Now as I said in Learning to spell in Bengali (when one doesn't know the language) -- admitting I said many different things in that post -- I wanted to get a copy of that book by Amit Chaudhuri.
It arrived yesterday (actually a collection of three of his novels entitled Freedom Song).
I have no idea why it seemed so important. I really don't.
But it did.
I jumped immediately into the first story (I had to read A Strange and Sublime Address first, you knew I did too, I'd wager).
I am blown away by beautiful language and sharp imagery. Of places, and people, and food, and more.
And a world that I admit I know nothing about.
Yet I find myself learning.
Because I am there, in Calcutta.
Visting when Sandeep, who is only ten, is.
Could I be ten, and there? It seems unfathomable.
By tonight I have finished the novel.
By the end of the book I find that I am so completely lost in the language that I worry how I will get back.
...He looked down again at the paper box, and gazed at the word "sandesh" printed on its side in neat, stylist Bengali letters.
The letters, curving, undulating, never still, curving into a kinetic life of their own, reminded him of Calcutta, of buying and selling, of people on the pavements, of office-goers in the mornings, and homecomings in the evenings, of children reading books, of arguments and dissensions in tea-shops, of an unexpected richness in myriad rooms, all festivities of colour and light. He wanted to return to the city where all things curved and arched and danced like those letters; it exhausted him to lie in this room with these other still figures He longed to come back to life.
I suddenly realize how I will get back -- I will be distracted, by the script.
(in between the above two sections is the word sandesh in the Bengali script)
I find myself thankful that the script does not appear too often in the book or I would never be able to finish it as fast!
The word sandesh in Bengali seems to be pretty well known and findable on the web as follows:
??????
Which is to say, U+09b8 U+09a8 U+09cd U+09a6 U+09c7 U+09b6 or SA NA HASANT DA E SHA.
And I find myself wondering why that it would not end with a HASANT to suppress the vowel at the end, making it
???????
and when I look at the script in the book, I am distracted by the small slant on the bottom of that letter which could mean that HASANT is there after all.
But Idoubt it -- no separation, barely a slant. I am reaching here, big time.
I try a Google Fight to see which string is more common and seem to hit a bug in Google Fight since the application won't finish (see it here).
Though when I search for them individually the reason for the problem is clearer -- without the HASANT gets 60 hits, including the Bengali Wikipedia article here, and with the HASANT gets 0 hits (after this article goes live it will probably find everybody who picked up the full article, but it is zero right now).
Now I am lost again, my foundation into the language began with the script, and that definitely came from Unicode. But clearly the VIRAMA model for pure consonants is not followed universally here.
Maybe when the word is said in Bengali the a is still there.
Just ever so slightly.
I suddenly want to look at my Daniels and Bright again and see what it says, but it probably won't help me here, and the book is in the office and I am home.
I wonder for a moment -- the office is not far away; I could just head over.
There is so little like getting lost in that tome, in the richness of the description of the world's writing systems.
Instead I decide to stay home and re-read A Strange and Sublime Address again.
Because I did find somewhere else to get lost.
I'll go back to Calcutta.
And the office will wait for tomorrow....
This post brought to you by ? (U+09cd, aka BENGALI SIGN VIRAMA, aka HASANT)
