For a long time in my childhood, I believed that I was the only reader of all the books that I had read. I wrote down their names in a notebook and lovingly watched their numbers grow. It didn’t even occur to me that there might be others who had also read them. So, being their sole reader, I “owned” all the characters that peopled the books – Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights, Anne from Anne of Green Gables, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, the ragdoll from Galldora, whose name was an anagram, the five “Find-Outers” from Enid Blyton, the list went on.
Their voices spoke only to me, for it was inside my head that they lived. It was something of a shock when I discovered that there were others who’d read them before I had, that these voices had “spoken” to them before they spoke to me.
Distressing though the revelation was, it was not entirely without merit. I became aware that all these characters had voices I had been listening to, and it was because of their voices that I knew them, for I had never encountered them in the flesh, so to speak. It was the first time I articulated the thought to myself that reading a book was all about listening to a voice, and that the voice could be heard only in one’s imagination. “Imagination” was a mysterious thing that existed somewhere in my head. The writer and her characters’ voices could not, for instance, be heard in the room or on the street, but only in that hidden place inside me.
In my home in the hot dusty plains of Allahabad, I’d hear the sound of bells. At seven o’clock every morning, a caravan of camels went past our gate. The camels were coming from the kachhaar, the floodplain of the Ganges which was close to our house. The camels carried a load of dark green watermelons strapped onto their backs in large nets made of hemp. The watermelons were being taken to the mandi to be sold. The bells on the necks of the camels would go killink killink softly, keeping in step with the loping stride of the camels.
Listening to the world
Far away, the bell of St Joseph’s Cathedral would speak. It was a very large bell that hung in the belfry of the cathedral. It needed to be pulled with a thick rope and I didn’t know who went up to the belfry to ring it. Maybe it was one of the brothers from the seminary. Dong, said the bell. A single sound that came echoing from the heart of its solitude. Then again, dong. The sound of the bell from the cathedral was heavier than the one from the bells on the camels’ necks. Deep. It had layers in it that formed creases in the bolt of blue cloth, which was the sky. It was a lonely sort of sound and made me think of the secret place inside me where, in the quiet, I could listen to the voices from the books speaking to me, and from where eventually, I learnt also to speak. It was a place where the sounds of the world – the political wrangling, the horrors perpetrated daily and terrifyingly across the world, the chatter on social media, the “mine-is-better-than-yours” gloating and the frustrations of the competitive race – all filtered through but were somehow absorbed and lifted into a great quiet where one could be alone with one’s thoughts, where the stimulus from the outside world could perhaps be distilled into a piece of writing.
The man selling “old woman’s hair” – candy floss – also went past the gate every morning. He rang a bell as he came along; the sound was higher-pitched than the sound of the bells from the camels’ necks or the bell from St Joseph’s Cathedral. The man carried a case made of cheap plastic on his bicycle, and the candy-floss was in there. Pink, sticky filaments of sugar, thin as hair, made up the balls of candy-floss. The little balls were kept close together, like rosy-cheeked babies huddling up one against the other. I’d run to the gate to see if I could catch the candy-floss man before he went away. The candy-floss has flies on it, said my mother. She would not let me eat it. Tanantanantanan went his bell. It kept ringing. Insistent. There was something necessary about the sound, urgent, the world needed it to save it from imminent disaster. From devastating floods or droughts, earthquakes even, and other unimaginable catastrophes.
When I sat down to write my first story three decades later, I kept hearing, with a startling clarity, the sound of the bells that came accompanied by the memory of the camels and the candy-floss man. It seemed I had not forgotten the bells, even though at the time I had not been paying attention to them at all. In fact, there were no bells in the story that I was currently writing, which was based on a girl I’d known in the years when I was living in Delhi, about the twists and turns of her life. I’d grown up hearing those bells but she could have known nothing of them. Why then did the bells want to enter the story? What was this “something” that I was only half aware of that seemed to want to be written? Why did the bells echo in my mind when I sat down to write? As though there were a secret pact between memory and the act of writing, which nudged into being an “organic” space – one that seemed of itself to fill up with things that did not exist in my conscious mind. I have found this to be so, again and again. So, at a time when the world is torn by wars, when glaciers are melting faster than butter melts in the saucepan, when the problems of the world in all their urgency are crying out for attention, why do I get waylaid by these “non-sequiturs” that demand to be written about instead?
