“Don’t worry, be happy.”
This was the only sentence in the first love letter I received. I was fifteen, and in the ninth grade. My Bengali middle-class upbringing had prepared me to expect a love letter to be something as thrilling as contraband things, but this was more innocuous than even baby food. The words were written in the upper case, or what we called “capitals,” the first letter of every word emphasized and given girth by the fat nib of the felt pen. Below it, on the bottom right, was a scribble—the name of the letter writer. Chhoton. This was written in Bangla.
I knew Chhoton and the song, though the American singer’s name had been wiped away from our consciousness by Amitabh Bachchan’s bad rendition in a bad film. Chhoton was a few years older than me and lived in a narrow connector of a lane, one that joined ours with a parallel street. A school dropout who felt superior to us, he had chosen to stay away from those who still went to school. We’d hardly ever spoken, even though his youngest brother was a friend of ours, a useful batsman in our neighborhood cricket team.
I wouldn’t have known that it was a love letter or that it was intended for me had my friend Iti not told me. By then my mother had thrown it into the kitchen trash. “Useless,” she’d said.
It was a sad truth: love letters were largely useless. And yet there must have been something in that one-line letter, for it had made me feel sad for Chhoton, a person who’d had no place in my consciousness before that. Not love but sadness—it was the quote, his use of the words in English, a language that would have been unfamiliar to him, and his unsure handwriting.
A few years later, when I was in the first year of college, another letter came. This one in an envelope, with only my name on it— someone had dropped it into our postbox. I had encountered the first lines of this letter before—I knew that they were Rabindranath Tag ore’s first real lines of poetry. “Jawl pawrey, pata nawrey.” Water falls, leaves move.1 That, I knew, had been turned into a greetings card, particularly on Bengali New Year’s Day:
Jawl pawrey, pata nawrey
Tomar kawtha monay pawrey
Tumi aamar bondhu hou
Nababarsher card ti nao
Water falls, leaves move
I remember you
Be my friend
Accept this New Year’s card
I had received several such handmade cards as a child. But this love letter had changed one word in this much-used rhyme. The word bondhu, meaning “friend,” had been replaced with lover. Be my lover. This was the only English word in the Bangla rhyme.
“Lover” and “Don’t worry, be happy” had been used to woo me, to convince me of the English-speaking habits of the letter writers. They had been used to tell me that I should not turn them down just in case I thought that they had no English. In it, though I was too young to notice it then, was a subterranean statement of class and its effect on romantic relationships. I’d begin to notice it soon though, how love—it was inevitably called “true love”—came to be expressed almost only in English. A friend laughed while narrating how a young man had proposed to her in Bangla, her mother tongue—“It sounded so silly,” she said. If one loved in the Indian provinces, one could only express it with “I love you.” We were in Siliguri, a small town in sub Himalayan Bengal.
My parents never say—or said—those words to each other, even though they often fought in English. For something she did not like, my mother was fond of saying “Rubbish!” Now, the word for a generation after theirs is “shit.” But I digress.
To return to love, a subject on which everyone considered themselves an expert. The new institutionalized experts of love in the provinces were shiny new stores that began sprouting in every neighborhood. They were called Archies—whether that was an homage to the confused schoolboy from Riverdale no one knew. They sold “stationery,” though most people I knew—including myself—were unsure about the right spelling of the word: stationery or stationary. And so we avoided using the word altogether—the franchisee called itself “Archies Gallery,” and both the English words, proper and common nouns, new to our towns, soon became incorporated into our languages.
“Don’t worry, be happy” and “lover”—these words were not to be found in the Hallmark cards, and the first certainly wasn’t a romantic line. Both these boys, the love letter writers, unfamiliar with the language, had used these words as quotes. Quotation, its buttressing of tradition, they had expected to be an efficient lubricant. Love might have seemed as foreign and inaccessible to them as the English language itself.
To read more, get your hands on Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy.