On a recent flight, my seat was next to a lady with a 3 month old baby. The mother was a sweet lady who kept the baby fed, warm and entertained with great efficiency throughout the flight, and so charmingly apologetic when the kid tried to grab my blanket, glasses and book, that I did not mind the least when the little human tried the above antics or held on to my shoulder with a hot, grubby paw as he slept.
The plane soared silently through the skies, the baby clung to its mother and I clung to the collected plays of Ibsen, each of us cocooned in our own worlds.

What stood out in this mundane encounter was the fact that the lady played Tamil rhymes to the baby whenever he showed signs of getting cranky. His cries immediately toned down to a soft whimper on hearing the sounds, while his mother sang softly along, cooing to him in Tamil.

The sounds of the language brought with it to me, the forgotten warmth of long conversations in colloquial Tamil and casual Hindi with friends and family, the correspondence with most of whom has now been reduced to standard paragraph long Facebook messages on festivals and birthdays. I thought of cousins from Chennai who acquired funny Tamil accents after a few years abroad, of friends who studied Tamil as a second language with me and now chose to sign off their emails in French and German and Spanish, a Tamil Professor who told me with great pride that her grandson who lived in a small town in Tamil Nadu found it difficult to speak in Tamil. Language is so much more than a medium for communication, it holds within its intonations, slang, idioms and dialects, so many personal associations of time and space and memory specific to each speaker. Perhaps all these people had their individual reasons to choose to distance themselves from certain languages, and make new memories with others.

Watching that baby with large intelligent eyes focused on his mother’s smartphone, it warmed the cockles of my heart to think that thanks to his excellent mother, one more child would grow up multi-lingual and perhaps one day, grow to admire Kamban and Bharati as much as he would Keats and Shelley.