The Language of Our Skins

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

IN THE IRANIAN city of Isfahan, a lilting cadence and the audible-enough proximity to various tongues offer a writer an open window into the lives of others.

Sunlight pours in through a large, courtyard-facing window. This isn’t bright sunshine, but the dappled diffusion of early morning light. The beams and particles bounce off the tables, old photographs framed by the elegance of even older wood, cutlery bearing miniature artwork inked in the conspicuous shade of dark teal, and the metal top of a record player that has seen better days. Over the past five days or so, I’ve come to view this café as home. Perhaps the language of early morning light has something to do with it. Or perhaps it’s an entirely different language that I’m drawn to.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            In a corner, at the front of the café, a couple is huddled in the whispered rhythm of young love. I can’t quite hear the words, but I recognise the cadence. It’s a rhythm that has grown to become the central fingerprint, the single most vivid motif in my journeys across this land and this city of a thousand bridges. The Iranians don’t speak, you see, as much as they induce.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            

            Each sentence, each greeting, each poem, and each parable ends in a melodic sway, a signature that begins at the usual tempo of conversation, but then rises in an intonation that appears part plea, part musical ally to the denouement of a chorus. You might think that such sweetness of the tongue would only be reserved for matters of the heart. You would be wrong.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            

            It’s the same drowsy, melodic lilt I hear as two taxi drivers battle it out over who had nabbed a passenger first, their furious exchange nullified entirely, to my foreign mind, by the saccharine sweet ending to each sentence. It’s the same monogram that is on display as a baker at one of the innumerable bakeries that exhale flour and redolence into streets, alleyways and bazaars enters into the daily dance of give-and-take with what seems to be a regular customer. And yes, it’s the return of the song as a waiter at a chaikhana informs me, in scattered tongue, that the jasmine tea would make for a better infusion than the mint.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            

            This tonality to the language of Farsi has ended up becoming the soundtrack to my journeys and detours through Isfahan. To my untrained ear, it holds the power to defuse any heated situation or unpleasant conversation; to the same ear, it holds sway in transforming even the most mundane and clumsy of amorous dalliances into an epic romance worthy of being enshrined within verse by that eternal doyen of love, the poet Hafez. Exchanges at the bakery are heightened to song; soul-draining dealings at the bank are rendered artistic; a wife’s nagging and a husband’s grumbling are elevated to operetta; and so forth.

            Back in my favourite café, nestled within the quiet inner embrace of the glorious Naqsh-e Jahan Square, in a concealed alcove that seems sheltered from the passages of time, I’m free to reflect further on how language has ended up becoming such a persistent companion to my journey.

But why do I detect the distant ethnic pull of Sanskrit? And why, inexplicably, do I pick up the whiff of my father’s tongue—Bangla?

            Naqsh-e Jahan is a wonder of the world, its unending dimensions home to the turquoise-accented perfection of the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah and Masjed-e Shah, two of the country’s most revered mosques, its flanks graced by the pavilion of Ali Qapu Palace, and its interior giving way to the Portico of Qaysariyyeh – the Imperial Bazaar. It’s within this network of the bazaar, with its profusion of shops, traders, artists and cafés, that I have made the majority of my linguistic observations. Having an Indian passport and Indian skin have certainly helped.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            

            Women, their eyes laced thick with kohl, their loosened hijabs indicative of an increasingly liberal and defiant mindset, have initiated conversations on India, on Bombay, on Goa, on the food, on the flavours … on the enduring enigma of being this close and yet so far. Cries of ‘Amitabh Bachchan!’ and ‘Shah Rukh Khan!’ have dotted conversations, India’s reigning superstars evidence of Bollywood’s ocean-traversing powers. ‘I was in Delhi for three years, studying at the Jamia Millia University,’ a seller of Persian rugs and vases speckled with Persian miniature art tells me. ‘I wanted to stay longer.’

this tonality to the language of Farsi has ended up becoming the soundtrack to my journeys 

            This umbilical cord between the two lands grows stronger. Persians fleeing persecution for their Zoroastrian faith from marauding Arab invaders and ones escaping the Great Persian Famine, split a century apart, are now embedded within Indian social, cultural, and culinary life. The Parsis and the Iranis – still bearing their original land and villages and tongues as birthmarks, proliferating their origins through the Indian culinary staples of the Irani café and the Parsi restaurant – are an enduring reminder of how humans and their journeys are the continuous forewords to any story worth telling. And yet, language has an even stranger way of reaching out.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            

            My café has started to fill up now; so have the conversations. As I pay closer attention to the words drifting in the air, I feel the soft kiss of familiarity as it keeps brushing against my skin. Farsi has some aesthetic and rhythmic resonance with what, surely, is another Indian national language, Urdu. But why do I detect the distant ethnic pull of Sanskrit? And why, inexplicably, do I pick up the whiff of my father’s tongue – Bangla? But then I remember the intonation, and it all begins to make sense. Well, at least this last connection does.

            Bangla, as with Farsi, revels in the act of the playful. It flits about coyly in shy seduction; it prances with the freedom of a wandering minstrel; it bathes the receiver in a sweet flood of remembrance and togetherness. Both languages, etched so thickly in poetry and literature, offer a path towards the obsessive minutiae of culture and cultural histories. And with both, I am but an occasional passenger, listening in, offering a smile, taking some words to heart, and understanding, by way of cosmic alliance, that this sound and this flow is meant to convey this word and this meaning.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

it’s the return of the song as a waiter at a chaikhana informs me, in scattered tongue, that the jasmine tea would make for a better infusion than the mint

            The waiter brings me another pot of tea. I allow the infusion of seven leaves to immerse itself in the water. I pick up a swizzle stick of unprocessed sugar, ready for the swirl. On the player, the record is switched and a forsaken Persian voice comes on.

Image: Siddharth Dasgupta

            

            The female singer elicits the odd ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ from some of the faithful, as she launches into a lament of love. Lilt and cadence firmly in place, it’s hard to believe that this story could end up anywhere but satiated. I take out my diary and try to match the gaps in her voice and the sighs in her verse with the words that I think might be making up the narrative to this song.

            Hours pass, in the repartee of this unspoken conversation. I understand now, beyond a silhouette of a doubt, that language is as much about feeling as it is about knowledge. In Isfahan, meanwhile, the song continues to play.

APRIL 2023 Siddharth Dasgupta MONK