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This was the other poem in the 'Anthology' that I really liked

Search for my Tongue
by Sujata Bhatt

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my toungue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place where you had to
speak a foreign tongue--
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,

may thoonky nakhi chay
parantoo rattray svupnama mare bhasha pachi aavay chay
foolnee jaim mari bhasha mari jeebh
moddhama kheelay chay
fullnee jaim mari bhasha mari jeebh
moddhama pakay chay
it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows londer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Everytime I think I have forgotten,
I think I have lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.
~~~~

The bit in the middle is Gudjrati.

I really liked the poem because I understood where it came from because my ability to speak German completely vanished for a time, and the only way it comes back is immersion, which as you can imagine is difficult. But thank goodness it does come back because sometimes the German word just feels better.

It like with 'Mutti', which is the equivalent of Mum. Mum is the person but, to me, Mutti has all the feelings attached to it. I suppose that's because that's what I called my Mum when I was small.

And the other fun part of this is that it was part of what me and Nisha bonded over, because she's a Gudjrati, and I asked whether that was the language in the poem, and she said yes and we started talking. Three cheers for the national curriculum I say ;)

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