In India, I once read M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavillions. Yesterday—36 years
later—I pick up her autobiography (part
2), Golden Afternoon from a Lilliput.
Kaye returned to India after 9 years of
English public boarding schools. She describes her dismay at having lost the
language that she had expected to retain like knowing how to ride a bicycle.
She descibes Hindustani that the populace
spoke as being a mixture of Arabic, Pushtu, Farsee (becoming Urdu) and Hindi.
Ah, what memories this observation evokes!
Time to delve once again into my own stew
of languages that I wish to stir.
