Silent lanes of tale of mother languages

I open a box of sweets on the table and an old familiar call echoes in my ears: Ramdana lai ba, bouwa ke mithai ba (Ramdana sweets… sweets for little darlings…)

A hot, languid afternoon in Chandpur Bela mohalla in Bihar's capital Patna. I was about 12 years old. A hawker came roaming the by-lanes, carrying on his shoulders a big glass container, its wide mouth bursting with Ramdana laddus (balls of sweet made from amaranth seeds).

His call was sweeter than the sweets he sold. Intimate. We were bouwa (little darlings) not customers. He addressed us as if we were relatives, razing the wall between us buyers and sellers.

In those days, I think, our language was not confined to classrooms. It reverberated across streets, in the calls of many vendors.

It was 1989. I must have been 8-9 years old. Two sisters in their mid-forties from the Dudekula Muslim community used to sell fresh flower garlands in my village Kolakaluru, in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district. One was frail and small, the other tall and well-built. I don’t remember their names. I used to call them pinni (younger aunt) and they addressed my mother as akka (elder sister). My grandfather taught them in his school when they had enrolled for a short time. Perhaps, that's why they adored my family.

Back then we got mallepulu (jasmine) only during summers. The rest of the year they made garlands of chemantipulu (chrysanthemum), banti (marigold) and karabbantulu (french marigold). Dressed in faded old sarees, colourful flower garlands flowing from bamboo baskets hung from their elbows, they would come calling out the names of fresh flowers. Mallepulu, chemantipulu, kagadaalu, karabbantulu…

Those were the days when young girls would be seen wearing pretty flower braids in their hair during summer holidays. Whenever the rare dontara malle (tender double-petaled Arabian jasmine) bloomed, the pinnis would bring them specially for me, hiding it from other customers, all wrapped in fresh lotus or banana leaves.

Nowadays malle is available throughout the year, but young girls don’t like wearing gajras (flower garlands) in their hair. And women selling flowers in the streets are no longer around.

We have apps, notifications, doorstep deliveries, but not the voices that called us by our names and kept our mother tongues alive in the streets – no bouwa, no chinna. Conveniences have multiplied, but our collective memories are fading.

Some 50 years ago, a rhythmic call used to regularly break the silence of sizzling afternoons in Mahasamund district’s Patandadar village in Chhattisgarh. Thande mithey baraf, lale lal, muh mein dal (Cool ice, sweet ice, reddish red, let it crackle on your tongue). The moment children heard him, they rushed. We with our bowls in hand filled with rice and Adivasi children with dried mahua. Money was meagre in those days, so we used to barter those for an ice gola.

No one knew the hawker’s name. We called him bentikhiya, a term that hinted at their social status. He always used kinship terms while addressing us: didi, kaka, dada. Often bentikhiya acted as a roving sandesiya (messenger), bringing the news of our relatives from nearby villages. Many times, I saw my grandmother feed him pakhal (rice mixed with water).

To understand someone is hungry on seeing them and then to call him over and feed some rice gruel – that was bhasha in its silent form. A mother tongue eloquent without words.

The streets of the harbour town Kochi in Kerala's Ernakulam district were once bustling with the calls of fish vendors, selling fresh catch of the day bright, glistening, firm and smelling of the sea and shore. Men carrying two bamboo baskets hung from a bamboo pole resting on their shoulders, women with large aluminium vessels filled with the day's yield on their heads would walk kilometres through residential areas.

I recall hearing a familiar voice from a time much before the refrigerated truck or ice-packed lorries took over the business to super-markets. Before the pandemic made buying fish online seem more acceptable. And before climate change brought in uncertainty and fluctuations to hit their haul.

A long call rising and falling like a wave through the street would list out the names of what comprised the catch of the day: mathi…ayili…srao…chemmin…thiloppia (sardine, mackerel, shark, prawn, tilapia). Yes, fisherfolk are still around, but the vendors calling at the door are rare and uncertain – like their catch.

I am a proud speaker of a language without a land in post-colonial India divided on linguistic lines. I never got to hear my mother tongue outside our homes, beyond a small circle of Sindhi residents in a little town in Rajsthan’s Sri Ganganagar district. Even when the language is one of those 22 scheduled in the Indian Constitution.

You will not hear it on the streets of Ganganagar town, barely 25 kilometres away from the Hindumalkot border between India and Pakistan. Not at local squares where business takes place, nor in government offices. The street vendors selling their wares call out in Punjabi or Hindi.

But my elders used to talk about local vendors hollering in Sindhi in their time. They are called hoko ḍiyanu (calling out to buy). And I recall a character of a vendor singing and selling street food of Sindh in a post-partition film Abana (1958): Biha batalo chahira chahira chatini chashke vaari, bini pesani men dhau karayan nerani aun mochari. O kaka, o bhau, o chacha hede aau (Crispy lotus stem fritters, lip-smacking chutney… what a filling snack for just two paise. Hey uncle, hey brother, hey uncle, come, come here. Let me make one for you).

So, somewhere the stories, songs and sounds of Sindhi hold out in books, films, and a few aging hearts. But the spoken language and the beauty of hearing it on the streets – not sure if I should say I lost it to partition

If there was a community that these voices, reverberating through our streets, really touched with an immediacy, it was that of children. They brought alive their latent wishes, tastebuds, and even their fears. Children also added their own voices to the chaotic melody that marked our mohallas.

The streets in Bhehbari village of Assam's Kamrup district where I used to go to school looked very different in those days when sedentary screens had not sucked out the stamina of the street. A couple of decades ago, one could find young children making a ruckus as they played traditional games on the street. Games beyond cricket.

