OF SMOKING LOUNGES, BARCELONA AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE

The Frankfurt Airport like many other airports around the world, I presume, has what I would call, smoking lounges. Actually they look like small glass cubby-holes where smokers go in to smoke (what else, you dirty minds?). After making that nine-hour journey from Kolkata, awake throughout the night watching three films—one after the other--and listening to two howling babies and later, I presume, their howling parents, we badly needed to, well, have a smoke each. So, in we went in one of the cubbies. We had our silk cuts all right but no lighter. This was offered to us by a woman who also sweetly offered us the information that she was from Spain. Don’t ask me how but till that point it wasn’t really difficult to figure out what she was saying. I said that we were from India and it was kind of funny, because, as we smoked, we struck up a conversation, although a brief one, without understanding each other’s language. I told her that I had watched ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ on the flight and catching the name Barcelona she seemed pleased, indicating to us in gestures and in Espaniol that(perhaps)she lived a little distance away from Barcelona. We thanked her for the lighter. She too kept saying, ‘muchas gracias’, for heaven knows what reason and then we parted ways. The whole incident was kind of ‘feel-good’. It warmed the cockles of my heart to think that two perfect strangers could oddly communicate with each other, each without comprehending the other, in a country not their own, and yet feel part of the same flowing sea of humanity.

As I recalled the episode later, I was struck by the grip that the politics of language has over us. What if I had met this lady in a wholly different set of circumstances? What if I had met her to tell her, without being understood, that I was in trouble and needed help? What if she had only managed to figure out that I was in trouble and not what my trouble exactly was? And this scenario can actually play itself out any day, perfectly within the limits of probability, between two people who do not speak each other’s language. Think of the Tamil version of the film ‘Roja’. An illiterate village girl from Tamil Nadu is searching desperately for her husband in Kashmir and speaking to an Army Officer who fails to understand her plea, let alone its intensity, just because she speaks Tamil. In fact, this aspect of the politics of language is absolutely lost in the Hindi version of the film. It was a crime to dub the film in Hindi.

When people back home ask me if I am facing too much of a problem in Poland because I do not know Polish, I tell them that I feel exactly the same problem here as I would face in any other non-Bangla speaking state in my country. They don’t seem convinced but it really is quite true. I am as safe or as insecure in Poland as I would be, say, in Nagaland!