Do you know that feeling when you hear a good song and want to write one too? And then you realise you can only write lyrics half as good as those, and not even in the language that you want to. I was born into a nation that teaches its mother tongue as a second language. My mouth is an instruction manual with directions to recite songs in English syllables, where my mind is so accustomed to the Latin alphabet that the Devanagari script has become a stranger begging to be let in. I may know the words to some of my favourite Hindi songs only partially, but I know the feeling completely. 

I am from the nation where aamras is served in steel containers, where songs play from chai stalls and wedding speakers, where boys buy frangipanis to tuck behind their girl’s ear. So how can I possibly describe the helplessness that consumes me every time I hear a Hindi song in foreign words that I’ve been taught to accept as my own? I write, I do, but not in the language I want to. So maybe I’ll learn to love the English verses that slip off my tongue like honey stirred into tea. Learn to smile each time someone compliments my poetry, saying the rhyme adds flavour to my piece like melting butter in a frying pan. Learn to nod when they say, You write so well, all the while pushing the grief behind my teeth and never letting it out. Or maybe I won’t learn to love this foreign language that was never mine to call home, this foreign language that belongs to the creators of Mughal architecture and Calcutta railways, this foreign language that has wrapped itself so tightly, so uncomfortably around my bones. The irony hurts like nothing an X-ray could ever show: an Indian most fluent in a language that isn’t her own. 

Maybe, in another world, what I’m saying will start making sense to you. Maybe, in another world, you will hear a Hindi song written by me and feel like writing one too.