As a toddler, my father took immense pride in me learning how to write অ,আ (Bengali alphabets) without anyone having to help me through it. As the legend goes, I apparently, quite easily learnt how to imitate the alphabets straight off my Sohoj Pat.
His pride, however, was to fade very soon.
As soon as I had settled in my pseudo Victorian boarding school, which took (and still takes) immense pride in being one of the oldest establishments (1789) in the business in the country, their Anglican ways began to rub off on me. In the beginning it was quite slow and then it was all at once.
If I have to start at the beginning, the story can be very simply put – with my very little exposure at the age of 7, every other person speaking in Hindi were non-bengalis, every north-eastern was a Chinese, every person using English as their primary mode of communication was a foreigner. In my defence, I was a child and I didn’t yet know geography. As I had entered the premises of my school, I was greeted in English, expected to communicate in English, and in fact told to as it would be next to offensive otherwise. But these are things most people from convents face. However, what is a little different about my experience comes quite literally from having to live in such an atmosphere.
Every time, in every situation, when you happen to be a minority, of any kind, your first instinct is to try and fit in. Our boarding, like I said, with its anglicized culture, housed very few Bengalis at the time. Which automatically resulted in us having to mould our ways even in the slightest. Within the first week of my stay I started making sense in English, by the second week I was eating in English, by the second month I was dressing in as westernised clothes as I could afford, and hell! by my next vacation I was apparently dreaming in English.
Gradually, the girl who was growing up watching and hearing ঠাকুমার ঝুলি & চাঁদের পাহাড় and Ray’s movies on Sunday afternoons on DD বাংলা (of course I didn’t understand them) got over them pretty quickly. If I had been spending sometime in learning my Bengali poems for elocutions and trying to read short stories along with cultivating my English, now I had moved entirely to my Grimm’s fairy tales and slowly on to my Enid Blyton. This change, not very surprisingly but quite automatically made it so much easier for me to fit in. I started relating to Anne from Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter because my condition seemed to align with theirs and I hadn’t found an equivalent in Bengali. I started hearing and learning and even performing (quite terribly to Shakira’s Whenever) English songs. I started learning about Bands and actors absolutely so foreign to me. When I came home for vacations, my father encouraged me to eat with my fork and spoon to keep up the habit and it of course made eating fish increasingly difficult and so I rarely enjoyed my fish any longer ( and this definitely does say something because I had quite a reputation of a cat as child for almost chewing up all the bones effortlessly). I started asking my father to decorate for Christmas and I even said my prayers when I was asked to, like a performance artist in front of my relatives (things you ought toa do as a child).
By the time I was in class 4, I had anglicised quite a bit. I was no longer the butt of all “bangali” jokes but voila! I was making some myself.. Every Saturday, when my father used to visit he used to bring me dinner from home and having remembered my love for fish, he almost always packed some for me. Initially they were everything I waited for. Then I began to feel embarrassed because people constantly associated Bengalis with “machlis” (fishes). At first I tried avoiding taking them for dinner. I used to try and eat my fish in front of my father so that nobody else can see. My father always wondered why and I of course could never explain and then I asked him to stop getting me fish for dinner entirely. I asked him to get me Chow mein, get me chicken, get me anything, buy me dinner even but not fishes. I made up excuses like, I cannot share a piece of fish or two with many people and eating alone is selfish and my father eventually obliged.
At around this time, I met another girl, a Bengali, who happened to be from Bangladesh (we had quite a few people from there. Very loving and beautiful people indeed) She was just about my age. We were in the same class and unlike most of my boarding mates, she was the first one from the boarding to have Bengali with me as her second language. And oh! She was good. She knew her Bangla and with pride and she was brilliant and every living day I wished to be like her. But instead of doing anything noble and supportive, I did the only thing I shouldn’t have done – I made fun of her. Because it made me look cool. And also because, (now when look back in retrospect, I understand this with the little education I have) I wanted to make her give up all that she believed in and her identity and become like me; misplaced and so ridiculously a pawn of a sort of reverse racism or a reverse bangali-ism if you may call it. I am not trying to say anybody victimised me, I may have victimised myself, but of course I didn’t know better. And I wanted nobody to know better.
The more I started to grow up, the more my habits began to settle in. They became more a part of me than I was myself a part of them. I began to literally think, talk, eat in English. Quite effortlessly by then. My lifestyle, by that point, had been influenced quite wholly by what I read and wrote and wore which were all in English and I had no complaints. People often called me ট্যাঁশ (pseudo), or they told me how the Britishers left but they left me behind as some leftover sample and even though now I understand they were quite scathing insults, I didn’t mind any of them then. I still don’t really mind. Because my colonised mind does accept these criticisms to no effect.
I came back home again and I started eating my meals and taking a piece of fish with it again. I began watching some Bengali movies and listening to some songs. I began fleetingly observing and making assumptions regarding the Bengali community. I began enjoying Durga Pujo even though Christmas still remained my favourite time of the year. And even though things did begin to change, I did understand I am stuck in my reverse.
At this point, I have come to accept my misplaced identity. I have come to regret and even wish so many things otherwise. I have come to regret not reading, not learning, not singing, not embracing enough Bangla to be a part of this community. But despite it all, I do know, I don’t really belong here. I don’t truly belong anywhere. I am just a knock off of a supposed Anglican culture and a quite rejected member of the Bengali community. I am no longer the child who used to wait for her sister to read the serialised stories from শুকতারা. I neither am much of the carol singer.
I am stuck somewhere in between, a hybrid, in a space I don’t entirely belong and never will, a half-shared, half-isolated expanse for a lifetime. A mix of the Orient and the Occident. Sometimes I feel like I belong in another time, in another era, in a cross between an English countryside and the Modernism of Paris- myself being just as conflicted as these two modes of living.
But what I truly find comfort in is how I am not alone. How my space is mine and also a shared space with million others. How my identity is not in a language, in Bengali or English but in stories. How I have always and will always find myself in between, always alone in terms of a community and always surrounded in terms of experience. How my isolation isn’t mine alone but it belongs to a certain us instead.
An International Language Day week special, where I try to elucidate my relationship with language. 🙂
Picture: Like the lights fading away, my being knits disarray.
Picture : Darjeeling tea served with crackers at the cafe I refused to visit today.
Wimpy Wallflower 