Dedicated to @Tasniaaa because I need to make up for lost time :)
"I think in English, but my tongue is dressed in Spanish. I am always missing a word for something in either language."
-Yesika Salgado, Brown Girl
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Rania Khan likes languages. She's never been able to decide which one she likes the most.
She knows English best, its taste as familiar as her morning coffee. English, she thinks, fills her mouth with willingness and holds her tongue in the right places. It doesn't stay buried, with scars in the shape of her teeth. It dances, embraces every ridge of her palate, every crooked and pointed piece of her teeth till it is thick with exhaustion and rolls down her throat to suffocate her with the sound of her own words.
She stares at the Qur'an in front of her, the letters floating in a sea of white. She dives in it, floats in it, feels its warmth and chill, cups some in her hands and stores it away for safe keeping. That is exactly how decoding the Qur'an feels like to her. Her personal copy with Urdu translation beneath symmetrical intricate boxes is a lively collection of word analyses and interpretations.
It looks loved.
The English written beside the Urdu is a stark contrast, one that is too symbolic for her to miss. A language her tongue has nursed to life and a mother tongue lying dead by the tombstones of her teeth.
Urdu is made for elegant mouths, she thinks. Tongues that know how to please and fall in love. Hers knows neither. It is a language she wishes she spoke better and not corrupt it with the vernacular slang that has crept inside of her like a cold chill. It's why she prefers the Urdu translation even on days it is too much elegance to swallow. She doesn't want to stay away from the one language she can call her own.
The Arabic letters in her Qur'an have witnessed a great deal of coloring. Fluorescent for the commands, pink for the favorites, green for the scary and most of all, purple for the miracles. Every letter holds significance in this language, every word connected via roots. Roots that transcend verbs and names, holding all of them with a thread of incredible continuity. Arabic lets you grow in it, it helps you trace the roots back to a beautiful story you knew to be true.
She has spent enough time with this language to learn that it loves you back in the same measure as you do.
For as long as she can recollect, Hindi has been her escape route. A language that bares itself to its reader, simple and graceful and extra ordinary in its own right. It is her country's tongue, one that boasts of kings and queens and demons of old. One that weaves itself into epics and mythologies, like it's showing the world that simplicity is capable of more greatness than it could ever imagine.
Her tryst with languages has been an evolving story, one that stretches back into the realm of time she barely can remember till the present day and possibly, till she's a living human being willing to learn.
