Of an age gone by and a language lost
Our villages have become ghost villages; will our language take the same road?’ A googly was flung at me by a student.
In Tibetan settlements, you will find them still speaking Tibetan. Uprooted from their home, living in an alien land, they speak to each other in the same tongue they once spoke on the Roof of the World.
Our story is a whole different one.
Going back in time, I see my mother, all 16 years old, accompanying my father to Mussoorie. The only language she knew was Garhwali. Of course, over the years, she did pick up a smattering of Hindi. Fortunately, she spoke to me in Garhwali (a language that now comes to me easily). I have no idea why my other siblings (five of them) had to make do with cobbled-together Hindi.
At the age of five, I was sent off to the school run by the Garlahs—three of them—Edith, Doris, and their brother Cecil who looked after 20 pupils. I am grateful to them for opening the doors of Anglo-India to me. This is where I picked up a second language.
Miss Doris Garlah, an accomplished math teacher, worked in the Railway School of Oak Grove. She is remembered for giving the girls the treat of treats in 1960, by permitting them to tune into the radio broadcast to hear Princess Margaret say ‘I do’ as she wed the Earl of Snowdon, Antony Armstrong-Jones.
‘Saili Sa’ab, what a chatter-box your son is!’ I overheard Edith Garlah tell my father, adding: ‘The fellow talks nineteen to the dozen!’
While my father tried to decipher her, the monkeys raided the ‘dooli’ placed outside the kitchen.
‘The blessed latch is not working! They’ve flinched the jharans!’ wailedDoris. Her tea towels had gone.
Soon after I too learnt to shorten words: ‘remember’ was pared down to ‘member’; ‘brother to ‘bro’ and later, much later I picked up priceless expressions like ‘she looks like a dying duck in a thunderstorm’.
Cecil Garlah would send me off to the wood godown: ‘Go! Give Arthur that old boozarda jhaanp!’ Arthur Fisher was a down-and-out hobo who lived out his life among sacks of charcoal and occasionally doubling as a projectionist in the Electric Picture Palace cinema.
One day I found him counting his pennies. He was stacking them into neat piles muttering: ‘Eightsies! Charjees! Dohjees!’ Winking at me, he slipped the coins into his pocket, saying: ‘A swig a day keeps the doctor away!’
‘Don’t you have a family?’ I ask a dumb question.
‘After the war, I camehome to find that they had gone off to England. Harmony Cottage had been sold.’
‘Did they ever get in touch?’ I twisted the knife. ‘Of course not!’ he spat back.
In his old age, Arthur was an assistant to the cemetery’s undertaker and saw many to their graves. One day he too came to rest in the pauper’s section of the Camel’s Back Cemetery.
Edith, the youngest of the Garlah family crossed the Golden Bridge in 2006, a few days short of her 100th birthday.
With her passing, an age had gone. My days of kofta curry and yellow rice were all but over.
Ganesh Saili
Author, photographer, illustrator
sailiganesh@gmail.com