My mind had captured the images and sounds from childhood, and they were recorded in my memory. I didn't realise at the time that all this “data” had entered my mind, that a bank of images and memories had been created in me. Which currency did that bank deal with? My ancestors, our centuries-old folk literature, our composite cultural tradition made of various religions and ways of life within which we were raised, the geography and history of my years spent on earth – they were all alive within me. They were the “banknotes” that memory handed out to me, that offered themselves up to be “spent”. The process of creation was a conversation with these things hidden securely in memory’s strongbox. A writer’s innermost being – something that Katherine Mansfield has referred to as her “secret self” – was forged through dialogue and empathy with the people and the places there. Connecting with this secret self was vital for a writer.
The relationship between literature and memory was as intimate as that between literature and language. Memory didn’t have to do only with the mind; each part of the body had its own memory – eyes, ears, hands, nose, fingers – a physical memory that awakened and began to work while writing. My ears remembered those bells, even though I had little memory of them by the time I sat down to write. My body – my ears, in this instance – had become an archive of memory that was infused with the landscape of my past.
Throughout my childhood, my siblings and I, along with our mother, would travel two or three times a year to Banaras from Allahabad. In those days, the train from Allahabad to Banaras departed from the “small line” (narrow gauge) at Rambagh Station. It was slow. It moved, wheezing asthmatically and blowing coal dust into the air. Many small stations fell along the way. It stopped at almost all of them and sometimes stood there for a long time. Names like Handia, Jangiganj, Kachhwa Road, Gopiganj, Madhosingh, Aurai, and Raja Talab sounded like a literary catalogue in themselves! At almost every station, there would be a peepal or banyan tree, and often a sadhu sitting beneath it. In those summer afternoons, people could be seen napping in the shade. Excellent samosas were available at Madhosingh, along with boiling tea poured from a large aluminium kettle into clay kulhads. The samosas and tea smelled of damp earth – the particular scent of our region’s soil.
I felt, without thinking about it in so many words, that it was important to love the scent of this earth. The senses perceived it before the mind did – the soil, the air, the dialects that fell on the ear, and the sights and tactile impressions that our senses wake to. This love is not a detached, cerebral love but a sensory, sensual connection between the writer and her environment, and it is essential for a writer. The connection can sometimes even be born of annoyance or ire, for in the act of writing, you don’t just use your mind but all your senses.
My maternal grandmother, who was a Shia Muslim, lived in Banaras. One of her daughters, my aunt who had decided not to marry, also lived with her. It was an old house with 16 rooms and a large central courtyard with the rooms arranged on three sides of it. There was an imambara which was owned by the Waqf Board, on the western side. A thick madhumalti vine grew along the walls of the rooms that opened onto the courtyard. Thousands of sparrows lived in the madhumalti and in the early mornings and at dusk, the air seemed to be torn to shreds with their raucous chirping. My aunt would beat the vine with a long stick, and the sparrows would fly out in a quivering cloud of flapping feathers and whirring sound. The early morning chatter of the sparrows was so loud that it would penetrate the deepest sleep, and we’d sit up wide awake to the sounds of a new day breaking.
My grandmother would be reading verses from the Qur’an in Arabic. Her voice, which seemed to resound in the sky, was deep and rounded like a stone from a riverbed, polished and smoothed by the water. It appeared to fall in shades of pastel on the courtyard that was laid with pinkish-brown stone. The language contained no word that I could understand yet strangely seemed to open the senses to something dimly perceived.
Soon other sounds would start up from the gali, for the house was in the crowded part of the city. A chant of Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram would waft into the courtyard as well as the sound of a milad prayer meeting being held somewhere not far – ya nabi salam alaika, ya rasul salam alaika, ya habib salam alaika. A vegetable vendor would go past calling out his wares in a Hindi inflected with Bhojpuri that entered the sleeping pool of languages within me, for that is what they were – languages that lay dormant till a particular piece of writing dredged them out of the subliminal. Safdar Ali, who was the cook’s son, would begin to work the “chaapa kal” or the hand-pump that with a reluctant creaking, released some water for the kitchen. Then Halima herself would arrive to make the morning tea and give us breakfast, adding to this universe of sound a clattering of cups and saucers, the tinkling of spoons, for her hands shook a little.
