For va, for Mari, for Zsolt Above all for palcikaember The villa why hungarian, why

magyar, the question came in many different languages, from many different standpoints. It was a split second decision, a second earlier even the remote flicker of the thought did not breeze by, a second after a door opened into an unfathomable path. The ongoing reflection on the repeated question seemed to constantly provide revelations but never explanations. Explanatory understanding is part of rational systems that one constructs from the conscious known mind but revelatory cognition comes from the deepest recesses from ones abyss. It takes the form of the riddle of the sphinx that has no final answer, only a path from enigma to secret to revelation to yet a new unknown. The topography of the abyss transforms into an odd villa, composed of contiguous interlinked chambers. I have none, only go in and out, inhabiting the many passages and receiving the scintillating communication of life that moves in and out of these corridors. M a Finnish friend beckons me Ive two chambers, Come in she says. I accept the glass of champagne. Dreams sometimes provide strange image scans of an interior architecture. The levels of the associations, the excavation of their interpretations all depend on the quality of its architecture and its many floors and planes. At first, I thought it was merely a European dream, signifying that its journey lay in the direction of the ugro-finnish. Only after my stay in Hungary did I realize it was innately linked to the mapping of my own linguistic topography. The first foreign language that I taught myself was French and when I visited the land, I discovered and marveled at the phenomenon of a mother toungue, where the language of thoughts and first images went hand in hand with the surrounding landscapes. It was not like the Nordic fairy tales that led to the nostalgia for sleeping in the bosom of the snow queen, when as a three year old child I had never seen snow, known only its polar counterpart of extreme dry heat and desert and dust driven hot winds. They did not come from the displacement of living in virtual realities that were not embedded in the fabric of material and seasonal reality. Here, the quotodienne existed in the fabric of its thoughts. My childhood ear had been surrounded by the presence of different languages fleeting by. From the paternal side B. spoke sindhi only within one part of his family. Likewise, like all good empty handed refugees my maternal grandparents spoke their dialect and language only when they played with their nostalgia of a past and geography once and for all left behind. It marked a bygone time, a past era that could have no temporal or spatial continuation. English and Hindi were the languages of the now but they were link languages and inhabited different realms unlike our gujrati neighbours. Gujurat and Sind are neighbouring states only on different sides of the border. Their children went to a gujrati school and their mother translated from Russian into gujrati. In my childhood there were atleast 7 or 8 languages whose sounds hovered as floating clouds above me. Sometimes the sounds intermingled but there was no umbilical connection to any language. One opened a door and one went in. One put a switch on in the brain and closed another. Hindi was the everyday; it was not the language in which one shaped ones thoughts. And it took me more then 20 years to learn the word for adrak-ginger or for that matter any of the Indian spices. The Indonesian word were primarily culinary gado gado, sate, - special dishes that my grandmother made. English became the medium of literature, philosophy and of school education.

At other points, it was an anarchic vaudeville, a cabaret of mishmashing and playing with languages, their accents, their syntaxes, their word formulations their rhythms, their sounds. One started a sentence in one language and ended it in another. Everything seemed to be the play of mimicking & translating worlds into an ad absurdum The sojourn in Hungary was indeed in a transformed villa and upon its many shelves, in the different corridors and rooms lay my passion. Dictionaries. Shabd- kosh word-collection sztr. I collect dictionaries even of languages that I do not know but reading them gives me another kind of passage. Sometimes it shows to me how words travel and come back. Take the word trigonometry, it started as a mathematical exercise, an inherently English word. Later the latin etymology became clear trigon + meter which in turn led me to its Sanskrit source trikon (triangle) (ma-matra measure). As I was examining the hindi-hungarian dictionaries, Mari asked me if I could read the Indian script as much of the dictionary was written in the roman alphabet. When I answered in the affirmative, she could not restrain herself from expressing a certain indignance. But Russian is written in its own script The empathy was like a lightning bolt. Written scripts are not only the memoric carrier of sound, but the order of the devnagari alphabet conveys an entire cosmology of language embedded in the image of the mouth, nose and breadth. It starts with the pure vowels, first short , then long followed by a set of their combinations starting with a Each row of consonants depends on where the tongue touches; velar, pre palatal, palatal etc . Each row consists of 4 consonants as 2 pairs. The first part of the pair is non aspirated, the other is aspirated. The difference between the 2 pairs depends on the back and front position of where the tongue touches on that particular plane. .A different nasal sound ends each row. The semi vowels have the inverse principle as inverted vowel combinations where a is at the end. The last row is the sibilants with different kinds of s sounds and the last alphabet h pure breath as the hiatus. Further each sound can be a half sound, a doubled sound and a combination sound. Temporally like on a musical scale, it can take half measure, a double one Prior to learning magyar, I had tried to learn sindhi but it is the only indic language whose script has been erased and replaced by Arabic. It was not difficult learning the Arabic script but as there is only one marker for all the vowels, it becomes impossible to imagine the vowel if one has not heard the word sound.. The exercise of trying to learn the language had only shown again the continuum of the severance. The ancestral logic lay not in preserving the language but in assuming the logic of exile as implicit. The journey into learning Magyar followed a very different route. The extensively developed grammar manuals allowed an easy passage to its architecture. Root and stem based languages are based on inflexion A root-stem can become a verb, a noun, a spatialisation, an expression of different levels of association. It is not merely an inversion of prepositions into postpositions. The villa of my brain contained two wings, separated by a chasm. On the west european side the sentences followed in linear fashion. Fixed syntaxes fixing the chronology of words. I could visit them even perhaps at will, indulge in the most complicated of mental acrobatics even interiorize them but there always existed a resistance to inhabiting them. On the other side lay the unspoken Sanskrit with its numerous roots, its many branches, its infinite associative visualizations. Above all a syntax that could bend anywhere, according to how the riverlike thoughts flowed in their curve. Elective affinities is the title of a Goethe novel that I had read in my childhood. I remember little of its content, only the title. All Indic languages that I know of have postpositions.

Here a meta-affinity, a dwelling kinship even before the first thoughts emerged. The word is only an afterthought. The villa becomes a nexus, the east of the west . kzpen To be able to read a language but not hear it only imagine its audioscape. It was an extraordinary journey, a spiraling return to an autistic childspace - a la recherch de la langue perdue The obvious level of trying to decipher meaning appeared secondary. Only the connection between the script and sound. Cask hallgatni .Sounds drape ones thoughts. Soft consonants give a silken touch Maris empathy revealed yet another eastern concordance, a lost treasure vowel harmony. The umbilical cord to sound that shapes the melody of a language. The chords touch lost vibrations. Metethereality of resonance Serenading bel canto. The incredible gift of canone inverso The inaudible violin