"How much Bengali do you know now?" one of my wife's relatives asks me as we are in Guwahati to attend a function. The event is being held because we are in Guwahati. There is no other reason. Bengalis don’t need a reason to throw a party. "Ektu-Ektu," I reply as fluently as I possibly can. The whole group laughs before regrouping to judge me. (Ektu-Ektu means a little bit.)
My wife has been bugging me forever to learn Bengali. I can understand it a bit now, but I am still not confident enough to speak. "One day," I tell her. She, on the other hand, has started understanding Marwari now. I think she is smarter than I am. No, I am just kidding. But what if she is?
I am at my friend's place. His mother has asked me to sit and wait as my friend is still in the shower. "Do din baad naah rya si," she jokes in her typical Punjabi-Hindi mixture before heading to the kitchen. I glance around quickly and decide to park my body on an awkwardly placed sofa in an overly-furnished living room. It's Delhi; we don't believe in minimalism. Walls exist to get hammered down with calendars, paintings, and broken badminton racquets. The TV table is crammed with various useless things, including the TV.
Aunty is back with leftover Diwali snacks and tea. "Fer settle ho gaya Mumbai ich?" she asks me, trying to start a conversation that will die after exactly two minutes. "Ji aunty, 6 saal ho gaye ab toh," I reply. Some more conversation happens, and I ask her not to be conscious of her Hindi.
"Aap Punjabi mein bol lo, main samajh jaunga."
"Arey nahi, ab toh aadat ho gayi si, Hindi-Punjabi ki."
She tells me how she can't even understand her pind di Punjabi now. "Wo Punjabi toh bachpan mein hi chhod di. Ye wali toh crash course hai," she says in near-perfect Hindi as her son arrives, and we bid her adieu for the rest of the night. "Savere masi nu len jaana hai 7 baji airport," she tells him as he puts the car in reverse. I smile; she has been living in Delhi for over 40 years now.
"Kataa baji aashi? 8 bajyaun peli aajaiyi nahin toh papa risaan bale-la." At what time will you come back? Come before 8; otherwise, your father will get pissed off.
My mother tells me this as I am going out to play at 4 in the afternoon. I am 14. "Thik hai," I shout back. I never spoke Marwari until I was about 16.
I was brought up in Delhi, and my dad used to speak to me only in Hindi. If he knew English, I suspect he would have spoken to me only in English. Even though my mother tried to teach me a little bit of Marwari, her attempts failed as all my friends were either Punjabi or Hindi speakers, and hence I had nobody to practice my Marwari with. It was only a few years later when my body was shipped to Kota to pursue my family's dream to see me become an engineer that I learned Marwari. In Kota, I realized two things: a) I can't do IIT as Counter-Strike is more important, and b) No two people speak Marwari the same way.
There is Nagauri Marwari, then there is Ajmeri, and then there is Ganganagar and Jodhpuri, even small towns like Churu and Sardarshahar and Deedwana spoke their versions of this language. Since Kota had kids from all parts of Rajasthan, I picked the easiest words/grammar of every Marwari dialect and made my own version of that language. My short stay in Kota was over in three months, and although I was supposed to learn Chemistry there, I took Marwari back with me. Even though my version still heavily relies on Hindi, I am extremely proud of the fact that I can hold a conversation in Marwari.
Language has always fascinated me. I don't even know how many times I have pledged to learn Bengali to read the original works of Tagore. Or even Japanese, for that matter. After finishing Murakami novels, I always have this urge to a) never read him again as it's depressing, and b) to re-read him in Japanese. If it's this beautiful in English, how beautiful it must be in the language it was originally written? I wonder. And sometimes, when I am in the company of solitude, I get this sudden urge to cram all the words of Urdu. I don't want to stop reading Ghalib or Faiz just because I don't know the meaning of Taskeen or Iztiraar. How maghmoom and ghamgeen it would be if he gets to know that I paused his sher and started googling.
But alas, my small mind can only learn inshallah and mashallah, enough to appreciate the shers, but not enough to understand them. A friend of mine understands Urdu very well but speaks it very... incorrectly. The purists will kill themselves if they ever hear him speak, but as far as I am concerned, he is my only connection to the Urdu world. And what even is a language without speakers? Just a script. It's our interpretation that is still keeping all of these languages alive.
It's my friend's mom whose crash course in Punjabi is keeping the language alive in her household. It's that incorrect-Urdu-speaking friend who makes you want to learn the language. It's me who will someday teach his kids the Churu-Nagauri-Deedwana-Ajmeri Marwari before sending them to Kota.
At night, before sleeping, my wife and I solve the NYT Crossword. It has become a ritual, and we have started cracking it in under 30 minutes. At least, there is one language we both are decent at. One of these nights, I ask her if I would ever be able to learn Bengali a bit more than ektu-ektu. She replies "मन कोन ठा" in perfectly fluent Marwari and switches off the light. It means "I don't know." I sigh. Even I don't know. “One day”, I tell myself before turning on my Kindle. Tonight, I want to read Parsai, not because he is funny, but because it’s in Hindi.
bhai apse inspire hokar likhna shuru kiya h, please take a look at it.
I feel a special connection with this place. It's ironic how beautiful a relationship you can have with someone or something if they are incapable of having a disagreement with you and carry no expectations. Maybe that is the reason why we like admiring people after their death. Well, mostly we do.
As I stand in the presence of the tree, it feels as though it gazes at me, as if it enjoys my company, or at least, I like to believe so. Sometimes, I would prefer a beautiful lie over a harsh truth that can shatter everything apart. Perhaps, that's why Ghalib wrote: "हम को मालूम है जन्नत की हक़ीक़त लेकिन दिल के ख़ुश रखने को 'ग़ालिब' ये ख़याल अच्छा है"
full post👇
https://shivam3.substack.com/p/that-one-tree?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Bro the line about your Father teaching you Hindi rather than Marwari felt like a personal pain; because its the same for many Bhojpuri speakers whose parents spoke with them in Hindi since the beginning and that's because they didn't knew English.