Guest column | What’s in a language, it’s feelings that matter

Placing the duster on the floor, I allowed the photographs to teleport me to a remote town in Kerala, which I had visited around 20 years ago.

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.” The words of Italian poet Cesare Pavese’s flashed through my mind as I flipped through an old photo album, which I had unearthed during one of my house-cleaning sprees.

There I was in God’s Own Country, accompanied by my knight in shining armour, and almost year-old toddler, wondering why I was there? (Representative Image/HT File)

Placing the duster on the floor, I allowed the photographs to teleport me to a remote town in Kerala, which I had visited around 20 years ago. In one of the photographs, I am sitting in the sparsely furnished first-floor apartment of a two-storeyed house in Shornur, a small town in Palakkad district of Kerala. It was our first day there and I was already feeling like the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. It was my idea to come to this place for a month-long training in Panchkarma at a local hospital.

There I was in God’s Own Country, accompanied by my knight in shining armour, and almost year-old toddler, wondering why I was there? We were neither familiar with the people, nor the terrain. We did not speak Malayalam, and more often than not, the locals failed to comprehend what we were saying. Looking at my toddler, who was already missing familiar surroundings and faces, I regretted my decision all the more.

My husband’s colleague, who lived three hours away, had arranged the accommodation as well as some basic amenities. However, I felt as if I were marooned on a deserted island. From a distance, musical notes floated in through the open window and the lyrics sounded like Greek to my ears. I wondered how would I survive for a whole month in this

The landlord downstairs was a bank manager and spoke a smattering of English, which was not much of a solace. The next morning, the bell rang as I was getting ready to leave for the hospital, my husband opened the door to find an English newspaper placed on the floor alongside a casserole full of homemade ‘puttu’– a south Indian delicacy. Every alternate day, the landlord without saying anything left a dish of some delicacy or the other at our doorstep

I remember, one afternoon, on returning from the hospital, I found my little girl missing from the apartment. My husband took me to the terrace and pointed towards our neighbour’s compound. We hardly knew them, but their children had requested my husband to let them play with our daughter. Our little girl was crawling around their compound, calling their grandmother ---who was putting morsels of food into her tiny mouth --- ‘amma’- short for ‘achamma’.

One evening, on our way ‘home’ from the market, we met an elderly lady who was fluent in English (the only one in the locality) for she was the widow of an IAS officer. She invited us for a cup of tea. It was in her house that I was introduced to the matrilineal system prevalent in some communities of the state. When it was time for us to leave, the neighbours come out to bid us farewell and offered parting gifts. Some of them even accompanied us to the local railway station. In that moment, I realised that human beings do need language to communicate, but it is not the only means to communicate.

sonrok15@gmail.com

The writer is an associate professor at SD College, Ambala Cantt