Mother is a Language is a House is a Poem

By Shantanu M

/ Third Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction /      

The cement tile on the threshold of my old house would transform into a canvas for my mother’s rangoli—a lattice made of colorful powders that would adorn the floor. Every evening, she would sweep the pattern of the previous day – breaking open its contours, letting out the colours contained within a familiar grid of white limestone rangoli powder. Red, yellow, and green would combine, compete, leave behind traces in the grainy mound of white rangoli powder, which would be routinely cast aside

I would sit beside her and watch her fingers tottering through the tin of rangoli powder, as though she were reacquainting herself with its texture. Her hand—in a perfected swoop—would lay out a smattering of white dots. I would draw an imaginary string through the air, threading the dots into constellations. “That’s Cassiopeia; there’s Orion’s Belt,” I would point out. She rarely had the time to indulge in my stargazing. With a disciplined touch, she would organise the unruly cluster into a symmetrical grid. Looking at the empty space between the crisscrossing, she would ask, “Aat red ani baaher yellow ani green changla disel ka?” (“Would red on the inside and yellow and green on the outside look good?”). That question was always inexplicably dotted with the names of the colours in English – as if red, yellow, and green—if uttered in Marathi—would blend with the other words and lose their hue.

* * *

My mother bought activity books for me in Marathi and English when I turned three and was learning to write the alphabet. I learnt to connect the dots and trace the shape of the letters and colour the corresponding objects, the names of which would start with the letter. In Marathi, the first letter of the alphabet, ‘अ’ /ə/, stood for अननस (ananas/pineapple). In English, ‘A’ was for apple. Letters can assume different hues in different languages – in English ‘A’ was red; in Marathi, ‘अ’, was yellow and green.

Mother must have taught me to write my name in both languages around the same time – I have never really asked. I imagine her holding my hand and teaching me to give shape to my name. First, in Marathi, ‘शंतनू’, accompanied by the sound of its sculpting – shun-tuh-nu. I would commit this sound to my memory until a teacher in school would see my name ‘Shantanu’ etched in English in the attendance register and call me shaan-tuh-nu. I would carry both names with me – place one outside the cement tiling of the threshold along with my muddied shoes and bring the other one with me inside.

* * *

Would red on the inside and yellow and green on the outside look good?

* * *

Piet Mondrian, like Mother, dealt in grids, lines, and colours. He distilled harmony into asymmetrical pockets of red, yellow, and blue that were offset by blocks of white and contained within lines of black and grey. He called his paintings compositions – they were arrangements of colours and lines representing the arrangement of colours and lines. He annihilated the object from his paintings entirely. He said his aim was “to express relationships plastically through oppositions of colour and line.”

Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930: I linger in the expansive field of red, then jump over a sturdy black fence and fall into blankness. The white is familiar; it is soothing. I want to stay there a little longer, but I notice the initials and the year (P M 30) scribbled in a slice of blue on the bottom left, which arrests my attention. This is where I am most comfortable. The yellow on the right calls out to me but I just cast a sidelong glance in its direction and get back to the blue. Here, I can affix a name, a body, to those letters. The lack of an object bothers me a little. The possibilities of meanings leave me flustered. The edges are unframed – suggesting an ongoingness beyond the canvas. Or, perhaps, he has left the doors and the windows open for us to walk in and find our shapes, our meanings, in the grid and the colours - it’s a kite, it’s a game of Tetris, it’s a bedsheet sleeping on its side, it’s the red of the English ‘A’, it’s the yellow of the Marathi ‘अ’, it’s Mother’s rangoli that has forsaken its symmetry.

* * *

Would red on the inside and yellow and green on the outside look good?

* * *

We had a rosewood-coloured rug in the living room. Years of dust and detergent had corroded its brown tint, exposing the dull red tissue underneath. The sofa, the ottoman, and the chairs rested their front legs on the rug, their hind legs parked on the speckled white terrazzo. They all stood at the same, respectable distance from each other. Breeze and light—sliced into an array of geometrical shapes by the wrought iron grid of the window—would carry the dust from the streets and distribute it equally among the furniture and the rug.

Every time Mother entered the living room, she would check if the furniture had inched towards or away from each other, if a corner of the rug had been led astray, if dust had accumulated in the crook of the sofa’s mahogany arm.

“Someone will stub their toe against that chair or trip over that fold in the rug. Am I the only one who sees the dust on that sofa? It’s going to dull that polish,” she would say while rearranging the chairs, wiping off the dust, or straightening the fold in the errant rug.

“You need to pay a little more attention!” She would always remind us of our neglect.

Even the slightest interruption of order was immediately remedied. She was always reaching for symmetry – maintaining it, perfecting it. For her, pinning down order was a comfort, paying attention was a habit.

* * *

There is an asymmetry in the way we personally experience a sensation.