Sounds and echoes
I thought about that universe of sound later, when I was already in my twenties and trying to shape my thoughts into the coherence of a narrative. For it was around the same time that I came upon the Sanskrit-derived Hindi word shabd. That it had a double meaning – it meant “word” and also “sound” – was a fascinating discovery. The word drew for me a connection between written language and language that was only sound. The morning sounds of my grandmother’s home – the sparrows, the clattering of cups, the creaking hand-pump, the wheezing and clanking of the slow train as it puttered along on the tracks – all of these seemed to belong to a language of sound that did not lead to further meaning. They were simply themselves. But in this language of sound, there was an echo that fell kaleidoscopically on the imagination. As a writer, this had a deep meaning for me. I felt that when we write something, it should not just be seen but also heard. In a piece of writing, rhythm and sound are as vital as meaning.
To be read sensitively, a written piece must also be heard. Writing and translation – and there is only a thin line dividing the two – are not only about seeing but also about listening. When I was four years old, I thought translating a word from Hindi to English was simply a matter of adding a “d” to the Hindi word, and that made the word English. It seems a somewhat amusing assumption now, but I wonder why, at that age, I got this idea into my head. Perhaps it had something to do with the aural quality of a language, with how a language sounds. I could not speak English but I heard it everywhere. To me, then, it felt as if English was riddled with hard-sounding “d”s and “t”s. Later, when I was working on my early translations, which was really a process of fumbling for my writerly voice, I thought about the four-year-old and her “translation” of Hindi words into English.
Thinking about word and sound led me to a further realisation. Not only are sound and word connected, but other connections, subtle and often invisible, exist all across the literatures of the world. There were many books at home; there was no TV and few visitors, so what else would one do but read? Language was discussed constantly. If a new word came up during a conversation, dictionaries were immediately pulled out – and we had dictionaries for several languages in the house: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Persian. A lot of the books were in my father’s library. I opened a cupboard one morning to find termites crawling in it. They had silently chewed away many of the books. I spread them out on the veranda to air them.
Among them were Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Stories, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, a battered illustrated The Arabian Nights, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, The Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun and two of the 12 volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, published by Chatto and Windus in 1941. The fat volume Gitabitan containing the songs of Rabindranath Tagore was intact, as was the English translation of Premchand’s Godan by Gordon Roadarmel, published as The Gift of a Cow by Allen and Unwin in 1968. I had grown up reading many of these books, but it was only now, when they were spread out before me, that I realised many of them were translations. I would not have been able to read them at all had they not been translated.
But the names of the translators were often missing, or written in such small print that you did not notice them. I had read the books like originals. And here were these “invisible” translators who had presented me with something like a map of world literature. The books were set in locations thousands of miles away – St Petersburg, London, New York, Paris, or Johannesburg – and yet I felt connected to the characters that lived so far away, across continents and spoke in other languages. They spoke of things that I too thought about and felt, to the extent that sometimes I even imagined all the books were about me! This somewhat self-centred idea got an added dimension later, when I started writing my own stories. For the characters, howsoever different their lives were from mine, were really, at their deepest core, all me!
My own engagement with language started in the strict Roman Catholic school where I studied and where the medium of instruction was English. We had to pay a fine if we spoke a language other than English. We were not allowed to speak our natural language. Looking back on this now, I find it humiliating, but the rigorous imposition of English opened various doors and created a different kind of imaginative space within me. In the meantime, Hindustani, a fluid mix of Hindi and Urdu, was spoken at home, both languages with complex, contentious histories.
