The multitudes of languages and shame

A story about this essay

Image rights: Me

This essay thrives in shame. It was formed in my head in English, once the most foreign of foreign things. Like deodorants. Or books. But now, it is a part of me. There was a time when my tongue and my brain both talked in Odia. But Odia has vacated the small spot where it lived in my brain. Now, shame lives there. Digging in its roots. Bit by bit.

This essay is about a snake in a dark corner. Cold and unkind. Most days, it lies dormant. But that day at the theatre was not like most days. The play is set in the future, where Odia is almost dead. The protagonist, the last human Odia, speaks alive, shaking with rage, and screams atop the stage at history, government, state, and audience. For killing his beloved language. As the curtain drops, the audience gives a standing ovation. But I am frozen to my seat as the essay rears its head to strike me.

This essay is not linear. It may have a beginning, a middle and an end. But never in that order. This essay doesn’t know how to use commas, well since Odia doesn’t have the comma in that form. “And what the fuck is an Oxford comma ?” it mumbles when an editor adds a comment on Oxford comma.

This essay is a collection of swear words. This essay sniggers loudly in approval when someone says “Fuck” but looks for places to hide itself when someone says “ବାଳ ନା”.

This essay collects stories. Once upon a time, when I reached school to learn the tongue that people converse in, this essay knew Odia. It knew not to end words in abruptness. It knew to speak with the tip of the tongue pressed against the hard palate of the mouth. It knew to speak hard sounds and soft sounds. But writing was tough for it. It used to mix up the soft-sounding and hard-sounding “la”. ଫୁଲ and ଫଳ¹ were always misspelt punctuated with either Namita Miss’s laughter or anger. And so, after the tenth board exam, this essay stopped being written in Odia. Good Riddance. But did it live happily ever after?

This essay is full of conflicts. As the oppressed with Hindi, with English. As the oppressor of Sambalpuri. This essay echoes Walt Whitman's poem “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

This essay is well-read in English. It reads Camus, Dostoevsky and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and struts around spouting quotes like “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is”. But it hides the fact that they never wrote those words, not in that language. This essay pretends to be a lot of things, but it never is.

This essay is shaped like the letter J. Like my tongue after a malignant tumour was removed. This essay lost the ability to sound retroflex² consonants perfectly as its tongue was too weak to bend backwards, with a chunk missing.

This essay is unkind to me. And rude to others. Like others are rude to it when they suppress a chuckle when he walks into a room. With a priest and a rabbi. This essay is a wannabe joke. And I am so unkind to it.

This essay might live on in my daughter. Having turned two, she still speaks and thinks in Odia. Or this essay might die with me as the world starts to ask her to cross her t’s and dot her i’s, and Odia, with all its complexities, lies forgotten in the corner with me.

This essay has been a long time coming. This essay is all the languages in me. It is English. It is Hindi. It is a bit of Bengali. It is all the swear words in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. It is the words of greeting in German and Spanish. It is the foreign movies that I watch in the original language. It is Odia. It is me.

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In other news, this essay could not help but be written after I read two great essays by Raju Tai and Natasha Badhwar.

Ochre Sky Stories

keeps on giving.

1. Translates to Flower and Fruit

2. retroflex, in phonetics, is a consonant sound produced with the tip of the tongue curled back toward the hard palate. Here