One Rupee

The fine was one rupee. That was the price of a Hindi word inside the walls of my English-medium school in Kota, and I paid it often. A rupee for paani instead of water. A rupee for every joke that only worked in the language it was born in.

Each rupee came from my mother. She kept coins in a steel box in the kitchen, the kind with a lid that had to be worked loose, and in the mornings, I would tell her I needed one, and she would work the lid loose and hand it over. She never asked what for; she knew what for. Some mornings, she gave me two.

I have tried to reconstruct the decision that put me in that building. I wasn’t part of it. There was a form. There was a fee that was more than the fee for the school down the road, where the teaching was in Hindi. At some point my parents sat with those two figures in front of them and chose the larger one. Nobody in that room was confused about what they were purchasing. They were purchasing a boy who would not sound like them.

It worked.

The English took me to Bombay and then out of the country. It handed me translations of Russian novels and German philosophy and a salary I could not have named a use for at twenty-three. It handed me Buddhism, which was grown in my own country’s soil but had to travel halfway around the world and come home wearing English before I could read a line of it.

It handed me a woman who never learned a word of my first language. The person she loved was the English one. I let her go on thinking that was all of me.

My parents got exactly what they paid for.

In 2022 I started doing improv in San Francisco. A room above a bar, eight of us, once a week. I walk into the scene as an angry waiter. My head floods with everything at once: the wrong order, the smug customer, a dozen sharp and ridiculous things to say. They are all there. I can feel them, hot and ready. Nothing comes out. I stand there. The jokes are alive, but they are alive in Hindi, waiting at a border, and by the time I try to carry each one across, it has lost its nerve, and so have I. The scene dies. Someone taps me out.

That night, I went home and worked on my English. I read comedy in English. I practiced until I could get a laugh in the second language on a good night. When something I had bought turned out to be defective, my instinct was to buy more of it, to go on paying the fine, voluntarily now, in a room above a bar in the Mission, until I had fully purchased even the right to be funny. I stayed in that class for three months, then joined another not much later. On the last night, we went for burritos afterwards, and I was funny in the queue, in English, and nobody noticed, which is what I had paid for.

My nani speaks to me in Hadoti, the tongue of our region, older and further back than the Hindi I was fined for. I cannot make one whole sentence in it. Neither can anyone my age. The last time I was home, she was sitting in the corner of her room by the window, the one that faces the courtyard, working a dupatta through her hands the way you’d work worry beads—not doing anything with it, just working it, slowly, the cloth going slack and taut. I sat with her for an hour. We only exchanged words about our health. I asked her if she was feeling well. She asked me if I was eating well.

When we were children, she recited the story of Lakku Baandri to us. I only remember her voice climbing and dropping through it. I do not remember a single word.

Her number is in my phone. I have not called her in a year.

I call my mother every day. We speak in Hindi, mostly. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth minute, I lose a word and reach across for the English one, and she takes it without comment and hands the sentence back to me continuing in Hindi, the way you’d steady someone on a step. She has been doing this for years. Neither of us has ever mentioned it.

Sometimes, I teach her a sentence. How to ask for coffee at the shop. How to greet a stranger in English. She repeats it back and I correct her. I am pulling her into my boat, a little at a time. The last time she visited, she ordered her own coffee at a Starbucks in San Francisco. We celebrated.

Last Sunday, I got as far as saying I was working on something about school. She asked if it was for a magazine, and which one, and whether they were paying. I said probably not much. It did not occur to either of us to say the obvious thing, which is that no magazine either of us has heard of would have looked at me in Hindi. Then she told me about her sister’s knee.

I know what she would say if I told her the rest. She would say: Look at where you live, look at what you do, look at the fact that you could leave that job and still eat. She would not say it defensively. She would say it the way you point at a house you built. And she would be right.

She was right and I have never forgiven her for it—for that, and for being cheerful about it on the telephone every Sunday of my adult life, and for keeping the box.

Next Sunday, I am going to ask my mother for my nani’s stories. I notice that this means asking the wrong woman.

The box is still in her kitchen, next to the tea. She keeps buttons in it now.