Bhasha

The Last Home

I have been homeless for decades now. The hypermobile, jetsetting life has left me with only one semblance of home - a mother tongue. I read and write less and less in Bangla, and my deracinated self curates a comfortable cosmopolitanism to those that don’t speak the language who then marvel at my love for my mother tongue. But today, on Bhasha Dibosh (Mother Language Day), I find myself professing love for that “bastard alien tongue” and all the gurus who taught me to wring out my peculiar emotional ecosystem out of that dreaded colonial language.

I find today I am also celebrating Hindi/Urdu/Braj - the language mix of north India that I know a smattering of. I learnt from a friend recently, the meaning of the word ‘azab’ (torment) in Faiz’s famous lines “aaye kuch abr”. Let there be raincloud, let there be wine/ then let’s get to the torment. I find myself marvelling at the mysterious line in the poem - “yaad tum behisaab aaye” - your memory is without measure (my own translation, please forgive). To measure is to give shape, your memory therefore, is shapeless. To remember must then essentially be to render shapeless?

In 2023, I wrote a poem called “For Shahid”:

For Shahid, I write in English. That bastard, alien tongue slits my throat

and stitches it back together so I sound like a screechy vinyl record from the 1930s.

Needless to say, the likes of Agha Shahid Ali (called “Shahid” in my poems) and Arun Kolatkar and AKR haunt my use of this “bastard alien tongue” with which I find myself in love, almost against my will. Bangla feels like an old love, the new lines on whose face are totally alien to me. But then, I remember the lines of Joy Goswami, in his Pagli (Madwoman) sequence of poems - pagli tomar shonge bhoyaboho jeebon katabo. I read adult Bangla poems before I read any literature seriously - at age fourteen or something like that. I often worry that I am not Bengali enough, or perhaps, too Bengali. Perhaps, it is one way of being Bengali to revel on a snow-morning that language is my last and only home. Home, as Shahid would say, is always a “missed land”:

Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land—
There is no sugar in the promised land.

Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,
I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?

If home is found on both sides of the globe,
home is of course here—and always a missed land.

[Montreal. Some kind of home. February 2025]