It's a Wednesday night and I am proctoring a statistics exam. The professor is a petite, slight woman from India. I had been talking with her daughter whom she had brought with to the exam who wasn't older than eleven. We complained together about the woes of fourth grade math and how art class was definitely way more fun. The professor came up to me afterwards, "I'm glad you talked to my daughter; before, she seemed so.... " she stopped, in a way that I had seen a thousand times before in the elderly of my own family. It was this search, this wandering endeavor to grasp at a word that did not exist. At least in English. It's a frequent thing for a linguist's brain. However, for a person whose native tongue is no longer the currency of life, it is never ending. Suddenly I am transported back to a thousand family parties with my great aunts and uncles on my mom's side. Brilliant people who could be rattling off a whole stream of jargon only to stop indefinitely in search of a word as powerful and potent and perfectly fitting as the one in the language they grew up on. They would stop to try to explain it to me, "you know Samar, kind of like..., but more..." and you could feel their frustration at finding a word in English that held only a pale comparison in their minds.
December 28th, 2014
We are in a Jeep, driving through the countryside of India to get to the small town my mother was born in. The name of the town means "New York" which is almost kind of laughable in its irony because I actually could not think of a place more unlike New York.
We wind through the roads and it's almost stereotypically idyllic as we see women working rice paddies, little girls in braids down their backs and school uniforms riding on motorcycles five at a time, and brightly colored saris on the women selling produce on the huts on the sides of the road. There are green, green hills dotted with colorful flowers that come rolling down, and the sky is this shade of early 2000s prom dress pastel blue. The trees have grown all the way together to create this tunnel of extra fresh oxygen to combat the humid, dense air above the road we are driving on. The men and women on the sides of the road sit by their vending stalls and drink bottomless cups of tea. And if I ever snickered before when learning about the concept of a collective conscience, I was sobered by its existence as this place I had never once set foot in before, this rhythm of life that was so drastically different from the way I had grown up, somehow felt like a warm embrace.
We are met in the town by a man on a motorcycle named Saleem. In true Indian fashion, apparently he is a distant uncle of mine. I shouldn't be surprised by now, but I can't help but be. I am always amazed at the depth of the Indian value for relationships. Their ability to maintain even the most distant of kinships is remarkable, I'm reminded of how any free time my grandmother has is going through her worn phone book to call every distant relative near and far to check up. In the Urdu language, there is a specific name for every familial relationship imaginable, connections that aren't even deemed worthy of maintaining here at home. I think that speaks a lot to the nature of the Indian people.
The man on the motorcycle invites us to his home and inevitably we are force fed and made to drink endless rounds of tea to the point of tooth decay. No, I'm serious. These people are the masters of guilt-tripping and force feeding--they have made it an art. As I sit in a room with two girls who are distant cousins of mine, I stare at them closely looking for the proof of the blood we share. I find nothing but the same warm shade of brown in our eyes. As I sit and converse with these people, I find myself amazed that family works this way. Decades without meeting, utterly different lives in opposite parts of the world, but a smattering of similar red and white blood cells renders us as guests treated with utmost dignity and love. As we prepare to leave, my Aunt looks at me and searches my face, as if she were trying to commit it to memory. She pulls me back and squeezes my hand hard and looks at me, her eyes filling up. And in that moment, I know the unspoken sentence between us, that there is a very good chance we may never meet again. And as I smile and hug her goodbye, I sit in the car and wonder how it is that the world works this way. How you can meet someone for the very first time and last time all in the span of an hour.
As we drive back through the countryside, I am listening to my mother talk to my relatives in that classic Indian way. The inflections in their voices go up and down like the scalloped hedges of the palace bushes. It is a tennis match of sarcasm and colorful analogies, sly wit and humble charm. It’s only mildly more intense than what I grew up with--if I asked my mother if she loved me, it would be a solidly thick, sarcastic "no" immediately--but for the first time I can appreciate it. It represents a culture of people that were incredibly adaptive, resilient, witty, and strong. People that survived everything and did it with a rueful sarcastic remark or two and a smile. People that were smart, kind, and hardworking. People, that I have the honor of coming from.
Growing up, the precariousness of language has always fascinated me. With three sentences, you can scar someone for life or leave them inspired forever—or if you’re an Indian parent, both, all at once, over and over. I have always been amazed by how the differences in language, produce different strengths and weaknesses of their respective speakers. For example, English is a very quantitative language, it is precise and scientific; incredible in its efficiency. But for a poet in English, there are frequent lexical gaps. There is love, longing, remorse, passion, but beyond that, the words to convey love and pain are rather few. In English the strength of writing depends a lot on the structure of the writing to convey an idea. Contrastingly, in Urdu, there is a word “parsu” which could mean anytime from ten years ago, to Tuesday of last week, to four years in the future. The word “kal” can mean either yesterday or tomorrow, and even that is pretty lenient. It could mean two days ago or four days from now. Urdu’s quantitative measures would drive a scientist to jump off of the tallest point in Agra Fort. But when it comes to expression of the self, Urdu is bursting with words. The word “fanaa” means destruction of the self through love, but with a positive connotation. It’s sort of like loving someone so much that your regard for yourself is thrown by the wayside. The word “takalluf” means the politeness of a guest to their host’s offers. As a teen sitting through family parties on my mom’s side, I was often frustrated as I listened to my relatives converse in Urdu about a topic I knew in English like love, disappointment, or frustration. However, the words they used in Urdu were words I could not grasp fully because they did not exist in the language I grew up speaking. Words with connotations and subtle undertones that required an immersion into the culture of my people to fully comprehend. This winter, over the dusty streets in the market nestled beneath the Charminaar, I think I finally got a sliver of comprehension into this complex, vivid, nuanced culture I come from.
What I am trying to say is this: when you know where you come from, you know your weaknesses, your predispositions, your baggage, and your biggest strengths. When you know these things, and you have faith and spirituality in your life, you are absolutely and utterly powerful. You can take on anything life hands you. A lot of parents try to transmit culture to their kids in this prepackaged bundle on the grounds that it is this slowly disappearing world they have to help preserve. Which it is. But that makes it seem like this un-relatable burden for your child. Culture is different from faith. And those two things cannot be transmitted hand in hand, because there is a good chance it will make your child want to run away from both. But culture has to be seen by your child as this comprehensive understanding of the gears within them, like a way to make their seemingly un-relatable quirks relatable. Because no one wants to feel like this oddity, we all want to know that there is a reason for the way we work the way we do. Knowing that is the doorway for slowly understanding and coming to terms with your biggest weaknesses and natural predispositions. Understanding these things will be your child's biggest asset in life.
The word the statistics professor finally chose was "morose". A word that exists in both Urdu and English and means “sullen, displeased, unhappy”. Sometimes that bridge between two seemingly contrasting places can be built with more ease that we anticipate.
