This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode
Patrick Cox: Hi Kavi, what’s the weather like with you?
Kavita Pillay: Well, I’ve been indoors all day. I see some sun outside.
Patrick Cox: Sounds like the same here. Anyway, cheers!
Kavita Pillay: From Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, this is Subtitle, stories about languages and the people who speak them. I’m Kavita Pillay in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Patrick Cox: And I’m Patrick Cox, also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But a mile away from Kavi. And we’re not in a recording studio this time which is why sound a bit different.
Kavita Pillay: Wherever you are right now we hope you’re holding up. Times are different, and so we’re going to bring you something different. Today we have a couple of stories from people at home in isolation. Of course, many of us are talking with loved ones all over the world. We’re talking in English, and in other languages.
Patrick Cox: And sometimes we’re talking with people who we haven’t been in touch with for a while. And all this — the languages, people from the past — it’s bringing back memories : particular words and phrases; memories that are getting rewritten now, updated.
Kavita Pillay: Hi mom, can you hear me?
Indira Pillay: Yes.
Kavita Pillay: This is my mom, Indira Pillay. Like a couple billion of us, she and my dad are at home.
Indira Pillay: Well, right now, I’m in the bedroom, staring out through the big window. We have not gone outside for the last ten days.
Kavita Pillay: Please forgive the bad audio. I tried walking mom through the voice memos app on her phone, which would have sounded better. But if you’ve tried getting your 75-year-old mom to do something technical at distance during a pandemic, you’ll understand why I recorded her on zoom.
I grew up in Ohio and Mom would often tell us stories of her childhood in the south Indian state of Kerala. Usually this was in response to something going on in the world, and there was always some Malayalam proverb to go along with these stories.
Indira Pillay: Suujikondu edukavinethu thuumbakondu edakuga, which means taking out with spade what could have been removed by a needle. And that came to my mind because it looks very timely.
Kavita Pillay: I thought I’d heard all of her stories by now. And then we entered this pandemic, and she remembered one more.
Indira Pillay: Just when I was six years old. I was living with my grandmother because there were no good schools where my father was working. And she lived in a village in Kerala, which, as you know well, is a beautiful place, along the backwaters of Kerala, which is a tourist destination these days. We’re talking about 70 years back, it was rather typical how it was segregated along caste lines.
Kavita Pillay: My mom remembers that there was a Hindu temple at the center of this village. And the upper caste Hindus lived nearest to the temple. It was at a higher elevation, and it never flooded there. In other words, it was the best real estate.
Indira Pillay: And then you walk down from the hilly part to the plain areas. That is where all the rice paddies were.
Kavita Pillay: This is where the Christians in the village and people of my mom’s caste lived. My maternal ancestors were lower caste rice farmers. They were the equivalent of peasants, so they had to lease the rice paddy land from the upper castes…
Indira Pillay: …who didn’t do any work. They were always kind of lazy, took advantage of the lower caste. They made the lower caste people believe that they were superior and closer to God.
Kavita Pillay: But there were people even lower in the Hindu hierarchy than my mom’s family, and they lived further away, across a river.
Indira Pillay: Across the river lived the Untouchable people, the Dalits.
Kavita Pillay: Untouchables. Dalits. In India, they’re the lowest caste.
Indira Pillay: They were the laborers. They had a hand-to-mouth existence. Suddenly, one day we heard that there was a cholera outbreak among the Dalit people, and the whole village was scared.
Kavita Pillay: To me, cholera feels as distant as the plague. The only thing I know about it is that it’s terrible.
Indira Pillay: What it produces is a horrible, watery diarrhea, and sometimes vomiting. In India at that time the custom was if someone had diarrhea, they stop giving them any fluids, which is exactly the opposite of what one must do for cholera. You can get dehydrated within 24 hours and die.
Indira Pillay: My grandmother’s house was just across the river, And I remember as a child, the terror of it. During the daytime, or nighttime, we heard these wailing sounds from a hut across the river and like we knew somebody died because that is the only time when we heard that kind of wailing from a home. And then when we look across the river, at night, we’d see a funeral pyre burning — and that is how we knew somebody had died.
Kavita Pillay: My mom isn’t religious. She is a retired pathologist, so she spent much of her career behind a microscope.
Indira Pillay: Many people believe there is an all-loving, kind, compassionate god, who will sit there, dish out our wishes as we pray. I do not believe in that kind of a god. But we may be under a giant microscope and somebody is watching us. Imagine that we are looking at a bacterial colony through a microscope. The bacteria do not realize we are watching them. And you know, we have no special interest in them. We are letting them do whatever they do. And then they grow, the colony gets too big, and we introduce an antibiotic or a chemical, kill many of them, and then see what happens. They mutate, they do something else. So, this is my concept of some other, highly developed civilization — not people, whatever they are — watching us.
Kavita Pillay: And yet, she does have a favorite line of prayer, especially right now. It’s kind of the ‘Amen’ of Hinduism:
Indira Pillay : This is in Sanskrit, it goes like this: lokha samastha sukhino bhavanthu, which means let the whole world be well. The reason I pray that, that’s the only thing I can do. I mean, you know, in spite of all my scientific mind, I am a human being. I have emotions, and how can I…[becomes tearful].
Kavita Pillay: Billions of us have been united by the very thing that’s forcing us to stay apart. And so, this feels like a moment when certain contradictions make sense in ways they wouldn’t have, even a few weeks ago. The world is big, and the world is small. And in that world, my favorite retired scientist is left saying prayers, in a dead language that will outlive all of us.
The second interview in this episode is omitted from this transcript. One of the projects discussed is still embargoed from print publication.
Kavita Pillay: We’re planning more episodes about the words and phrases that are coming up for people now. We’d really like to hear from you — if you have a story to tell other listeners about a phrase in another language that’s got you thinking recently.
Drop us an email at subtitlepod@gmail.com. Or tweet us. We’re at lingopod
The podcast version of the story is available here and on Apple podcasts.
Subtitle’s sound designer is Tina Tobey.
Thanks to our partners at the Linguistic Society of America, the Hub & Spoke audio collective and The World public radio program.
Subtitle is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.