#Scurf112: When a Language Comes Calling

the alchemy of a language left behind and how some of us come to be writers

The five Ws of being a writer (but just about anything): why, from where, when, how. Are some of us born to be writers? And is that by the gift of the pen or the gift of blood? Does class, caste and access have a role to play too? What about the city you’re born in? And the education, reading you undergo as a young writer? All these and so many more things come together to refine, define and (un)make a writer. I came to think about it today as I read yet another article about Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker win for Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand).

Unfazed in the face of the win, Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell have been giving candid interviews in the medias more internationally than nationally. I read most of them, sometimes twice over as I make my way through both versions of the book. Some days I feel like a student on an assignment to know as much as one can about the book, outside of the book. I watch interviews new and old, search for podcasts, writers Shree refers to, tweets Rockwell responds to. I go to sleep thinking about the book, its story, the win, Shree among other more immediate, personal things. The book, it seems, has imprinted itself into the psyches of Indian readers.

Even non-readers, one might say so. According to publisher Rajkamal Prakashan Ret Samadhi has sold more than 35,000 copies in the last five days. That is nothing short of a gigantic turn of events. The book is a translation, a Hindi novel first, a story of a woman’s life and times and also a partition novel. It’s an homage to writers of the league of Vinod Kumar Shukl, Krishna Sobti, and Intezar Husain. But among all these things, Ret Samadhi is, at its most primal mode of existence, a true Hindi novel. Both the language and the literature of the book are a joy to behold.

The prose sings its own tune, dances to a rhythm unique to it and manages to keep the readers in its thrall for the entire 375 page run of its Hindi version. Reading the novel I am reminded of my grandmother, my mother, my mother’s aunts, my niece, my aunts, my househelp. A long lineage of women course through my mind as I recall with scant precarity, the Hindi language I grew up in the milieu of. It reminds of my first ever piece of writing, a poem I wrote for my school magazine at the age of nine, in Hindi, of the time I scribbled the name of my first boyfriend in Hindi in a letter, of the time I penciled in my own name in the last page of a Enid Blyton book in school.

In stead of my Hindi poem, my best friend’s poem was selected for the school magazine. When it came out in print, I was sad at first, even resenting her poem, quietly. But after a few days I was able to set my joy aside and share her poem with the wider world. The title of her poem, very remarkably so, was उफ़ प्रदूषण हाय प्रदूषण (oh pollution, bad pollution).

While I don’t remember much of else of it, I do remember that our school magazine featured an eclectic mix of poetry, prose and fiction, in both the languages we were taught in, at school. Hindi and English both featured in equal heaviness in print, but in the lived reality of school life, the languages did not have the same importance.

We were penalised for speaking even a word in Hindi, looked down upon when our English didn’t flow like that of other convent educated kids. There was an imperialistic strictness about shedding Hindi as a burden that will only increase with time. If someone couldn’t elocute well, parents were summoned. Teachers, friends, classmates shot disastrous, deadly, scathing glances at the kid. As if he/she was befallen. Careers, lives, whole academic report cards would be at stake. All to discourage the use of Hindi.

So much so that even the Hindi teachers, outside of classroom hours, would feel a tinge of shame when conversing in Hindi. After spending 14 years in the same school I was indoctrinated, washed in the glories of English language. When I graduated, I knew better. Even at the slightest nudge of Hindi, I would spring back a response in English. Verbally English became my lingua franca. Yet, each time I scribbled on paper, the mother tongue found its way out through the nib, bleeding into the leaves.

My penmanship was beautiful, cursive in both the languages (and even a third—mathematics). While in college I took to writing letters to a boyfriend. I would write them whole in English, perfumed by some Hindi words. When I wrote a word in Hindi, then, I’d take a deep breath in and gaze at the gorgeousness of its curves. The lushness of that line drawn atop as if giving the word its own little costume. The word would pull me not only into its literary ambience, but also to the world of the page. The smidgen of life that existed between the ink and page — I would breath there. Resting my head on the page, Hindi came to be an oasis of rest. It sang a full note for me. And it was magical.

Where then did it loose the sheen? Or was it me who lost touch? In a bid to come up against all these worldly-wise, big city kids around me, with blogspots and wordpress, did I intentionally set aside my love for my mother tongue?

Shree’s win ignites these old, now well-doused fires, within. It brings to light my most feared, very personal and well guarded fears.

In an age where writers, journalists, content brewers all take pride in googling synonyms of a well known English word, Shree had won the Booker for a Hindi novel. Late that night as I watched the live stream of the Booker ceremony, a mounting emotional cadence jolted me. I endured that familiar stab of having betrayed a once too familiar someone, for someone more trendy, cooler. Drops of tears falling from my eyes spoke the words in a language I was no longer conversant in.

In my essays for foreign publications I have mourned about having to institutionally part ways from Hindi, and my mother’s dehati (a rural dialect of Hindi). But the truth lay somewhere else. And unbidden it unearthed itself at the leap of Shree’s Booker win.

I had purposely buried my Hindi away. As a kid I was startled at the grip that English had over the world. It further cajoled me, subconsciously so, to forgo the attachment I had with Hindi. Shree’s win brought me back to all those moments, days and times when Hindi was my means to an end. When my Hindi poem was rejected, when I read all of Leo Tolstoy in Hindi alongside Premchand, when I read my first Krishna Sobti. Hindi then had served as a mode to quench the literary drought of my early childhood life. And I had swiftly given it up for the mere acquaintance with a different bhasha. How that acquaintance went from being a mere ember, to a whole fire that enveloped my existence, I hardly didn’t realise.

The essence remained. I was and still am in love with languages.

My hometown (an erstwhile industrial north Indian town way past its heydays), my class (middle class, but…), my gender (!), my caste (upper), my academic background (trying to be the best, but stuck as the second or third best) — all these made me the writer I am now. They played a crucial role in this journey, but nothing was as testing as language itself. And those were two. One I was born to and the one I adopted. Why did I choose one over the rest? How did it happen that one came to rule at the cost of the other?

Thinking, unthinking, the answers all lie in the mind, body and soul. Stirred by Shree’s win, I am encouraged to take a step in a new, definite direction. As much as I know, I don’t have a favourite language. But in my formative years, as a reader, I remember being drawn to the taste of Hindi, the texture of its words, the finish of its letters, the flourish of its reach. At the time it felt de rigueur , muddy, even quotidian. But with Shree’s win, a page has turned. I feel a change in the air. A new beckoning. A siren call. A twittering clamour.

I think of all this as I turn to the next chapter of Ret Samadhi.

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