Wittgenstein believed that a shared ordinary language does not allow even the possibility of the expression of this asymmetry of experience. He says that there can be no private language for pain, for grief, or any other sensation. Ordinary language dulls the polish of our sensations.

In Marathi, the word for mother is Aai (आई /ɑːiː). A word made of two vowels – an unobstructed sound carried effortlessly by the breath, the way breeze and light carry dust. Colloquially, we often hitch it to a consonant and repurpose the common noun as an interjection. If someone stubs their toe against an out-of-line chair or trips over a fold in an errant rug, they usually say ‘Aai!’ (आई!) or ‘Aai-ga!’ (आईगं!), instead of ‘Ow!’ or ‘Ouch!’.

The interjections interrupt the tidiness of a sentence; they disrupt the tyranny of ordinary language which slouches towards the symmetry of experience, of sensations. They shape themselves into a private abbreviation—ordinary yet strangely personal—of a lament, a cry for help, an expression of one’s pain or grief. They permit an asymptotic reaching for the private meaning of a sensation. In Marathi, when you are reaching for language to express your pain, you are also reaching for consolation, you are reaching for your mother.

* * *

At eighteen, I found a studio apartment in a different city. I bought two chairs, one rug, and a sofa that I repurposed as a bed at night. Initially, I tried to discipline them the way mother would expect me to—arranging them, maintaining them—until my inadvertent neglect slowly turned everything asymmetrical. The chairs then stood in disagreement, angled away from one another. The rug remained somewhat askew. The sliding window stayed only slightly open – to keep most of the dust and all of the birds outside. The dust that did sneak in with the breeze stumbled on the ledge and settled on my old books on the sequestered shelf closest to the window.

One day, while on a call with Mother, I stubbed my toe against one of the chairs. “Ow!” I whispered under my breath and continued talking. She interrupted our conversation to ask me about it. I blamed the unruly chair.

* * *

The TV and the telephone were confined to a corner of the living room, in our old house. The CD player had a glass shelf—just above the TV—entirely to itself. Installing the devices at the centre of the red accent wall with the furniture oriented towards them would have been the more obvious, the more convenient arrangement. I don’t know if it was Mother who cornered them, but the possibility of devices disturbing the symmetry of the seating, of electronic noise interfering with the euphony of a conversation must have seemed disagreeable to her. Over time, we just learnt to angle ourselves towards that corner while watching TV.

I was thirteen when Mother first brought home a CD of Vishnusahasranama – the Sanskrit hymns that listed one thousand names of Vishnu, the Hindu God. Mrs. Dev, a colleague at Mother’s school, had told her that listening to these hymns in the morning was auspicious. Mother observed that Mrs Dev seemed more positive and cheerful than usual and was convinced that the cause of this miracle was the hymns. So, it was decided that I would be waking up to the penetratingly nasal voice of the singer who was popular only for singing religious songs. “How pompous and wasteful to have so many names and then have hymns written about them,” I remember telling Mother repeatedly. It was the year I started high school. It was also the year I started to outgrow my uniform, my love for Marathi books, my tolerance for syrupy Marathi songs, and my monthly visits to the temple with Mother.

Every morning, she would be on the ottoman for the better part of an hour—reading the newspaper, drinking lukewarm milk—with her head leaning towards the consecrated corner, humming the hymns under her breath as the CD player rattled off all the names of Vishnu on the sacred roster. On some mornings she would even compose poems in Marathi, write them in her diary.

I wonder if Mother remembered the names of Vishnu the way she remembered the names of her students, if she read their names from the attendance roster in the cadence of those hymns, if Vishnu and her students ever made it into some of her poems. I don’t remember when she outgrew the hymns, why she stopped writing poems. I have never really asked. I just imagine her in her corner, sifting through names—of gods, of students—setting them to hymn meter.

Years later, a teacher recites Gertrude Stein’s line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” and explains how Stein “caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun” through her poetry

* * *

Mother and Gertrude Stein both paid attention to order, although Mother would most likely disapprove of Stein’s deliberate disarray. Stein, through her poetry, rearranged the furniture—nouns, verbs, adjectives—within the space of a sentence to reveal that we impose an order on our words, we confine them to certain corners of a sentence, of meaning; we always try and reach for a familiar arrangement of the furniture. We enforce redness, fragrance, and thorniness on a rose. We foist faith on a thousand different names of one God. Wedged between the language of signification and poetry, words jostle each other to inhabit or to elude definite meaning.

* * *

We shared a wall with our neighbour, Mrs. Gokhale – or as we all called her, Gokhale Kaku (Gokhale Aunty). During brief moments of quiet—when the noise of vehicles and hoarse hawkers would desert the streets—the rustle of a feebly stifled sneeze, the familiar trill of the telephone, the wheezing of an overworked blender, or an angry line from a Marathi daily soap would jump over the wall and flee into different corners of the house.

