languages

At birth, she was declared destined to be the learner and lover of languages by a doctor who she would never see again in her life, in a room that would burn down years later due to an electrical fire, in a memory her mother would carelessly bestow upon her one birthday.

Since childhood, she was taught her national language of Hindi, a language she would mindlessly use, as though it rolled off her tongue out of sheer habit and memory. And yet, in the seven decades she would go on to live, no one would ever consider her knowledge of her country’s language to be a skill, a proficiency. Never was it something that made her unique, or different. It was a part of her that she shared with a billion other people on the planet, but never herself.

Quality education demanded of her to learn the language left to them in scraps, a language that commanded, ordered, and orchestrated the slaughter of hundreds of her ancestors. She would sit for hours with her mother, slowly learning how to enunciate the long words using her small mouth, and brittle teeth, with different alphabets making different sounds each time. In her years later her only salvation would be using the art of imitation, of learning how to pronounce the same words by absorbing hours of media, theatre, music. She would try, riled with frustration, for the English language to come off her as an act of nonchalance, in vain. In the
quiet corners of her heart, she would forever remember that it was a language of necessity, of opportunity, but never of love.

The first language she ever loved was her own mother tongue. The sweetness of its diction called out to her; she felt an unending sense of peace and security when she would immerse herself in it. A language replete with strength, courage and fearlessness, it seemed to be tailor-made for her own reckless soul, as though someone had carefully cut and stitched together pieces of the silkiest fabric, only for her. Spoken everywhere around her house, it would, however, be decades before she would ever start using it as hers, as something she could proudly display, rather than comprehend in conversations. It was not while still living in her birthplace that she ever understood the hunger, the desperation, the craving for a language. No, it was many moons after, when she would go halfway around the globe and find herself living with all the freedom in the world, with no grandparents or relatives bugging her about being more aware of her culture and her roots. It was only then she realised the loneliness that loomed with the lack of a language she had ignored for most of her life. It was then she would understand why her parents would strike up conversations in Punjabi with strangers on roads
and malls, why they insisted on visiting Gurudwaras every weekend. It was then that she first started freely speaking the language, stealing it for herself, and holding on for the rest of her life.

As a young student in middle school, she took on the French language for the first time because of the thrill it offered to her. The curiosity of learning a language not because of any rusted chains tied to her wrists, but because she could because she wanted to, made her fall in love with it. For the next seven years, she would meticulously study the language. But as all things do, what started out as untainted hope, dissolved into furious pestilence. Self-study lessons turned
into tuitions turned into language certifications; hours and hours of her life would go into pleasing a language that refused to give back, like a stubborn child. She would reinforce to herself that it was doable, that she still loved the language, and that one day, it would benefit her. But somewhere, in the depths of her own consciousness, she recognized the fading of the spirit of the young girl that once set out on a journey to learn the language of art, fashion and everything classy. For decades after the language would stay with her, indeed allowing her to utter some recycled version of it during her European trips, a memento of childhood zeal.

A radical lover of reading, she discovered Greek literature as an evolving teenager. A journey that began on the unlit back shelves of an old, local bookstore when her fingers brushed the leather bound cover of The Iliad, would be the first one she would ever cherish till the grave. Immersing herself in tattered copies of The Odyssey, Daphnis and Chloe, Metamorphoses, Medea, she would despairingly hunt for some of literature’s finest. The desperate desire to learn the language blossomed in the pits of the night under reading lamps and sore eyes, replete with passion and determination. Scrupulously, she hunted and curated every resource she could scavenge the internet for, spending the early hours of dawn and the forgotten hours of dusk learning the language. She read through the past, and the past’s tomorrow, learning about the blueprint that created communication in civilizations. Finishing bundles of pages with practice, it was also the language she forgot the earliest, losing the accent from her tongue, forgetting the liaisons and the pauses. But never, never once in her life did she regret drowning herself in a language that she discovered only for herself, and no one else.

She learnt Bengali out of love. She met him when she was in her late twenties, past having the time for learning something new, too burnt out to plunge herself into the depth of discovery. But it was the way he spoke his own mother tongue, stressing on the plosives and remarkably articulating the syllables, laughing at the end of every sentence as if it was a joke too private to be shared with the world. She had never felt it before, the urge to learn a language to communicate with a part of someone that could never come out in any other linguistic choice, a
persona solely reserved for when you spoke that language. And so she did it, not for herself but for him, to meet him and understand him, and in extension, to fall in love with a language she never fathomed to learn. This time, she did it bit by bit, word by word, phrase by phrase. She did not start with the alphabet, or the grammar, or the tenses. No, she learnt this language in stolen conversations in a cafe with a hot cup of coffee, in cream-coloured rooms with yellow lights, on two-hour-long video calls. She learnt this language in pieces, and he completed her incomplete sentences for her. This language she kept in her heart always, never occurring it once after he was no more, but always smiling when she heard a couple bickering in a language she made theirs, a decade ago.

She first understood the plight of being a mother when she first saw her daughter writhing in tears on the edge of her mahogany wood, four-poster bed. Now having lived over four decades on the planet, she was oblivious and dispassionate to everything but the routine she adopted to in the eleven years since childbirth. And so, it was her daughter for whom she learned the language of culture and joy, the language of Spanish. She believed it was her duty to help her own flesh and blood who was struggling to cement a future, just because she was failing to perform in a linguistic subject. Shedding her own curiosity and resolve, she simply adhered to the very same textbooks her daughter studied from— learning the language from the scratch, completing the exercises given and learning until she could pass the very same tests her daughter had brought home with a failing grade. Every once in a while she would wonder about the irony of life in between her learning sessions, a part of herself, her mesh, her body, distressed by the study of something she has done her entire life. But it was not her job, she would always conclude, to force her daughter to fit her mould. No, she could do whatever she liked. And so, she learnt a language, and for the first time in her life, taught it to someone else. Her daughter would go on to become a great lover of the sciences, and a successful researcher, never once speaking a language more than she had to, what she had learnt, long after her mother left the planet.

A frail woman with her heart gone blue, she learnt her final language eleven months before she passed. The journey began with a gift from an old friend, a childhood friend from her school time, on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday. Wrapped in glistening sheets of blue and gold was a copy of An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura. An I-Novel traces the life of its author, a woman from Tokyo whose family moved to New York City when she was twelve. Twenty years later, she hopes to return to Tokyo and become a writer, writing in Japanese and rediscovering her language and culture along the way. A novel with an ethereal cover, it was written in Japanese. For the last time in her life, she would find within her the resolve to learn again, this time to read. Now rendered unable to do most of the work she could tirelessly do as a young woman, it took her months before she could even translate and understand the opening paragraph of the novel. But it was here, when she had the endless power to fuel her own knowledge, when she held the potency of communicating with millions of new people on this vast planet, that she felt the life creep back into her body. Eleven months later as she finished the last page of her novel and safely stored it on her crimson bookshelf, she rested at night with the hope that came along with discovery. A discovery she knew all too well, and more so now that she had been with Minae through her own struggles with her language.

She slept that night with the thought of the doctor, who seven decades ago had informed her mother of her life in languages, and departed with eight languages on the tip of her mouth, and a lifetime of memories they had brought her, elatedly breathing in her tired heart.