In Which Language Do I Remember You?

NONFICTION

Mar 14, 2025

By Shruti Sonal

The year is 2012. The world is supposed to end in a few days.

My classmates and I have read one too many conspiracy theories online, and have no idea why we are wasting time in school when humanity needs us. We could be out there building ships, rockets, or atleast paper boats to set us adrift in case of the ever-impending apocalypse. Yet, we sit quietly in a classroom, shaking our heads and chewing our fingernails. Today is the day we dread the most, the infamous parent teacher meeting. However, there’s someone in the room who dreads the day even more than me.

It’s my mother. Draped in a pomegranate coloured cotton saree, she nervously clutches the ends of her pleats. Even in winter, tiny sweat beads appear on her forehead. Her eyes travel, scanning the other parents in the room.

They walk confidently, and chatter aloud. They wear branded coats and leather boots. And they all talk in English. Maa, meanwhile, sits in solitude. She looks at her wrist watch, wishing time would move at a quicker pace. Or stop altogether.

From the corner of my eye, I see her. For a brief moment, she is the child, and I, the parent. I walk up to her, and sit beside. We don’t speak, but I hold her hand and squeeze it. The gesture translates to “you will be okay.” She stills. Minutes pass before the teacher calls my name. Maa and I rise together and make our way to her desk. We sit.

The teacher looks at Maa.

“How are you?” she asks. Maa smiles yet says nothing. The teacher continues, “Your daughter is doing well in exams. But she needs to participate more in class. She’s very quiet.”

Maa raises her eyebrows at me. I lower my gaze and nod. "I’ll speak more from now on," I murmur.

The teacher turns back to Maa. “Do you have any concerns?”

Maa hesitates, but words don’t come to her. She shakes her head.

"Alright, then could you sign here?" the teacher says, sliding a sheet across the desk.

Maa carefully writes her name in English, each curve of the alphabet giving away the fact that she has rehearsed it too many times. We stand. As we step out of the classroom, I hear it– soft but unmistakable. A sigh. A sigh of relief.

–

Twelve years later, I sit at a messy desk, surrounded by books, pens and half-empty journals. The world has not ended, yet mine has shrunk a little.

Maa is no more. Like a firefly at the break of dawn, she slipped away quietly. Her death became part of a larger statistic – she was one of the millions of people who passed away during the COVID pandemic. I saw her body wrapped in a plastic sheet, yet wasn’t allowed to touch it. A hospital caretaker gave me some of her belongings in a zip pouch: a Samsung phone, a pair of gold earrings, an uneaten apple.

I have tried to forget many of the details of that day, but one refuses to leave me. It was Mother’s Day. My last text to her was a mix of English and Hindi, my mother tongue. It read:

Happy Mother’s Day. Jald hi milenge – we will meet soon. Love you 🌻

Two blue ticks on WhatsApp told me that she read the text, but did not live long enough to respond to it. Or to meet me again. Was it the last thing she read before taking her final breath? I’ll never know.

–

A week after her death, I received a call from the government. A voice on the other side asked me to press one for English, and two for Hindi. Almost instinctively, I pressed one. The voice informed me that the families of those who died, as a result of the pandemic, are eligible to get compensation in the form of Rs 5,000 rupees. The voice asked me to confirm my address. I was on a train, and the signal was weak. I repeated it multiple times, but the voice struggled to get it right. Was it C block, D, or E? I told her it was C. C for Cat. A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat. We had all been taught the same words in kindergarten. It was never A for Avocado, or B for Baggage, or C for Crestfallen. The voice finally understood. She cut the phone. I stared out my window for a long time.

Outside, the landscape was rough, outlined by barren trees and dusty fields. It felt like I was watching a film. A part of me believed that the credits would soon roll in, and I would exit the theatre and go back home. There, Maa would be standing at the door. A smile on her face. “Aa gayi tum?”, she would ask in Hindi. You are back?

Mother tongue. Maatra bhasha in Hindi. The language we say our first words in. The language that seeps into our memories. When does it start becoming alien? There isn’t a date on the calendar circled saying, this is it!

No, it happens slowly. In bits and pieces. First, you forget how to count the numbers beyond fifty. Then, you get confused about the spellings. Somewhere along the way, the right words stop coming to you. And even if they do, you are not sure if you are using them correctly.

Over time, as your mother tongue slowly transforms into your second language, your mother starts standing at the margins of your life as well. She peeps inside, from time to time. But in your teenage years, as you hide behind earphones and celebrity crushes, the worlds diverge too much. At some point, she becomes one of the many characters in your story. Mine did too.

We lived in the same house, but started leading different lives. I’d come back from school, and turn on the television. After shuffling the channels for a while, I’d put on an American sitcom. In the show, the characters talked about New York pubs, soccer leagues and dressing up for high school prom. I often imagined myself sitting on the couch with them, laughing, sobbing, sharing an apartment. Maa sat in the room with me for the first few episodes– squinting her eyes at the screen– trying to comprehend a world that seemed as distant as the sea , which she had never seen. After a few attempts, she gave up.

