Languages That Flow in My Veins
On the said and the unsaid.
Many languages flow in my veins, but not all have a vocabulary. There’s a language for pain, a language for shame, a language for joy, and a language for love. Ah, the sweet feeling of love – can there be a language for that?
The first time I heard Shiv Kumar Batalvi recite his poem was the first time I fell in love with a man. Yes – in love with a man. How else can I describe that feeling? I have no other word for that.
Wittgenstein popularly said, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.
My world is too big to be held in the gentle embrace of a language. My language is the language of Ghalib’s desire. Bahut nikle mere armaan, lekin phir bhi kam nikle. No matter how much I try, something always remains unsaid, something always lies buried.
So, I let others speak my emotions while I sit in a corner, silently, always wondering – so this is the shape of that feeling? This is how it looks in the form of words and pauses.
It terrifies me how alone I am, how there’s a world within me that will never find words, that will always be devoid of any structure and shape. Nobody will ever know how I love, how I experience fear, and how I feel joy. But then, who or what is this ‘I’, if not just a letter on a white paper?
Can language really define who ‘I’ am? Can words give shape to my always dissolving, metamorphosing self?
I associate languages with feelings. Punjabi, to me, is the language of longing, of hidden truths, and of my personal history. Every time someone asks me what my mother tongue is, I tell them it’s Punjabi. But it isn’t.
My mother tongue is Jhangi – named after the region in Pakistan from where my grandparents migrated to India. I cannot tell the difference between Punjabi and Jhangi. All I can tell is that there’s a part of my history, my zubaan, which got left behind somewhere in the midst of disruption, conflict, progress and change.
Jhangi is the language of sorrow.
Hindi, that’s the language I grew up with. But my Hindi was always the Hindi of everyday affairs. It was the language of convenience, of community. English came into my life much later. It came carrying a sense of urgency, like a superfast train I had nearly missed. I had to get onto it, lest I miss the destination success.
Somehow, I was always stumbling and slipping. I didn’t know how to balance the sharp-edged English inside my tender brain. Its edges would leave occasional abrasions. Yet, I continued to make space for it. And English expanded to take up that space, but it couldn’t flush out the soft nostalgia of Punjabi and Hindi.
“I think slower when I think in Hindi,” I told my peers in the writing workshop I was attending. Hindi also alters my sense of touch, taste, and vision. I see a sepia world when I see it in Hindi. In Hindi, I walk effortlessly, lightly, with awareness of each step.
Hindi is the language of comfort.
But Jhangi? I don’t know what its texture feels on the tongue. I am afraid I will never know. Just like I will never know my mother’s inner world because we don’t have a shared language to describe all our feelings. She will never read my words. I will never see her thoughts take a shape I can trace. Despair.
And yet, she probably knows more than the world will ever know. She knows what I felt as a child when I slept with my hand, curled into a fist, and gently placed it on her cheek. There’s no language to describe some emotions. Touch has its own language, just like a lover’s gaze, and a companion’s laughter. Language is music; and silence.
John Koenig coined the term Sonder in his book ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’. It means that everyone we meet, and everyone we don’t, carries a life within them which is as real, and as vivid as your own.
The only way I can see everyone’s world is through their words and their expression. This is why language fascinates me. It reminds me that I am only seeing this world through a keyhole – there’s so much that eludes me.
It was my second month in Hyderabad when a man, my Uber driver, allowed me a peek into his inner world. I had limited knowledge of the area to give him appropriate directions, and my unfamiliarity with Telugu didn’t help either.
After five minutes of confusion, he said to me – “mai idhar khada hu jidhar jhaad ko maar diya hai.” It took me a few seconds to process what he had just said. He was talking about the tree at the end of the street that had been cut down to make space for a new building.
I was amused to hear how he framed the sentence. His Hindi may have been broken, but his language wasn’t. His language was the language of humanness. In his language, the tree wasn’t cut. It was killed - It was a living, breathing organism whose life was abruptly forfeited. As I walked towards the end of the street, I saw the tree branches scattered all over, I saw its trunk chopped into smaller blocks, and I saw violence. I saw cruelty. I saw death.
For a moment, I saw through his eyes.
There are many languages that flow in my veins, but not all of them find an expression. They live within me, in hibernation – part of a deep void, of confusion, and wonder. But, I hope, that on days filled with mundaneness, unknown pieces of my language tumble out unexpectedly, and add some meaning, fill some gaps, in someone else’s world. And I wish the same for me.
This essay was written in response to a prompt during the Ochre Sky Workshop by Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai.
This is a masterpiece, Namit. For someone who's a language enthusiast, every word struck a mellifluous chord. Bravo.
So beautiful and poetic. Lovely writing Namit.