by Vani Viswanathan
I was sitting in the bus with my head between my knees, and my father was stroking my back in an effort to keep me from throwing up. My mother was sitting with my younger brother who was enjoying the view, his head dangerously dangling outside. I wished then that I hadn’t greedily gobbled up those aloo parathas that morning – at least not touched the generous dollop of butter that melted like magic on those steaming hot parathas. The conductor walked up to us and said something that I didn’t bother to listen to. My father nudged me. “Ammu, he’s telling us something in Hindi!”
I looked up.
“Nimbu chahiye, didi?”
I shook my head. “What did he want?” my father asked.
“If I wanted lemon, Appa…”
He went back to stroking my back. When the bus stopped for a break, I greedily took in lungfuls of air and sat on the grassy slope on my knees, willing myself to throw up, but nothing happened. I then went up to my father, who was busy taking photographs on his grey Yashica.
“How come you never learnt Hindi, Appa?” I asked. I couldn’t understand how a man who idolised Kishore Kumar and R D Burman and apparently bought stacks of cassettes with his measly salary in the early 70s, and even sang with pure joy Hindi songs from the 60s and 70s, couldn’t even manage the basic Hindi we needed to get by on our trip to Delhi and the surrounding hill stations. Our family of four was made up of my parents and my younger brother and me, and except for my father, the rest of us had learnt enough Hindi to get by. Never mind the thick accents, the servers at restaurants could understand when we asked for chawal and dahi when our throats went dry chewing chapatis.
Appa, though, was at a clear loss. My brother taught him to say “Nahin maalum” if someone for some reason stopped to speak to my father in Hindi, and my father faithfully repeated the phrase to all and sundry, including men who solicited us to eat at their restaurants, thrust cheap handkerchiefs at our face or asked us to check out sweaters at their store.
So when the bus stopped on the way to Shimla, I asked him about his Hindi, for sheer lack of nothing else to say – throw a family together on countless bus journeys and you soon run out of everyday things to talk, and with our family, deep discussions often happened on vacations.
“Didn’t you have to learn Hindi in school?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “We were taught the subject, even in my tiny government school in Madurai. I still remember the teacher – dark as the night, bushy moustache, and eyes that glistened with sheer pride at being able to speak the language that so many of us couldn’t make head or tail of.”
“So you learnt the language!”
“You could say so… although I should show you my SSLC grade book, and there will be a number or two you would be shocked to see.”
My eyes lit up. My father, the Physics head of department at the university, got questionable scores in school?
“What kind of numbers are we talking about?” I asked gleefully, grinning.
“There was once a nine… and once a zero too, if I remember correctly!”
“You got zero? Zero?!” I asked my father, laughing with disbelief.
I knew my father’s Hindi skills came close to naught, but until today, I didn’t know that was literally applicable in his case.
“But how could you possibly not know anything??”
“Of course I knew enough to write to pass, but I deliberately didn’t write anything,” my father said.
“And why did you do that?” I asked.
“There were protests all over the state against the imposition of Hindi as the official language, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Wow. My father once had a rebellious streak in him.
“So my way of protesting was to fail the subject!”
“But didn’t that affect your overall rank?” I remembered my grandfather telling me that my father had passed with distinction, there was an anecdote too: they had searched the newspapers high and low for his roll number, hadn’t found it, my father had been yelled at by my grandfather – the school headmaster then – about what a shame it was that the headmaster’s son had failed, while my father had retreated to a corner of the house unable to understand what was happening, until my grandmother’s brother had pointed that they were searching only the second class column; my father had passed with first class, knowing which my grandfather had sheepishly bought him a toffee in appreciation and apology.
“Hindi was an ancillary subject; it didn’t affect our SSLC ranks!”
Of course, the studious man he was, he would have thought about the consequences before taking such a drastic step. It was still hilarious, though, to imagine my father doing something like this.
“So what did you do during the exam time?”
“I used to copy every question verbatim into the answer sheet.”
I doubled up with laughter. This was unbelievable.
“Do you ever feel bad you didn’t learn the language properly? I mean, you love Kishore Kumar but you don’t even know what he’s singing!”
My father was thoughtful for a moment. “I know I’m missing something, but those were different times. Here we were, a whole bunch of people with no connection to the language, and they were going to impose it on all of us! At least there was some Sanskrit doing the rounds in our house… the language was completely alien to so many of us!”
“Hmm… what did you do about it?”
“There were protests in Madurai, and I joined them – without your grandfather’s knowledge, of course. We were chanting slogans, burning effigies… I looked at awe as students, hardly a few years older, took the stage and made inspiring speeches. ‘Down with Hindi! Bring English!’ they said. Thinking back on it, it was irresponsible behaviour on my part, for riots broke out, the police were beating people up, people were hurling stones at each other… I remember running back home at one point breathlessly, legs quivering like jelly, all my idealism having melted with one lathi blow on my right leg…
“After that, the only thing I could do was fail the exam, deliberately. My father could understand, but it was always a matter of shame to him that his own son was rebelling under his nose. Hindi annoyed me; I couldn’t care less about the difference between ba and bha. They were trying to force this down the throats of a populace where Padma was often pronounced Bathma!”
I laughed. True. To this day, my grandmother referred to my cousin, Rahul, as Raagul. Foreign sounds. It puzzled me, though, that we didn’t have a problem picking up an equally foreign language, English, while protesting against Hindi.
“I think about that too,” my father said, “…although honestly I’m a little happier that English, rather than Hindi, held sway. And I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve had to know Hindi. Besides, I’ve so enjoyed English and the access it gives us to so much from other parts of the world… an extension of colonialism, no doubt, but things have worked out, haven’t they?”
“I don’t know, Appa… I’m just worried for those times when you’ve had to be away from us and you don’t know the language!” I wasn’t great guns at Hindi or didn’t have a particular affinity to the language, but it made me happy that I wasn’t at a loss when I stepped outside the borders of my state. Just then, the conductor asked us all to board. People rushed to take different seats, and Amma, my brother and I managed to get one, while Appa had to sit in the row behind us, with two burly Sikh men.
Out of sheer politeness and camaraderie that I began associating with Sikhs after that trip to the North, the two Sikhs struck a conversation with my father. Or should I say, they kept talking to him, asking him this and that, assuming that and this as his responses, while the three of us silently shook with laughter, all the while aware of Appa’s intense discomfort. After ten minutes, Appa finally mustered the courage to tell them “Nahin maalum,” at which my brother and I burst out laughing. We heard the two Sikhs muttering, puzzled, about why he couldn’t have said so earlier.
Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. She is now a CSR communications consultant, and has been blogging at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com since 2005.