In times obsessed with cultural purity, Hindi itself is not an uncontested category. With its different names – Hindi, Urdu, Hindustani – it is the robust hybrid language of everyday life that has absorbed the linguistic wealth of many traditions, and is distinct from the “pure” Hindi that is being pushed over the older Hindi – indeed over non-Hindi speaking areas of the country – cutting off other linguistic tributaries that flowed into the river that was Hindustani. This “pure” Hindi is taught in school syllabi and has become linked to Hindi language xenophobia with its religious and political overtones. It is sought to be cleansed of Farsi words, as well as of Avadhi, Braj, and other locally spoken languages that were the creative soul of Hindi. In a world where languages perceived as “minor” seem to be falling off the linguistic map, translation – as indeed writing itself – becomes a profoundly political act, through which literary as well as social and cultural traditions may be preserved.
I chose Hindustani as the language in which I wrote my fiction, but my relationship with language was never straightforward. Which language should I write in? This question continued to haunt me even after the choice had been made – till the realisation dawned on me that it was possible to write in both. One language did not negate the other. To live in India, perhaps it is a necessary condition that linguistic awareness resides in multiple registers. The presence of other languages pulses through whatever is written in any one language. I was attracted to Hindi because it was a language in which it seemed possible to write by ear. The question I grappled with was – how can you live in one language and write in another? But the waters of linguistic purity have been muddied, or have always been muddy, and the richer for it, but isn’t the very definition of “mother tongue” now blurred? It is our cultural and geographical truth that we exist in multiple languages.
Hindi itself wasn’t a single language either. It changed regionally. There were some of my relatives and acquaintances who spoke various dialects – in and around Allahabad, it was a Hindi inflected with Avadhi. Travel thirty or forty miles in the direction of Banaras and the Hindi became Bhojpuri inflected, and beyond Banaras, the Bhojpuri too changed, not to speak of Maithili, and Bangla with its many variants further on. It was truly a mixed bag and how could one be anything but a linguistic itinerant, always on the move, travelling from one language to another? It was a polyphony of sound that permeated my awareness of language, with the linguistic world around me in motion, each language thriving in the penumbra of another, haunting each other, peeking through the writing in any one language.
Inhabiting languages
If we inhabit languages, the languages inhabit us too. A word or a phrase heard in childhood may lie buried for years in a forgotten seam of memory, till some trigger brings it to the surface again. Social and cultural factors sometimes disallow the use of a language we grew up with, which was spoken by our ancestors. But the mind preserves the language somewhere as an ancestral, subliminal memory. So, our language past never quite dies but remains like a subterranean river flowing into our present. Some years ago, I met the Avadhi scholar Indu Prakash Pandey who had been living in Germany for the past 50 years, with no contact with Avadhi and yet, he said, he felt that the doves that came to his balcony spoke to him in Avadhi! The memory of the language he had been born into hadn’t died despite having been unused for decades. If languages remain embedded in our bodies, the future of even “minor” languages begins to seem optimistic.
Both writing and translation – which taps into the same reservoir of words, enriching and expanding it – are about creating a sensibility, and also about establishing literature as a space of possibility. In the seventies, my mother started a primary school in the precincts of our Allahabad bungalow where she tried to disseminate an “all-round” education – one that did not simply consist of rote learning – to the children of the neighbourhood, often too poor to afford the regular schools. In the school, every Wednesday, there was a storytelling class in which the children, ranging from ages six to ten, would tell a story. One boy, about seven years old, came up with the story of a “non-violent” lion who did not want to eat any of the other animals in the jungle. What then did he eat? When asked about what the lion ate, his simple answer was, “He ate mud.”
A mud-eating lion! In the story, the lion eating mud didn't feel out of place at all. It seemed quite feasible within the story. Such a lion could never have existed in the “real” world. There is a moment in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, when he talks about artistic truth as deception, with all writers being deceivers. While talking about his old governess, Mademoiselle O, he speaks of her “radiant deceit”, of a carefully composed, emotionally resonant image as being truer than a factual one. The child with his story about the mud-eating lion had inadvertently hit upon an important truth. What is possible, indeed logical in a story, may not be possible in reality. Literary truth is different from the truth of the physical world. Literature, then, is a space of possibilities, where anything may happen, given it is logically consistent within the story. Through this window of imaginative possibility, a writer may craft a parallel universe that is emotionally true and which may lift reality above its smallness.
Sara Rai is a writer, translator and editor of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction.
