In response to a debate on storytelling in non native languages on Cowbird
From the time I was little, I have had the habit of closing my eyes shut
right in the moment, an attempt to save something in my mind for later. I wrote
then too. My mother had the habit of going through all I wrote, when I
discovered this, my words got cut short into keywords, words only I would know,
contexts only I had seen. Funny, because I use the same method to sketch out my
characters for the scripts I write. It reminds of me of the exact light, the
mood the person has just stepped out of, the direction he wants to go, the
image description makes the language come alive for me.
When I work on the field, it is the same, I never speak the language of
the people in the interiors most often, but I do manage to speak,
inspite of the difference in our words.
In Rajasthan once, I spent long hours in the heat by the anvil of a
reticent, quiet blacksmith, a master traditional scissors-maker, who carried on
with his work the whole afternoon like I did not exist. I kept speaking to him,
in the language I knew, tottering between words from his language and the
closest dialect I knew to it. Eventually, he understood I had seen his method
in the mountains far north, he understood I had made a short film on it, he
understood I wanted to share it, the only thing he said to me after the four
hours of my intermittent chirping was to come at 2 pm with the film to his
house.
At 2 pm, I set up the laptop on his jute bed as instructed, he collected
his wife and kids and sat himself on the floor to watch. My film, shot in
Ladakh, had a Ladakhi metal worker who described his process in Ladakhi, my
driver translated it into Hindi on camera, I had the film subtitled in English,
and I played the film for the scissors maker and paused it every once in awhile
to translate the images out into a mix of Hindi and the dialect of Marwari this
man spoke.
Right in the middle of this exchange, his eyes suddenly shone when he
saw the Ladakhi man pump air into his kiln using a goat skin air pump, and
started speaking excitedly in fast Marwari, he got up, let go of his
intimidation with the laptop, took it into his lap, and pointing at the image
kept talking to his wife and me excitedly. I learnt later, this was the exact
process his grandfather had used, the same goat skin air pump, he identified tools
in the background, he asked me to continue playing the video, and marveled at
the old Ladakhi man's work as he carved a dragon out of molten metal on the jug
handle he was crafting. I didn't have to do anything. We were just juggling
around words from five languages in his living room, we were almost talking to
ourselves, we continued with our words solely on the basis of the light we saw
in each other's eyes.
I believe any words work, however they totter out in alien tongues,.. it
is finally about the light in your own eyes, and the words flow out in
desperate attempts to describe what that light sees, especially when you see
the light in the listener's eyes.
The image up there for example, is from Karnataka, it was the bath house
of the Queen of the kingdom. I spent the entire afternoon lying on the floor
under each of the arcs forming the corridor around the bath area. Each square
so different, each one such a storyteller, I thought about the sculptor who
crafted each one of them, his thought process, was he thinking about the queen
when he worked, had he been instructed to create each different for her
amusement? I thought of the queen's maidens in waiting, the starry nights, the
visiting king, about myself, about my teachers, about objects, and art and the
meaning we try engraving into our bodies of work.
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