Language Barrier

The closer I am getting towards my thirtieth birthday, which is a little over a year away, I am becoming more and more like my parents when they were in their thirties.

Those days we had just arrived in New Delhi from Calcutta, their hometown, and my homesick parents were determined to surround themselves with as much Bengali-ness as possible. Right from the location my father chose for our house, Chittaranjan Park--originally a refugee colony for Bengalis forced to flee, what was then, East Pakistan--to the food my mother cooked at home, to what we listened to. Of all these vestiges from Calcutta that we desperately hung on to, it was the music that depressed me the most. While it is sacrilegious for any Bengali to not be obsessively in love with Tagore’s music, or Rabindrasangeet as it is better known, it tired me. The words and emotions were too heavy handed, most of it sounded too melancholic, and I really couldn’t be made to care one way or other. The same ritual was repeated when satellite television entered our home. By then, we had moved out of our Chittaranjan Park house, but because of access to channels directly from Calcutta, the house was infiltrated by not just sounds but visuals as well. And I protested. Nearly every time that a spectacled, harmonium playing singer took center stage and went about business. Of course all these rituals quadrupled every time that we actually went to Calcutta. Again, while authentic Bengali food was closest to my heart, Rabindrasangeet and most of Bengali cinema tired me. (Except Ray of course.) One evening, while in my unruly teens, I went so far as to say to my grandfather, “All this is repulsive.” It also stopped our conversation for an hour, which was a big deal, considering that my granddad and I have very rarely needed anyone else in our sphere of conversation.

All that was before America happened.

Youtube has one of the finest collection of black and white Bengali cinema, and since the last few months or so, not only have I combed through most of them, I have inflicted them on the only person I can…my roommate. Fortunately for me, she is half Bengali, and enjoys good cinema. Last night, it occurred to me that I was doing the exact same thing as my parents did. Surround myself with the roots lest they disappear in a country where I get to use my mother tongue only twice every week – while chatting with Ma and Baba on Saturday and Sunday mornings. A complaint that my creative writing friends have heard sometimes is that my head seems jumbled with words from English, and I cannot think anymore because I need to do something in Bangla in order to be able to get back to English. Which either means putting Bangla music on a never ending loop, or watching back to back 1950s movies, or at the very least, reading a Bengali newspaper or webzine to ensure that the language and I are still old friends, and that I haven’t forgotten a letter or two.

So finally I think I have forgiven my parents for all those afternoons and evenings when their very act of switching on a tape player or TV made me cringe. I do have one question for them though: every movie that I have so far seen of my grandparents’ generation or from the time when they (my parents) were very young, inevitably shows the man and the woman get married almost instantly or at least reach the conclusion that “this was the final and only one” by the end of the movie. Why did things change so dramatically and drastically within my parents’ generation that by the time the next one appeared, cinema as well as real life began telling us again and again “this is not the final one, this cannot be the final one, but there is nothing to be depressed about, after all the options are unlimited.” It would be interesting to see what sociologists have to say about this.