...And of Language

B. stayed with me about two weeks. She was on her first visit from India to the US. I was about to write “maiden visit” and then realized how easily I had slipped back into Indian/British English which would be incomprehensible to readers here. During B.’s stay, I uttered words that I had not used in a long time, like “passed out” from college. And most of all, I became bi-lingual again. B. and I chatted in Hindi and English, sentences beginning in one language and ending in the other, and also slipped in words from our respective languages, Bengali (mine) and Tamil (hers).

Growing up, being bilingual was no extra-ordinary thing for us, middle-class children of socialist India. English was the language the British left behind, English was the language of the working world, of incomprehensible bureaucratese, English was the language of the music on our cassette and record players and was the words coming out of improbable-looking (to us) men and women in American movies.

But, our mother tongues were the languages of our sly humor, of our landscapes, of our identity. At home, my mother would break into Rabindrasangeet and would recite verses of Tagore’s poems, for reasons ranging from the weather to her moods. There were no words in English adequate to describe the beauty of the monsoon rain or the golden harvest of Baisakhi. Only Hindi or Bengali or Tamil or another Indian language could yield satisfactory images of our world – rain clouds as thick and dark as a woman’s long hair, an aanchal, “kelenkari” (social stigma). And then, of course, there were movie scenes that were utterly hilarious only if you were bilingual or had some idea of the interplay of English and Indian languages.

But equally importantly, bi-lingualism made us mentally flexible, cognitively agile. My linguistic nimbleness is fading now after years of monolingual English, but it comes back now and then. Such as when confronted by Indians of a certain age in shopping malls who hesitate and ask me in broken English for “the lift”. Unlike many monolingual others who gape at them, dumbfounded, I know that they are asking for “the elevator”. I require an approximation to comprehend, not absolutely exact words in a language. In another life, back in India, that’s exactly what I used to say: “Where’s the lift?” On the other hand, I still need more elaboration when one of my kids demands, on an almost daily basis, “Where’s the thing for that thing?”