On Telugu
For Uncle M.
When we moved to Vizag in 1996, my mother was the only one of us — my parents and I — who knew Telugu. Having grown up in Hyderabad, she was delighted to be back in a city where she could feel at home. One of the first things we did when we got there was to go to the beach — my first time seeing the sea! I was terribly excited by the feel of the lukewarm water washing over my ankles and dragging the sand from beneath my feet. To this day, I feel that thrill every time I wade in the sea.
The second piece of entertainment we allowed ourselves was a film. We went to Sree Kanya theatre to watch Ramudochadu. We were driven there simply by boredom; plus, my mother recognised the actor on the posters. I fell asleep halfway through the film, and haven’t dared to try watching it again. (I just looked up the plot and realised that I had assumed it featured Venkatesh and not Nagarjuna. So much to unlearn!)
This was my first proper encounter with Telugu. Then, entering my new school in Class 5, I had to choose my third language. With only Telugu and Hindi offered as the language choices, Telugu was my only option for third language. My mother helped me make sense of the primers we wrestled with, understand the swirls of the foreign script, and the rhythm of the words that were taught to children of five.
ఎలుక
ఏనుగు
చిలుక
And so on. Birds, animals, nature. Life was that simple. The language seeped into my heart, settling there for good, returning like a whiff of home-cooked food on foreign shores every time I hear its lovely sound.
However, for several years, I continued to speak in English even when friends spoke to me in Telugu. Shy or uncomfortable, I never speak in Telugu among people I know. People at work found it funny when I responded to Telugu sarcasm with English wisecracks. At a Nellore mess, on a trip to Vizag in 2019, the man at the counter laughed at my Telugu. “You speak Telugu with an English accent!” This is something I am not proud of, one bit. But when you leave a language behind, no matter how much you love it, the relationship changes. The words take a while to take shape when you try to construct a full sentence, but become ready fillers when you are speaking a different language.
Now my family is a source of entertainment for G., with our Tamil liberally sprinkled with Telugu words. It is always pelli for marriage and pedda for big. My mother offers G. allam pachchadi and pulihora. We can’t help it, some of the Telugu words just come to mind more readily!
I write this as I think of Uncle M. My mum and her brothers talk to one another in a typical Hyderabadi mix of languages, with Tamil thrown in. Uncle M., one of her older brothers, was among the biggest fans of Telugu I knew.
We lost Uncle M. early on Saturday after a year-long illness. I’m not yet ready to talk about how it feels. For now, I want to remember him through the things he enjoyed, Telugu being one of them, and I’ll leave you now with one of his favourite pieces in Raga Mohanam, Ra Ra Rajeevalochana.
