Does it really matter if you speak your mother-tongue and write in another language? Sorry if it sounds grim, a neurotic excuse to admit that you don’t have a language of your own?  I must confess English is neither my mother’s language nor my father’s language. Also, there is nothing ‘Anglophone’ about my social and family background. My family travelled frequently from small town to smaller towns and often lived in makeshift asbestos-roofed houses.  When not chasing river-pirates, my father would read cheap translation of Tolstoy, Lorca and Ibn Battuta. I am told that he tried unsuccessfully to publish his ‘motorcycle diary’ in fantasy magazines.  Believe it or not, I did not speak until I was ten.  I only mimicked green parrots and played with pigmy elephants in the Saranda forests at the tri-junction of Odisha-Bengal-Bihar (undivided). And I would often stammer. Little did my father realize that ‘stammer is no handicap. It is a mode of speech’ and ‘when a whole people stammer, stammer becomes their mother-tongue.’ (K. Satchidanandan). So ‘I was wounded early, and early I learned, that wounds made me’ (Adonis).

It is true that English is the language of the powerful and ‘bald-eyed Gods’. But it has also become the ‘power of the powerless’. Wishing to speak truth to the power, I learnt English ‘from rats, reptiles, insects and part-time teachers with plastic accents’ in schizophrenic fits of self-harm. You won’t believe but I loved James Bond’s car chases in my adolescent years, and enjoyed playing with rubber toys of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara in my college days. I suspect when I landed in ‘barren Oklahoma’ of Derek Walcott for my doctoral study, I experienced my many heteronyms colluding and colliding with each other at the hallucinatory cliff of my existence. I had travelled to North America so absentmindedly that I didn’t even know Oklahoma was a land of violent tornados. Geographers and geographies often betrayed me. For days, I remember I suffered from the cold haemorrhaging guilt as if I practised human sacrifice in a foreign language. To overcome the lack of a primordial language of my skin colour, dreams and memory, I would often hide into the claustrophobic tornado shelter on the campus ‘with the long-bearded Darwin’ and his progenies. Chewing long lines of unspoken words, I invented a new language of survival but never altered my voice either sighing or sewing. While I remained an untutored, invisible and disenfranchised Bihari migrant in the Anglophone world, whimsy verses flourished in the backyard of my ‘political unconscious’. No wonder, psychologist Ashis Nandy’s fictional prolegomena for ‘my grandfather’s imaginary typewriter’ ended my exile at home and the world (Ghare-Baire). Ah, it also led to the end of my prelapsarian Eden. I had already lost my mother and mother-tongue. And when I returned home my father was struggling with dementia remembering ‘only his first bribe from a poor widow’. This is how I arrived at poetry in English; an intimate and frightening homecoming!