Brok-e-n Lang-uish

The language and me had a complex relationship.(refer http://lifelineanusha.blogspot.in/2011/11/is-it-he-or-she.html)

 It was a language that often had me infuriating my teachers from primary through secondary to graduate years. The primary school Hindi teacher took an instant dislike to me the moment I uttered my first word in the language. She looked at me like I was an alien who could destroy her carefully chartered academic world. 

I shifted town and school whenever my parents were on transfer but in spite of  all efforts my struggle with the language was inevitable. I tried to think in it, I tried to sing it, I tried to speak it but in the end my efforts boiled down to fighting with it. I knew the words, I understood my hindi tutor's questions at school but then never could understand the gender of  my answers. There were times when I felt tears in my eyes as I  tried to seek an answer why God created a language that could get me beaten up.

When I was shifted to a new school, I hoped the newness of my satchel and the newness of my Hindi tutor would ease my struggle away. I was in for bigger trials. The new tutor was a maniac of the language who, I guess lived by it and swore by it. I heard her voice loom over my head and felt my temples bang away for I knew I would never complete my sentence. I whimpered struggling to complete the answer for I didn't know if it was to be ka, ke, ki or whatever else the language's gender rules demanded. I saw her eyes fill with rage, red rage as I opted from ka to ki and back to ka trying to alter my answer according to the size of her dilated pupils.

I saw her nostrils quiver as she picked up her wooden scale and I knew I was to experience my red carpet welcome into my new school. I remember a crow watched along with me as the scale hit me hard thrice, then broke and a quarter of it perhaps flew an inch above my head. I remember the rest of my classmates watching the scene with both fascination and terror. There was something horrid about that wooden piece that flew across...something that was far greater than the pain I felt on my reddened palms.

God just knows my ways. He has finally placed me where I can't survive without using the language. I have to choose between survival or a course in the deaf and the dumb.

I still struggle with the ka and ki but then what actually happens inside my head every time I try the language is... a wooden piece goes flying past and I stop where I am supposed to begin.