After giving Mother a thirty-minute head start every morning, Gokhale Kaku—who lived alone—would play romantic Hindi songs of yesteryear on her radio. She was rather zealous in her appreciation of Amitabh Bachchan—a popular Bollywood actor—and would tell everyone that she had married her late husband because he was tall and spoke in a baritone, just like Bachchan. Starting her day by listening to songs lip-synched by the actor in his films was a ritual for her. The melodies from a romantic track, the percussive beat from a dance number, a stray line from a heart-wrenching ballad would inevitably spill over into our house.

As the hymns would steadily approach the end, Mother would turn down their volume slightly and then move to the sofa, in the corner across the room from the CD player, where the words to Gokhale Kaku’s songs—or as Mother called them ‘Gokhale Kaku’s hymns’—could be heard distinctly. Over the steady thrum of Vishnu’s names, Mother would slip into Bachchan’s tunes. An undecided agreement would take effect – in this corner, prayer and romance, God and actor, inside and outside, would briefly coexist. On the mornings when Gokhale Kaku forgot to play the songs, Mother would unfailingly remark, “I didn’t hear Gokhale Kaku’s hymns today. I should check if she is well.”

“We live our daily lives in a constant exchange with the set of daily appearances surrounding us… they confirm us in our lives,” wrote John Berger. This morning exchange, in that corner of the house, was a way for Mother and Gokhale Kaku to confirm themselves in their rooms, in their lives.

* * *

Sentences in Marathi are cul-de-sacs – with the verb(s) stowed at the end. Colloquially we may start a sentence with a verb but conventionally it is always placed at the end. It marks a cessation of an action for dynamic verbs and the realisation of a state for the stative ones. Some nouns find suffixes depending on their function or persuasion – that is, their grammatical case. They identify themselves as subjects, objects, neighbouring nouns, etc. and then settle on their ottomans, their sofas within the space of a sentence.

Marathi, being a split-ergative language, has the verb torn between the subject and the object. In some cases, the verb is in agreement with the subject while in others it goes with the neighbouring noun/object. Often it takes on the marking of the noun that it agrees with. The verb transforms into the corner that confirms the existence of people in a room, of nouns in a sentence.

* * *

Derrida speaks of difference and deferral in the total apprehension of meaning when he speaks of différance. Difference in meaning exists in the way a mother is different from a neighbour, a God different from an actor, a religious hymn different from a Bollywood song, and a corner different from a room. In language, we also defer meaning by jumping from one signifier to another without ever getting to the centre of meaning. The pursuit of meaning, then, is the constant movement from one corner to the other, from the ottoman to the sofa, from Mother to poetry.

* * *

In Alejandro Zambra’s novel Chilean Poet, when Gonzalo—a teacher and once poet—and his estranged stepson, Vicente—an aspiring poet—meet after years, they retrace their tenuous connection through poetry and to poetry. On Gonzalo’s insistence, Vicente reads out one of his poems, which briefly awakens in Gonzalo the desire to write poems again.

Vicente’s poem:

In my mother tongue the word for earthquake

is masculine

(Though I may disagree)

The word for tattoo is too

The mole on your skin—that’s male.

But a freckle is female

Like a scar, like a wound

…

In my language the words for winter, summer, and fall

are all male

Only spring is a female season

I may disagree, and I do

But those are the words that we have.

…

And the desire to never play with words again

(is all mine)

And the desire to never play with words again

And the desire to never play with words again

I offer my poem after Vicente’s:

In Marathi, the word for language (भाषा/bhasha) is feminine

But a word (शब्द/shabda) is masculine.

A wall (भिंत/bhinta) is female

(Though I may disagree)

A room (खोली/kholi) is hers

But not a corner (कोपरा/kopra)

Which mistakenly is his.

Mother’s hymns (स्तोत्र/stotra) and Gokhale Kaku’s songs (गाणे/gaané)

Like a house (घर/ghar), are neuter.

I may disagree, and I do

But those are the words that we have.

In Marathi, a poem (कविता/kavita) is feminine

And so is the desire to write (लिहायची इच्छा/lihaychi ichcha).

The desire to write is feminine

The desire to write is all mine

The desire to write (is all mine)

* * *

Bachelard believes that the house we are born in is inscribed within us. Every time that we dream of this house, we participate in its warmth, we recreate its intimacy. He calls these the “maternal features” of the house. Even if we haven’t lived in it for years, we still have the same reflexes while moving through the house.

Is this also not true for the language we are born into?

Every time I write, I carry with me the maternal features of Marathi. My desire to write is the desire to participate in the warmth, to recreate the intimacy of my mother tongue.

* * *

A line from an Oscar Milosz poem unites the image of the mother and the image of the house: “I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House!”

* * *

Mother is a language is a house is a poem.