Language, Clouds and Aeroplanes

“As soon as I reached the station, the train arrived”, this could also be worded as “I reached the station no sooner than the train arrived” said my dad. He was looking at his favourite English daily which he had been reading for the last 30 years or so. It was very important for him that I understood the basics of the language well enough even though he had no formal higher qualifications in the language himself. For me, it was boring and stressful as I thought (in my language) if something can be said effectively in one way then what is the need for saying it in another way as well. What a waste of time! Anyhow, my job was to translate 10 sentences into English. It was a daily thing.

We did not speak English at home, or at school or elsewhere. But it was still important to learn it. I must have learned a-z before I was 2 or 3, can not remember precisely. And that should have been sufficient. But this foreign language was being increasingly considered supreme and therefore had to be learned in greater detail, in greater detail than our own language.

The complex form of tenses always haunted me. I was happy with present, past and future but any suffixes at the end would crumble me down e.g. present indefinite or past participle.

At the outset of the learning programme, I was explained the basics of prepositions, articles, verbs, nouns, adjectives and gerunds. Then, everyday, if there were any words, from amongst those 10 sentences, which I did not know what they were called in English, I was supposed to ask before starting to translate them. Once I was equipped with necessary vocabulary it was expected that I would translate them to the best of my ability.

It was a weekend morning and I was not very keen on this exercise. I was looking out of the window. The sky was almost clear. There were some scattered white clouds making an impression of white cotton used in quilts and pillows by the man who used to come on his bicycle with a long wooden tool with a few strings on one end to give the old cotton a fresh and musical spin and make it into new before refilling it back into the quilt cloth. The shapes of these clouds always caught my eye. I could always see them emanating from one another, often overlapping. I never understood how they were designed. The east facing ones were shining bright due to being sun facing. A flock of birds forming a long queue appeared in the foreground from the left of the window with vertical iron bars across its antique wooden frame and started to immerse into the right hand side panel. I thought for a second that a streak would appear on the white wall between the window and the far right corner of the room but it didn’t.

“I want to go out and play” I said to my dad.

“Have you finished your sentences yet?” He asked without even looking at me. He was looking at some dark and tiny creatures on his paper which described the sentiments and reactions of the readers to some then current affairs in the form of letters to the editor. He found them interesting!!

“No, but I will, as soon as I come back” I said. The birds had gone but the clouds were still contributing to the panoramic view on the window’s rectangular canvas.
My request was refused. I bowed my head in serenity and started to think how to begin; my brain was preoccupied with white cotton. Since there was no other way I could get away from there, I somehow completed the sentences and handed my notebook to dad in jubilation. I still could not go until he had checked them. This was the only time when newspaper could have a rest. He checked them all in less than no time. I got 2 correct. I was amazed that not all were wrong. Now was the time for me to understand where I went wrong. I tried but the list was long so I just heard and nodded in affirmation.

After having been booked for next morning, I was freed to go out and play or do whatever.

Later, this affliction continued for a few years. Over time I started enjoying this a bit. However, English still was not my cup of tea. My learning was confined to this very activity. At school, I studied all the subjects in my language except the subject called “English”. If I had to study history in English, it would have no longer been “history” for me; it would have become “English”, with no importance left in it for the emperors, kings or the Victorian staff. I would have struggled to finish chapter no.1 of my book. But the emperors, kings and the Queen were very fortunate as I had to conquer them in my language. It’s a different thing that I was still not keen on any of the subjects and struggled to make it through my books in time for exams, always. There seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. I had to study at least until I was graduate; future appeared bleak.

Soon I was outside the house. I had forgotten about the clouds in the sky. I no longer needed them to amuse myself. I knocked at the door of a friend’s house. He opened the door and let me in and asked me not to make any noise as he did not want his parents to know that we will be going on the roof terrace. We walked sneakily towards the door which hid behind it the staircase leading to the terrace. This staircase was common to two houses. The two doors to either side of the first step were facing each other. One of them was the one we had just come through. The other one was of the neighbour next door. We were now leaping towards the terrace.

Roof terrace sat on top of the two houses which shared the staircase. So, the whole terrace was divided into two parts, one each allocated to the two houses and had two openings without any actual doors hanging on either side on top of the staircase just similar to the two doors at the bottom of the staircase. We turned left to confine ourselves to the terrace that belonged to my friend’s house.

Zzzoooommmmm went my paper aeroplane from top of the two storeys building hurtling its way to the ground. “Lets see whose aeroplane goes farthest” I said and started to tear off another page from my English notebook. I could not see a better use for it than this. He was busy making his own aeroplane from his most hated notebook, I suppose. Soon the ground was full of paper aeroplanes. I had quickly exhausted with my notebook. I looked down, with my hand supporting my chin, and my elbow resting on the two and a half feet tall boundary wall erected on the terrace for safety. It looked quite white, the ground. Wherever there were no aeroplanes landed, it looked green of the grass. Suddenly, my eye caught a shiny white cloud on the horizon. I wanted to go there and touch it but my aeroplanes were not strong enough to take me up to there.