It looks like a very familiar Indian market scene. Colorful and vibrant, smelling of guava and jasmine flowers, and very noisy.
MARKET NOISE
As cars trundle past a man hawks strings of white flowers that women wear in their hair
FLOWER SELLER
Another man sells neatly cut guavas.
GUAVAS
Yet I understand nothing anyone says. This is not in my native Kolkata. It’s in Trichy in the state of Tamil Nadu in the southern part of India. Everyone speaks Tamil, a language I don’t understand. Many of the store signs don’t have English. And I can’t read Tamil either.
I am a stranger in my own country.
This is Sandip Roy in Trichy.
India is a country of hundreds of languages though the government recognizes some 22 officially. Language is a prickly issue as many states are suspicious about attempts to impose a language like Hindi on them willy nilly. Others argue that Indians would be more united if everyone across the length and breadth of the country could communicate in Hindi.
Perhaps.
As I wander around Trichy at first not understanding what was being said around me feels disconcerting. I feel a bit lost, as if cast out to sea without a life jacket.
At the Ranganatha temple, the biggest temple complex in India, the priest tries to explain the Gods being worshipped inside one temple.
PRIEST:
I understand nothing.
Old ladies come up to me and ask questions. I stare at them in confusion and shake my head. I hear songs and its just pretty noise
PRAYERS
At a 17th century church a priest is giving a sermon. The church is packed, everyone’s slippers and shoes piled outside. He sounds impassioned but I don’t understand a word.
SERMON
But slowly as I got used to the noise around me I realise what a relief it is to just experience a city without trying to eavesdrop on its conversations. I don’t have to make sense of the words. I can just listen to the soundscape of the city.
At the Ranganatha temple a flocks of parrots suddenly take flight, their squawks echoing around the temple spires, intricately carved in candy colours.
PARROTS
The temple elephant gently hrrumphs, using its trunk to bless someone who gives her some money which she gently hands to her keeper. Someone blows conch shells.
CONCH SHELLS
As I walk into the sanctum sanctorum of the Goddess Lakshmi, the consort of Lord Vishnu to whom the Ranganath temple is dedicated I see a group of elderly women, offering their prayers.
As the priest serenades the deity with an oil lamp the women start singing to the Goddess, their voices rising and failing
WOMEN SONG
I don’t understand what they are saying but the devotion transcends the words. I gaze at them, their snow white hair, their brightly colored saris, parrot green, deep maroon, midnight blue, all with golden borders and I feel transported to another world.
WOMEN SONG 2
As a writer I understand the power of words. It’s my craft. And my crutch. I try to find the right words to describe scenes. I interview people and select the clips that will move my narrative forward.
But words carry their own chains within them tying us to one meaning and one meaning only.
Here I am suddenly free of those chains. I just listen to sound the same way I feel a piece of fabric or a piece of music. I admire the texture, I am free to interpret it just based on how it reverberates in me, no dictionary meaning needed.
Later on that trip I wander into an old Danish fort. Tharangabadi or Tranquebar was a Danish colony centuries ago. Once it was the second largest Danish fort in the world. Now the fort is being restored. Tourists mill around taking selfies.
REPAIR SOUNDS
It has a modest little museum that looks like the display in someone’s living room. Danish weapons, documents and ancient Tamil sculptures just piled haphazardly around. In one corner is giant whalebone weathered by the sun.
A man asks me what it is. He speaks no English, I speak no Tamil. Whale, I say hesitantly. He looks confused. I pantomime. He looks more confused.
WHALE
For a moment we are stuck on either side of the language divide. Suddenly I open my notebook and draw a cartoonish whale. Light dawns. Oh like with a spout of water he pantomimes.
And somehow are on the same page. No language needed.
This is Sandip Roy in Trichy.
