Lingo Shingo

(Published in First City magazine, July 2012)

It was lunchtime, I remember. Uninspiring lunches lead to some of the most memorable lines, as we struggle to add masala-smack to life. I found one as my editor passed on a gem her mother had delivered to her, mid-spat, “It’s all fine, to think in one language and feel in another. But your mother-tongue is the one that spews when you’re lava-bursting angry.”

That was the day I decided, on my drive back home, my car imploding with fire-spitting phrases for the machchar bikewallahs, that I must be a Dilliwali.

As a writer, I am obsessed with language; with the search for answers in words, words, words. I search for epiphanies in the crevices between words, hoping for my banal moments to explode into the grand. My method: their infinite arrangement into sentences, like the unending jigsaw puzzle of fitting luggage under train berths. And so in a city of infinite word-universes like Dilli, I’m never the type who ‘travels light’.

I listen to the language that floats about in the public spaces of my city: in the malls, in the Metro, under the staircases, in the queues outside post offices, in the lanes of Punjabi Bagh and Mayur Vihar, in snatches of conversation floating about in Purani Dilli. I snap up words mid-chatter, then poke, cajole, stretch them, assess their resilience against the violent voluptuousness of my emotions. Sometimes they slip into the crevices of my memory and bubble up during perfectly routine moments, like in the shower. They accost me during work, they create 2 am blink-blink, no-sleep moments until I try them on for size. I window-shop for the perfect words all day, until they’re vivid to the point of being lurid.

Perhaps it was my stormy youth spent in literature class that propelled this ‘market research’ on the language-I-feel-in, this silly search for a mothertongue, for belongingness. Actually, scratch that. Like every logic-defying complex phenomenon, I’d say it all started with the parents. I was raised for the better part of my life in Punjabi Bagh, where we were referred to (and still are) as the ‘woh Bangaallee’ people, attendant notions in place (namely, ‘those amusing sleeveless-blouse-wearing, liberal-to-the-point-of-foolish people with the unpronounceable surname and inborn inability to count currency’). But inside our house, there was an utter vacuum of Bengali-ness, except for the odd once-a-month fish curry and Papa’s curvy, sweetened, funky Hindi that encased jagged, erect words in unbelievable roundels, curled them into twists when they were ramrod-straight simple. That was all that survived his encounter with Dilli, the Picassoesque edges of which he took on so readily that the language he grew up speaking in suburban Kolkata, was happily packed away with all his memories.

On the other hand, my Delhi-raised, very Punjabi mother raised me on a steady diet of lectures peppered with textbook Hindi, muhaavras and all. (Every time we were in a snarling mother-daughter spat, she’d hurl a wack proverb like ‘tumhaari kaan pe juun nahi rengti hai’ and derail my steamed-up, lined-up argument completely.) Punjabi, however, was out of bounds. All requests for her to teach me the said language of coolth were rejected promptly. “Have you ever heard the news in Punjabi?” she asked me every time I gave her I’m-having-identity-crisis excuse to learn the language, until one day we did happen to watch Punjabi news on television. It was hilarious, even though the news was ghastly. “Dekha? How can I speak in a language that does not know what depth and gravity are?”, she said, before switching off the channel and drowning in her daily Jagjit Singh ghazal album on are-you-nuts? volume. Ever since, I don’t complain about her why-care-about-roots-beta parenting style. I know that the only time I will ever hear her prattle tone-perfect Punjabi is while bargaining over summer suit-pieces with Sardarji shopkeeper uncles in Shankar Market. And I know it’ll jolt me each time; it’s odd to see your impeccable-English-Hindi-wali mummy suddenly channelling your saamne wali aunty.    

