string two words together. When I took in loads of food in tupperware to share with classmates - a typically Asian food-loving gesture - they looked at me like I was a peasant.

But I think they were there for the same reasons I was. Because they didn't feel Asian enough, disconnected from their roots and were attempting to integrate something of their parents' backgrounds so they could pass it on to their own kids. And maybe they were also there to be part of a collective, modernised face of Asian Britain.

Until I joined the class, I had only had one other Asian friend, who went "trad" on me by getting an arranged marriage last year.

Now we have begun to get together for themed Asian nights, where we have an unwritten agreement that only browns are welcome. We listen to Bollywood music, whose Hindi or Punjabi lyrics we don't quite understand, we eat out at Indian restaurants and we speak about our shared experiences - in broken Urdu. Tonight we're going to see Bride and Prejudice - the Hindi version.

After half a lifetime of trying to escape the odd ethnic bits of me that I tried desperately to shed at school, I have never felt so good about being a British Asian, thanks to my new best friends. I might even buy myself a sari.