As I approached my 40th birthday, I turned to the long list of birthday resolutions that had accumulated over the years, a list that remained mostly in the realm of wishful thinking. Somewhere close to the top of the list was my resolution to learn a new language. That was the beginning of my love affair with Spanish. I started this journey with a small group of three other students at a Spanish language institute in Bangalore. While I struggled with rules of grammar, I really liked expanding my vocabulary, learning new words by rote and by associating these with root words. I loved the way these unfamiliar terms began to hold meaning, and as I began to grasp the technicalities of Spanish grammar, I basked in the afterglow of gradually understanding television series and news articles in El Pais without subtitles. As I continued to take Spanish classes in Delhi and Sydney, my grasp of Spanish gradually increased over the next five years, and my initial flirtation with learning the language turned into a passionate and intense love affair. I soon realised how central language is to our understanding of the world, and how language constitutes the limits and possibilities of our experiences and identities.
For instance, the rules of Spanish being highly gendered with every noun allocated a male or female gender, made it much more difficult to be ambiguous or neutral about gender identity, when compared to English or South Indian languages like Kannada and Tamil that I had grown up speaking. (I have given up trying to master Hindi grammar let alone remember how Hindi nouns are gendered). I understood quickly that Spanish is a more passionate language that also gives to an intensity of emotion and expressiveness in the Spanish-speaking and Hispanic world that is very different from the more Anglophone tradition. Language allowed me to travel through cultures in the Americas and Europe – from getting a glimpse of high school intrigue and sexuality in the Netflix series Elite, to revisiting Luis Fonsi’s lyrics in Despacito that reek of sex. Language allowed me to revisit and rediscover the pleasures of the iconic opening scene in Wong Kar Wei’s stunning film Happy Together when Tony Leung and Leslie Chung head to the Iguazu Falls as Caetano Veloso sings his deeply moving Cucurrucucú Paloma in the background. Language has given me an insight into how people from the Spanish-speaking world frame their profiles and communicate on Tinder – something instinctively different about their self-description and interaction that I know but can’t put my finger on exactly.
Language gave me direction and stability during my PhD, a large part of which was done during the COVID pandemic in Sydney, closed off to rest of the world. In a situation where we were not allowed to cross the border of the state of New South Wales, I spent a lot of time doing Spanish lessons online and practising my vocabulary on online dates and intimate encounters with people from across the world including those from the Americas. I soon learned Spanish curse words and words for different parts of the human anatomy that were necessary to know to understand my Spanish-speaking counterparts. I was quick to begin using the diminutive for names when needed, showed off my limited knowledge of countries in that part of the world. I spoke about India and Indians in Spanish and learnt about their cultures, and how the pandemic had impacted them very differently depending on where they were. I negotiated differences within the Spanish-speaking world – the diversity of words and interpretations, speed at which people spoke, and pronunciations.
My love affair with Spanish continues today but is more subdued. Along the way I flirted with learning Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, but neither of those flipped my switch. In fact, they confused me given that they are similar to Spanish, but different, and just without the same kind of sex appeal. I realised that my relationship to Spanish is a long-term one. When I started teaching full-time and moved to Adelaide, and then back to Bangalore, I realised I would not be able to do justice to the demands of formal Spanish classes anymore. But I am determined to keep up some level of fluency with the language by listening to SBS Spanish radio, continuing to watch Spanish films and television series, reading news articles and analysis online in Spanish, and listening to Spanish-language music.
Who knows, I might even get my act together one day and plan a trip to Spain, Mexico or Argentina. That would be the ultimate test – to flirt, court, tease, romance, or hook up using my Spanish skills in a Spanish-speaking country. Un día, !ojalá¡
Cover image by Miss Lacitos on Unsplash
