On The Tip Of My Tongue
Age 12
I am sitting with a group of friends – giggling and laughing about something inane – a boy or an actor or whichever ‘scandalous’ movie scenes escaped our parents’ watchful eyes. We tease each other with decorative words from the English language, words we picked up reading, or watching scandalous movies. There is a sense of girlhood that unites only those collectively experiencing the rite of passage of adolescence. The househelp knocks and hands me the cordless intercom. She says, “Aapki mummy ka phone aaya hai.” My friends are polite enough to pause the chatter so I could talk to my mother. I pretend to be polite enough to step out of the room to tend to my call. Both parties aware that our politeness means nothing. Once outside, my tone changes from that of a South Bombay girl who softens her Rs and delicately weighs her Ds and Ts to that of one locally sourced and conglomerated from different parts of the country. “Haan, mumma. Abhi nahi. Thodi der mein ghar aaungi.” I tell my mother I will be home later. I take a deep breath and gather my thoughts, ready to inscribe once again into whatever the new topic is – in English. I enter the room.
We moved to Mumbai when I was 5 years old, already speaking Hindi, English, and crumbs of Nepalese, dregs of infancy passed in Kathmandu. My father was born and raised in Bombay to parents hailing from Punjab (India and Pakistan). My mother was born and raised in Rajasthan to parents from Pakistan (then India). My brother and I were raised here – our ancestry a smorgasbord of cultures and languages stitched into the fabric of our tongues. Quite early on, we picked up the social leeways certain languages afforded us. Given that we went to English-medium schools, we could syntactically align our thoughts in English. With enough time spent around people who shunned their other languages, I learnt all the metaphoric vocabulary to express myself in ways that I never would have in Hindi. Hindi, I reserved as the language of the house – my mother scolded us in Hindi, my father questioned our test scores in Hindi, and I fought with my brother all in Hindi. I saved the language for behind closed doors like a clandestine violence that if uncaged, would shed points from my integration into the unshakeable worship of the anglicised.
Age 27
I am more than double the age of my initial memory of shame and disguise. The battle that I fought with myself about the acceptance of one language and ostracisation of another has now expanded its battlefield. English and Hindi were the primary languages of my life. My parents argued in Punjabi and then sang songs in it too – so much of it is stapled permanently into my parlance. I learnt Marathi in school for there was no way to escape it.
I live in Brussels now. The two languages I speak the most are English and French, except on Mondays when I spend four hours practising Dutch. The sheepishness of the 12 year old who controlled her Rs has been washed over by the need to over-enunciate words for no one worships English here, they tolerate it. All those years of taut control on my speech feel like a speck of dust – I gargle my French Rs and let the Dutch Gs slip in my throat. My buccal muscles have stretched to accommodate new sounds. People who surround me here – whose speech mannerisms have snuck into mine – grew up speaking and studying in the same language that their parents did, and those before them. Their language comes with a past. They wear it like a crown that never weighs heavy on their head. They speak French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish with an ownership that comes with heredity; of never being told they were lesser than. They do not know what it is like to internalise a language that often feels borrowed. They ask me, “Does English really feel like your mother tongue? Shouldn’t it be Hindu (sic)?” At times, this feels like an assault – I am once again the South Bombay girl who moved there but had no roots there. Other times, it is the privilege of ignorance. My linguistic identity within and without my country remains political. No matter the extent to which I can eloquently express myself, the brown of my skin does not turn pale in winter.
English came to my grandparents as an imposition, a cruel theft of all things that were no longer their own. But, as the second generation who never lived through the partition, English naturally occupies the throne of my speech, even though the throne has been split in half. In so doing, Hindi took a backseat for me. School was English, social life was English, even entertainment was English. When you are young and immersed in a clique where everyone speaks the ‘coloniser’s tongue’ fluently, you are desperate to be a part of these “polished folks”. Anyone who speaks Hindi with a certain flair, we call it a lehja. I always believed that my two primary languages were a tug-of-war – if I pulled English too hard, all my lehja in Hindi would be lost. So I let it, for a big part of my life.
I live in a country with a past on the other side of colonisation, my outlook on my mother tongues has changed. It has evolved from a tug-of-war to a robust elastic, there is infinite room to fit both eloquently in my mouth. It took months, even years, of being around people who never learnt to be ashamed of what their homes sounded like for me to accept that the sound of my voice in any language would still sound as sweet.
Now, I’m sitting in a room full of grown-ups. Neither of us is 12 but the conversation remains the same – gossip, scandalous movies, and tiresome boys. My friend hands me my phone from the table, my mother is calling. I remain seated. My company hushes their tone. I pick up and say, “Haan, mumma. Bas doston ke saath hoon. Baad mein baat karte hain.” The conversation picks up once again. No more deep breaths.