Her TV time was slotted for late at night, only after my father had fallen asleep and I had slipped back into my room. Though I locked the door, the sound of the music trickled in. Maa loved listening to old Hindi songs, their melodies steeped in the grand theatrics of love – yearning, heartbreak, and the bittersweet grace of reunion. Sometimes, when I quietly stepped outside to get water from the kitchen, I could hear her humming along. Back then, the songs made little sense to me. One of her favourites, for instance, had a line which went something like this: dil ke mere paas ho kitne, phir bhi ho kitni door (you’re so close to my heart, yet so far away).

Did it remind her of me?

I never had the courage to ask.

Today, Spotify notifies me that the song is one of the tracks I listened to the most last year. But back in those days, the playlist on my shiny new MP3 player consisted of numbers ranging from Taylor Swift to Linkin Park. I had no idea then, that in her absence, I would turn to the songs she so dearly loved. That one day, in order to keep her memory alive, my playlist would transform into a mirror of hers.

As I turned to the songs, I also turned to poetry.

Before losing Maa, poetry had existed in my life as a ‘hobby’. A space to let out the teenage angst, to get over heartbreaks, and to withdraw from the outer world which, more often than not, disappointed me. In this cocoon of words, Maa occupied only the faintest corner. Don’t mistake me – I loved her with all I had. But I could never quite grasp her essence well enough to weave her into my writing. She remained at the edges of my literary pursuits, watching patiently, waiting for me to return from school with awards and certificates in creative writing. When I did, her face would light up, a radiant testament to her pride. That evening, without fail, she would prepare my favorite dish – coriander chicken curry – a quiet celebration of my victories.

Yet beyond the celebrations, the more I wrote, the more I withdrew. I entrusted my deepest thoughts to the page, guarding them in ink rather than speech. Poetry became my confidante, bearing witness to my brightest and darkest selves. Maa, who once held that place, struggled to bridge the quiet distance that grew between us. She never voiced it outright, but I heard it nonetheless. The walls of our home were thin.

Once, I heard her say on the phone to her sister: “She has become so quiet that I sometimes feel like I am living with a ghost.” Those words continued to haunt me for many days. On winter mornings, when we laid together on the terrace to soak in the sun, Maa sometimes spoke about language. She had grown up in a place where the ebbs and flows of the river would dictate the curriculum. When the river would overflow and flood the school’s grounds, exams would be postponed.

In the entire Pahsara village, there existed only one English teacher. He had a single mandate: to ensure students can write their names in English and learn the alphabet. Anything else was superfluous. In the event of a student going out of their way and learning a sentence or two to speak in class, they would be ridiculed. A big reason why my parents migrated far away from that world to Delhi, the country’s capital, was to give my sister and I an English-medium education. I don’t think they anticipated the distance that would come as a result of that. Or the fact that though language binded us, it also kept us apart.

And yet, that same language became my tether to Maa in the wake of her passing. Poetry was no longer just a refuge – it became a necessity, the force that anchored me to the world. I felt like a helium balloon, weightless and adrift, with only poetry as the thread that held me.

I wrote about the sarees that lay in her wardrobe, waiting for her return. I wrote about the tulsi plant that had no idea she would never water itagain. I wrote about her coriander chicken curry, and the bakery we frequented together. I wrote about the sea, and the sunset we had seen together in Bombay once. I wrote about the things I could never tell her, and the promises I could not fulfill. I wrote about the many ways in which death seeps into our lives and grief co-exists with love.

I wrote, and wrote, and wrote.

The poems arrived in English. It was unsettling– a voice in my head whispered that if Maa were to read them, she wouldn’t even understand. Did that render the act of writing them meaningless? Another voice posed an even stranger question: was I writing for her, or for myself?

As I wrestled with these thoughts, one realization became inescapable – I had begun to think in the language of the colonizers. A language that, for most of our lives, had drawn an invisible line between my mother’s world and mine. A language that still demands Rs 14,000 every two years and an exam to convince the world that I belong to it.

It felt like a betrayal. Yet, when nothing else helped, I turned to Maa.

It had become a quiet ritual – visiting her Facebook profile from time to time. As Hindus, we cremate our dead, leaving no grave to return to. Her profile, then, became the only cemetery where I could lay my offerings.

I would scroll endlessly, sifting through memories until there was nothing left to see. Tribute posts from strangers. Pictures of us, softened by sepia filters and framed with florid embellishments. But more than anything, there were my words – reshared by her. Clippings of my newspaper columns, poetry tucked into obscure online journals, even frivolous short stories I would disown today.

Did she read them in entirety? What did she think of them? Which words did she struggle to understand? Did a line stay with her? Did she see herself in a character? Did something make her cry? I’ll never know the answers to these questions. We never spoke about it when she was alive. Reading my work was as private to her as writing them was to me.

But it gave me a strange sense of relief: my act of writing meant something to her. Maybe, language finds a way to reach those it is meant to, irrespective of the barriers of grammar and access. For the first time since her death, I felt at ease. In that moment, this poem was born: