It was a warm evening in Bengaluru. The sun had begun to touch the horizon and the smell of butta, kadlekai and churmuri had begun to fill the air. In this scene, among the buses coming and leaving as they pleased, I stood to take in the bustling Kempegowda bus station. It wasn’t my first time in the city but it was the first time I would call it home. It seemed to roll very strangely off my tongue, the word home, since this city had no one and nothing that made it my home. Not my family, not my friends and most importantly, not any places I could run off to in moments of crisis and claim as my spot while being in denial of the fact that it could and would be the same for several others. No, none of that, not yet. There were my pen-pals who all lived here, some people I met in an online literature conference. Our mutual love for literature and overtime, each other's virtual company had made us the proud members of “Over Caffeinated Bookworms™”, a rather vibrant Whatsapp group. That’s where I met Varun and Chetas, the guys who said they had an extra bed for me in their room and whose location I was searching on Ola. There were also Aleena, Sanjana and Thanu, who I planned to meet once I settled in. Ours is a half and half group, gender-wise and language-wise. Varun, Sanjana and Thanu are Kannadiga whereas Aleena, Chetas and I are Malayalee. One thing that always managed to earn a smile of mild fascination out of all of us at the end of our virtual meets was how easily we all seemed to communicate with each other. We were different and our englishes were not the same, and yet we somehow communicated and the flow never broke. Sanjana lamented one day, after we discussed colonialism, about how she was made to write words and sentences over and over again by her grandparents and constantly shown English films by her father just so she would speak “proper english”. She much preferred and enjoyed her grandparents orienting her towards the Kannada language, as it came in the form of legendary Rajkumar films. Varun also enjoyed watching Old Kannada films. He has been dipping and diving himself in Kannada ever since he was a child. His parents made him recite poems, quizzed him, gave him dictation work and made him solve riddles. That, and the fact that he watched quizzes on tv and listened to his father read newspapers and poetry aloud, really piqued his interest in the language. His enthusiasm shows when he is talking about book and movie recommendations to us. Chetas and Aleena, though Malayalees, had picked up Kannada as children simply by interacting with other children. While Chetas’s parents were relaxed and laid back about it, simply encouraging him to develop a reading habit and letting him absorb Kannada, english and Hindi from films and other kids, Aleena’s parents had a more hands on approach. Upon learning that she was only able to read, write and speak in Kannada and English as a child, her parents were determined to teach her to read, write and speak Malayalam to properly communicate with her, if nothing else. She was made to write malayalam letters over and over, spoken to only in Malayalam for a period of time and encouraged to read comics and short stories in the language. Now that I think about it, maybe Chetas had little to no parent intervention because he could speak with them and that too in their mother tongue Malayalam. Other than making him choose Hindi as a second language so that their knowledge would help them help him, there is nothing else. Thanu’s parents were the same. They virtually exercised no control over how she learnt what language. They performed the “Aksharabhyasa shastra” and let her be. Even today, she accredits her love for music and stories for why she explored other languages. It was kind of similar to my own experience. After my Ezhuthiniruthu when I was three, my mother had taught me to write a bit of English and Malayalam before enrolling in an Anganawadi. Apart from the occasional children’s weeklies and alphabet charts from relatives as gifts, I too was left to rely on my love for literature to explore language. Such similar and different stories at the same time! It was one of those moments that made you realise just how profound simple things can be. I smile to myself at the thought of how we made ourselves familiar to each other through a language but the process through which we learnt that language was a story that could be of each one of us and not a single one of ours at the same time. The abrupt stopping of the rickshaw made me snap back to reality. I paid off the kind man who had helped me till here and stood in front of my new home. A home that I would share with two other people who felt a lot closer to me now after recollecting our stories. As I stand here with Chetas greeting me in Malayalam, a warmth spreads in my chest, putting me at ease. Varun greets me in Kanglish (a mixture of kannada and english) and though the words are unfamiliar, his friendly embrace felt like Chetas’s words. In that feeling, calling this city home doesn’t seem so strange on my tongue.
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