The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER VI

"Silence is the language of God,
all else is poor translation."
― Rumi

That year, after the summer died out like a wildfire in a forest does, Rumi was back at school. It wasn't necessarily his favorite place anymore. But he went, for he needed education- or knowledge and experience, of some things he didn't even realize.

On the first day of orientation, there was an announcement (which was eventually stuck on the Notice Board- and then again explained by a teacher during a lecture) that told the students they'd now have options for their third language, which was mainly Marathi all these years. But now, they'd have options of learning Sanskrit and French as well.

Of course, the teacher who taught Marathi was devastated. Her face hung like a tired giraffe's neck as if the stars had vanished from the sky or the world was silent. She was disappointed but angrier that the school would do something so disgraceful to let children study a non-Indian language. "It is against our culture!" She exclaimed in class during her lecture. "Why should one learn any other language, a ph-oreign one at that? Disgraceful!" And then she turned towards her off-faced students, looking at them smilingly as if the bird had taken flight already. She cleared her throat and adjusted the sari on her blouse properly and asked, "You all will obviously stay here; I know it!"

But she was faced with disappointment when half the class was empty the next day when children ran to other sections of the lecture throughout the building on different floors. Most of them took Sanskrit. Rumi didn't.

Rumi was one of the very few people who took an interest in a language that didn't belong to anybody there. It was an English school with an inbuilt Catholic Church, and so English was the primary and first language. French was a fresh addition, an interesting one- something unique the school wanted to do to stand out. And if anything, Rumi was grateful.

The first thing that crawled his lost mind was: Simone De Beauvoir! Perhaps he could read her other book he picked up from a library there- The Ethics Of Ambiguity. But now, he also had a different understanding of that country.

Europe: France: French: Simone: Charles.

And he was proud of it somehow.

It somewhat gave him immense joy and pride to read somebody who spoke so non-violently of the repressed. He loved the language from the moment he understood her. But more than that, it made him happier to say that he knew a Frenchman who visited his father's cafe. He told this to the other students in the same class, to his previous teacher and himself. He said to them all that they were friends because it made them feel that he worked towards something. And he was cooler than anyone thought.

But like the earth that centered with deep heat, deep down, Rumi joined the class to learn the language, purely. He did it to learn something new, something fresh. A wave of fresh air, perhaps, or a new batch of raindrops. A new perspective. A new mission in that quiet little, bookish, and unnoticed life he led; where his father didn't love his mother and mother only cooked food; and he read books and only knew friends from them. Where his travels were virtual, and books were tickets. It was a strange world, confined strangely in another realm itself. The silence of his room provided companionship, solidarity with the walls, and life in person.

And what games did his stars play one day that the professor wanted to teach them- from alphabets and easier words to powerful and easy prose by none other than Beauvoir herself. The book given to them was a translated version of the original; in English, so as to read and understand and then, eventually, a couple of weeks down to translate it from the translated back to the original. The original translated works would be compared to Beauvoir herself!