And so, on my warped mother-tongue chase (fuelled by my writer ambitions and all those stormy unresolved Jaipur Lit Fest debates about what the hell an Indian writer is), I turned to the only other oracle I know: Dilli. This haphazard aural garden of sorts, this city of borrowed languages, their dregs homegrown into robust hybrids. Where I found the perfect way to express ennui in that Urdu-morphed ‘boriyat’. Where I figured that a well-modulated ‘Arre!’ provides the best opening to even the harshest lines, and the banal ‘achcha’ makes for a versatile, all-weather response. Where I learnt that alliteration and rhyme add generic meaning, even if to chholey-sholay. Where I discovered that any word can be filled with plenitude if you duplicate it and put a ‘hi’ in the middle (bags hi bags, rishtey hi rishtey, barbaadi hi barbaadi).  

The zabaan-e-Dilliwali multiplies. From my Malyali husband, I’ve learnt the choicest words for anatomical parts, and that everything can be personified by suffixing with a ‘kutty’ (but don’t try this at home if you’re Punjabi and cannot read that word aloud without denoting a four-legged). From my Sardarni best friend from school, the perfect word for a newbie in Dilli, the ‘gwaanchi gaay’ (lost cow). From my very-Bengali JNU classmates, the way to make even god’s skin crawl, with a perfectly stretched-out nasal ‘can-o?’ (why?). In my head, I speak a delusional PoMo language full of stolen words – one that can be understood only by someone who has lived my life with the same exactitude; in short, no one but Dilli, this city that is a person only I know.

  

Post-discovery, I return (like we all do), to home, to DNA, for a relook, perhaps at myself. To my mother, whose dreams and intelligence are woven in an arabesque of adjective-soaked English, Urdu and Hindi, but whose exasperation bursts out in full-full Punjabi words. To my father, who speaks a Bengali that sounds like an eccentric creation of his own when placed in the midst of a Bong soiree, and a Hindi that morphs my mother’s Punjabi slip-of-tongue wildly (“what is this shyaapa!” he says, when things go topsy-turvy).

This is when I realise, that epiphanies can be quiet phut-phut bubbles too, that surface from the crevices of our daily chatter. As a writer, my job is to search for belonging, for the timeless, in neat Times New Roman size 11 words on my Word Doc; but the moment I type them, they get so caught up in time. Words, spoken and blown into the air, ephemeral all, surprisingly, do not. They linger, they pass on, they evade intention, intervention. The more I listen - to my words, to the words of this city of migrants and homegrowns - the more I learn that the written word is a way to forget as much as it is to remember. And that a pet phrase is possibly infinite, like a gesture echoed in memory. That the languages we all speak in this city, are remnants of potent encounters, between memories and Dilli.  

No wonder then, that while tracing the gnarled roots of the word ‘Dilli’, I found one that goes back to the word ‘dehleez’ - the threshold, the gateway. Passed from mouth to mouth, memory to memory, over centuries, it became the Dilli that now gives me my pen name. And so, much like life, this city remains suspended in a poetic metaphor, beautiful to visit, but frustrating to live; full of overwhelming emotion but no belonging. A moment of becoming, prolonged for us mythical citizens, always in a state of mid-articulation.

THINGS THAT KEEP THE DILLIWALI SANE

When in doubt, eat. When monsoon madness fills you to the brim, make food not war. Here’s Dilliwali’s favourite fancy-schmancy salad recipe – easy-peasy evening snack, made in 10, vegetarian-friendly even. Just dice one tomato, some eggplant (the long variety, preferably) and garlic, while a pan simmers with one cup of water, salt, a dash of olive oil and some herbs (Punjabi-fied ‘mixed Italian herbs’ would be totally spot-on, to hell with authentic!). In another pan, fry the garlic in olive oil until golden, add the eggplant and sauté on medium flame until it’s soft and wrinkled (add more mixed herbs here if you’re me). To the boiling water in the other pan, add one cup of couscous, stir once, turn off the heat and cover. Chop up some mint leaves. Fluff up the couscous with a fork, tip in the garlic-eggplant mixture, tomatoes and mint. Mix, mix, mix. Add a dash of lemon if you like your salad tangy. Switch on the AC, put your feet on the windowsill, and wolf it down warm, as Dilli prepares to drape itself in a gown of shimmering night-rain and purgatorial traffic jams.   

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).