Written piece
Tangled Tales
Nidhi Srivastava Asthana
India
About this piece
An essay extract on learning to read in two languages. The writer discovers she can tell herself a story once Hindi letters click into words she already speaks, while English stays meaningless a while longer. Her grandparents' Ramayana and Mahabharata tales, and the Amar Chitra Katha comics that followed in parallel Hindi and English editions, become the bridge between the two.
One day when I strung sounds of the letters that I read off the page of a children’s Hindi magazine called ‘Parag’ together faster and faster, I was overjoyed to discover that I could ‘tell’ myself a story instead of waiting for someone else to. I learned to read stories for pleasure first in Hindi because if I just pronounced the letters out aloud and uttered them in sequence together, I was saying a word I knew: since I was trying to read the language I spoke at home. In English, even if I managed read some words, I was often left wondering what they meant. One of my first books in English had been about two birds, Peter and Paul. ‘F-l-y a-w-a-y’? There was no fun in tales in English yet.
We were extremely fortunate that my mother’s parents, my Nana and Nani, loved telling us mythological tales from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Then it was a smooth transition to a series of illustrated comics called ‘Amar Chitra Katha’ because they were stories in pictures that our grandparents had often earlier already narrated to us. We became addicted to this fun and easy way to read mythology, history, biographies and folk tales. Not only were the visuals a fantastic scaffold for the text, but the fact that I could compare the English and Hindi versions of the same story in two separate but parallel editions helped me learn both the languages.
I would experience some disconnect right through even when I became a competent bilingual reader. While everyone around us was called Suresh and Salma, we read about children called Julian and Anne who, when they were not solving mysteries, ate buttered scones. I could not even begin to guess what they tasted like ̶ buttered or otherwise. My imagination had a lot more leeway …
What better way can there be to transcend cultures, families and places that we are born into than through stories of peoples and places and times that are not our own?