One that goes back to my childhood in lower Assam is a game called hau, somewhat like kabaddi. Two teams face each other. A player from one team shouting ‘hau re hoppaI’(nonsense verse) enters into the opposing team’s territory to touch and 'kill' as many players as they could. Their act would also ‘resurrect’ the same number of players in their own team. I remember shouting and cheering as we played. Not a day went by without our playing the game, except when it rained.

Hau re happai, dima khaba nappai, ito kotha kone kochhi, bordekar appai, bordekar appai (Hau re happai, eating eggs not allowed, who said such a thing? The son of the elder brother. The son of the elder brother), we would say on our turn. Whether the rhymes made literal sense or not, they carried innumerable connotations of carefree abundance, deep bonds of friendship, and endless joy that only children know. Or should I say the children of certain generations had known?

A man selling toffees, seasonal fruits, tamarind, water chestnuts and popsicles used to stand in front of my school in Patti village, in Punjab's Tarn Taran district. There were no packaged foods or pocket money for us then. I don’t remember the vendor’s name. But because he used to sell sanghadas (water chestnut) during the winter, children called him Sanghada! He too had accepted our nick name.

But for some reason, when one of us children misbehaved, our parents or teachers used to threaten us by saying that they would leave us with Sanghada that night. I used to be horrified at the thought. Especially because the four-year-old me was already intimidated by his super tall figure and jet-black hair.

And yet, there was a strange pull in his voice as he sang to us children:

Hohohoho lalalalalala
Lo lo bachchiyo barf da gola...
Hihihihihihi
Badle biche de do ikk dassi
Lalalalalililili
Ah rahi tuhadi imli
Aja meri rani dhi meri rani dhi
Badle wich de do chawani
Sunawo menu 4 da pahada
Rati khawo ikk sanghada

(Hohohoho lalalalalala
Come children come,
here take this icy treat...
Hihihihihihi
Take this and hand me a ten paise coin
Lalalalalililili
Here is your imli
Come my little princess, come my queen
Hand me 25 paise for your tamarind
Sing to me the table of four,
for the joy of water chestnut pure)

The memory of that voice, even today it takes me back in time.

Kabuliwala wasn't just a film for me but my very first lesson in trust and belonging. The little girl Mini and Chhabi Biswas as Kabuliwala in that 1957 film had made a lasting impression on me, years before I read the original story by Tagore in Class 5. The relationship between Mini and Kabuliwala, a migrant street vendor, taught me that we need to understand outsiders and not be afraid of them. Maybe it is because of this story that I never treated the hawkers and vendors as strangers.

In Murshidabad's Beldanga village a khaja-seller (seller of crispy layered pastries) Yakub used to come regularly. Gurer khaja, tiler khaja...khete moja, vari moja (Jaggery khaja, sesame khaja...fun to eat, endless fun). I would be delighted every time I heard his voice. We used to wait for him, as if he was family.

Years later I came to Kolkata for studies. The environment was very different, so was the medium of instruction in the university – English. I was feeling lonely and disconnected from everything around me. On one such gloomy afternoon I heard the same call. Khaja khaja gurer khaja. This time in another city, on another street, as if calling me back to my childhood. No, it wasn’t a dream, there was Yakub, all flesh and blood!

Yakub's voice with its distinct lilt and character against the buzzing metropolis made me connect with myself. Meeting him again like that was my own Kabuliwala-moment, an anchor for me. I didn't need to mould myself to fit into this mega-city, I realised.

Today Yakub isn’t around, but his voice always resounds inside me, connecting me to my roots.

About an hour from our village Barri Phulwaria, in Bihar’s Sitamarhi district, is Bhawanipur. A woman from there used to roam around the mohallas in our village with meat stacked up in a chhyanti, bamboo-basket, on her head. She was quite fond of paan (betel leaf), so everybody called her Paanwali. This was 1979.

Those were the days of severe scarcity, very few could afford fish or meat. But when Paanwali came, once in a couple of months, it was like Eid for us. Gos le lo gos (Come buy meat, come buy meat)!

As a child I was so fond of meat that my grandfather, Sheikh Abdul Hakim, used to tease me by saying, “Jab bada hoga, teri shadi Paanwali ki beti se kara dunga [you grow up, I will get you married off to Paanwali’s daughter].

Ours was a Muslim majority village. There were only two roads from Bhawanipur to Phulwaria. One ran through Narharpur, and the other was via Basaul. Both of which had a mixed population of Hindus and Muslims. And then there was river Adhwara that Paanwali had to cross to reach our village.

From our village she used to walk through Barri and Bajitpur, villages with Hindu majorities, to reach Kanchanpur, where she sold the leftover meat.

Today it would seem unbelievable, but no one stopped this woman from going door to door with a basket-load of meat on her head, no one harmed her as she walked through the villages. Muslims were not upset with the Hindus in our areas eating pork, consuming toddy and alcohol. And similarly, Hindus were not troubled by Muslims enjoying meat.

Today, I don't know whether Paanwali is alive or not, but surely that time isn’t. The distance between Bhawanipur and Fulwaria just keeps increasing.

This story was originally written in different languages by Swarn Kanta, Sudhamayi Sattenapalli, Nirmal Kumar Sahu, Rajeeve Chelanat, Karan Vanni, Pankaj Das, Kamaljit Kaur, Smita Khator, and Qamar Siddique.

It is translated and edited in Hindi by Swarn Kanta, translated into English by Joshua Bodhinetra, and edited in English by Pratishtha Pandya. The layout and photo editing of the piece has been done by Binaifer Bharucha.