from the archives

Ever since I moved to Rotterdam, I have had one close Indian friend who studies with me and a couple who lived in my building. One of them was Gujarati, which was just the best feeling ever because I never had to translate a single thought when talking to him, but they all moved away last year. When I came back after this summer, my classmate too was on exchange, which meant I had no Indian friends who I could make aloo paratha with and converse in Hindi and discuss how Kareena Kapoor is an icon. However, I recently started working at an Indian restaurant. Half of my team is Dutch and the other half is Indians or Pakistanis. So, most of them speak Hindi, which is nice because I feel like I’m not too far from home anymore but none of them are from Gujarat. 

Anyways, that’s just some context. 

Last week at peak rush hour I was looking for a spoon and one of my colleagues asked me what was I looking for, without much thought I said chamchi not chamach: the Hindi word for it or lepel in Dutch or plain simple spoon. I said chamchi and he looked at me, confused. I immediately self-corrected and said- “oh sorry, the Gujarati in me came out for a second.” 

This morning as I wait for my coffee to brew, I realise it’s been three months since I last spoke to someone in my mother tongue. I mean sure I call home and I speak to my parents and my grandma and my aunts and my friends in Gujarati, but it’s been three months since I’ve left Gujarat, and the comfort of my language. It’s different when you’re talking to someone on a phone call or on a video call than when you’re sitting in front of someone decoding their body language, reading their facial expressions, observing how their mouth moves when they say words you don’t even need to hear to understand. These are not new words that you have to learn. You were born knowing them. You didn’t have to be taught. You just knew. Your native language is the language you learn to think in, to feel in, and then later at some point, naturally, you learn to communicate in. Gujarati isn’t a language in my head. It’s a feeling. It rolls off my tongue faster than pearls off a broken necklace. The words all flow as smoothly as water and it is just as comfortable as my mother’s lap. There is a word for every thought and a sound for every feeling. How dare I be embarrassed to speak in the language I developed my entire identity in?

It is chamchi, that’s how I know it, but I must also know that it is spoon and it is chamach and it is lepel because I no longer am limited to that single identity. I have multiple identities. I am an Indian who thought until very recently that Hindi was their national language (no it’s not) but we were taught the language since we were 4. I am a child of colonisation, I was taught the English alphabet before I was taught the alphabet in my native language or Hindi or any Indian language for that matter. And now I am a student at a Dutch university. Funny how I always thought how important can a language be if you can all communicate without ever really knowing a language completely, but lately I am realising how each identity I have is associated with a language, even feelings I feel are all associated with languages. 

My spirituality is in Gujarati. My drama is always in Hindi. Thanks, Bollywood. All my embarrassment and apologies are in English. I am the funniest in Hindi. My guilt, even though rare, is in Gujarati. I always get angry in Gujarati, but I always express love in English. I find this one the most amusing. Maybe because talking about love or sex or crushes is coded as a Western concept in my brain and it feels like I’m doing something wrong when I do it in my mother’s language. 

My internal dialogue used to be in English growing up but ever since I have moved countries, there has been such a shortage of the familiar sounds of Gujarati that now I unconsciously only speak to myself in Gujarati.

What an interesting and weird relationship I have with languages. For someone who loves talking and is studying communications and wants to be a writer at some point in life, of course, I understand the role of languages. But still, I fail to look at them as a means to communicate. I always find them somewhere between a consequence of identity crisis and the effect of socialisation.

Yesterday, a new guy joined our team and I don’t know what his name is but I overheard him talking to some of my colleagues. English deeply marinated in a thick Surti-Gujarati accent. I was so excited to meet him. When he found his way to the bar, I without a second’s thought asked him- kem cho? His face lit up. Oh the sweet sound of your native language in a foreign setting.