AABAA

As a baby, the first word I uttered might have been "Aabaa" instead of "Aai". Yes, he was a person I loved even more than my mother, as a child. I would wake up in the middle of the night, crying, "Take me to Aabaa..." and poor dear mother and father had to take me downstairs. There Aabaa would sit playing with me or tell me stories when the rest of the world was fast asleep.

He made up stories with our favorite god, Maruti, who would help me with magic rings and avenge all the wrongs done to me by other people! I even used to believe that Maruti could fly to the Electricity Board and restore power, when the heat in Nagpur during summer was made even more unbearable by a power cut in the afternoon!

If anyone could put wings to the imagination of a child, it was he. He made me the little queen of my world, and I was treated royally all through my childhood, because he shielded me from every rude word, every harsh reality. Sometimes he took it to the extremes though: He would hold me by my frock when I was sitting in a rickshaw, for the fear that the wind might blow me away maybe! He would come running behind me, whenever I tried to climb the stairs with my baby steps, so I wouldn’t trip and fall.

We played all the time in our courtyard. Sometimes I was a vegetable vendor (after I had gathered random leaves and fruits from our garden). At other times I was a worshipper at the great temple at the top of the stairs…( maybe I need to mention that the goddess in this temple was my huge doll, decorated suitably with all the jewelry and other adornments I could lay a hand on.) Aabaa would give me cashew nuts and raisins to offer to my goddess, but my most favorite was “Gems”. Thus he can be pronounced guilty of first introducing me to the magical substance called “chocolate” to which I readily became addicted and would whine for some every now and then.We would stop in the middle of the road while coming back from some shopping, and I would grope into his pockets, knowingly. He had a dairy milk chocolate or a pack of gems always ready. We both had a sweet tooth. Dinshaw’s ice cream, chocolates and cakes, gulab jaamun or khoa jalebi, we were always for it!

Jokes apart, I have a much more valuable legacy from him than the sweet tooth. I owe him my English language!!! I would probably never be where I am right now, if he had not happened to be a private tutor of “spoken” English, as he used to call it. Now it might seem a perfectly commonplace thing- children are known to learn the languages spoken in their household. But here lies the difference- Aabaa had developed the whole structure of his English syllabus on the basis of the fact that language is best learnt through listening. He placed all his emphasis on the conscious listening to, and thereby acquiring the structures of English language. Little did I realize as a child sitting on his lap for being cuddled even while he taught, that I would become the living example of his theory. Within no time I had picked up long sentences involving passive voice- something that boggles most of the foreign students of English in India. I rarely stood second highest in class in an English language test, and my natural choice for Masters had to be English, without doubt.

Aabaa was a highly creative person- he wrote little limericks to amuse us kids- he knew how to weave stories out of daily life and he had a great understanding of the psychology of learning and creating. As an English teacher, he could have chosen a classic, a Shakespeare-play as a text for his course. But he chose “Don Quixote”!!! Simplicity of grammatical structures, a wide range of commonplace situations replete with dialogues, and the quality of arousing interest unfailingly- these were the qualities he wanted in a model text- not philosophy, not poetry, but plain, spoken English.

Well, it is easy to idolize a person so close, someone who has been a beacon, a guiding light not just to me, but to my father and everyone else in the family. And so I did, as a child. But as I matured, our relationship matured too. Sometimes I would ask him, “When can I read all those books stacked in your cupboards?” Those cupboards were a sacred place to me, I longed to reach them (little knowing that I lacked in both physical and mental height then) and he would smile and say, “You are too small for these, dear! I will give them all to you when you grow up.”

He did not wait till I grew up- he left us all too early for that. There is a vacuum in me now- that part of me which wanted to proudly discuss those big fat books with him still aches for his presence. He was going to teach me his theories of spoken English teaching that summer. I went to Pune to learn German instead- and never saw him again.

I still think sometimes that I could meet him in that dream-space…where he is, in my unconscious.

Or with his touch of spirituality, he could come back to see me! Because I have experienced this first hand, I know he had an aura of a mystic which made him whimsical and hot-tempered at times. He definitely had some oracular capacity- he had even predicted the number of a lottery ticket accurately. He had a strange, but totally philanthropic past- and by the time I was born, he had settled into a more “normal” family life. He never bought himself new clothes for years together. He never traveled too far from home, and was almost never seen at family-celebrations or marriages of relatives. But he would be the first one to offer help to a student not able to go to university for lack of money, or to some relative in need of money for an expensive medical treatment. He was so exacting about household expenses that everyone else in the family would dread the last day of the month. But he never failed to reward me with a ten rupee note whenever I topped in class or bagged a prize at debate. He used to sponsor ice creams for us if India won a cricket match or if my mom made a special dinner that he had liked.

Well. As they say, memories are an endless repertoire I could draw on till eternity...If I say he was my grandfather, he wasn't that, per se. If I say he was my best friend during childhood- he was far too old for that. I can only say that he was the crucial link in the life of so many people- including me, that I still think of him, not as a person from my memory, but as a perpetual source of inspiration and blessings.

SYMBOLIC ORDER SIMPLIFIED

Every word has a life of its own.
It resists being chained to a sentence
And every word is a poem
A seed, a soil, a water and a root
Waiting to burgeon.

"They must be fighting for survival then"
I think- even as they continue to fight and I continue to "think".

"Think" am a mighty word.
Think thinks every word originates from him-
Even as I "think" that "think" grew inside my head

And so my "head" thinks it was the first one
So that "think" argues that "head",
would make no sense without "it".

"It" "And" "All" "etc." form a battalion of their "own"
Claiming a right to all possibilities
which "they" seem to open up.

"Open", Yes! That's one person
who can exactly describe
What's going on "here" right now.

"It" "is" the "opening" of a "world"
called "language"
Inside my "head"
Inside language.


Prajakta. 22nd May 2005.
NOTE: "THE SYMBOLIC ORDER" is the order of language, claim the cultural theorists of language and psychology that I have studied. We are born "into" language so that LANGUAGE IS THOUGHT. Also, the key idea is that we have no control over language because we can never see outside it's matrix. i.e. we cannot think beyond the language we speak.