Vowel attacks

SUMANA ROY

It begins as a game, like most things do, even work. She is learning to write her first words, and everything is as tortuous as it is thrilling.

H A T

The upper case is called ‘bawro haat’ in Bangla, meaning ‘long hand’, the lower case ‘chhoto haat’, ‘small hand’. I wonder why children, with their little hands, are taught to write in bawro haat first. But my thoughts can’t progress beyond the first beat. She’s turned towards me for appreciation after writing the word. ‘Very good,’ I say.

‘Draw a hat,’ she instructs me, as only little nieces can order their aunts.

I don’t want to fail in front of her. I cannot draw very well. I try to distract her. A hut is easier to draw than a hat, I tell myself.

H U T

The hut is now only a part of a communal memory. She’s never seen a hut. ‘Draw’, she instructs again.

It is as if I’ve noticed this for the first time, these words that I have probably known ever since I was her age. I notice what the vowel is doing. I do not mean the difference in sounds of the two words – that is obvious. I suddenly see that a HAT is related to a HUT. I want to share this with her, and so I draw a hat and a hut. I take the hat and place it on top of the hut. Every hut needs a hat as roof just as a face in the sun does. My drawing isn’t necessary to make you see what I did: that the HAT could be the roof for the HUT – place a HAT on a U and see how it becomes a HUT? (Later, many weeks later in fact, I would do something similar with CUP and CAP, how an inverted CUP could become a CAP – the inverted U has some resemblance with A.)

Is that all it took, a change in vowel, a change in the shape and action of the lips, to transform a word, an idea, its meaning, its material, and its metier?

This exercise, inconsequential as it is, sets me off on a trail, though I’ll realize this only much later. To return to that moment: my niece, then three years old, was perhaps as startled as I was, and it might have been that that made her drop her pencil from her little hands. DROP, she said, and her face changed, particularly the muscles around her mouth, from where, for some reason, disappointment begins its journey. I hadn’t seen the pencil DROP, but I could see an echo of its movement: her face had DROOPed. An addition of the same vowel is all it took? It seemed that something had been set off without my awareness, something I now had no control over. For it happened again, almost immediately after the DROPping of the pencil, the DROOPing of her mouth and the DRIPping of tears from her eyelashes.

It was winter – unlike many places, where cold drops like snow, from above, the chill is like a snake in our sub-Himalayan town. It emerges from the ground and crawls upwards. And hence the axiomatic invocation of socks from time to time – the first armour of protection. My niece has lost a sock, her mother is scolding her. The child is walking without any awareness of the difference in her feet – one protected by wool, the other bare, like her face.

It is at this moment that the vowel attack strikes me again. I call Tuki and make her sit on the bed. The drawing board is beside us. I draw a sock and write the word: SOCK. Then I wipe the ‘O’ from the word with my left hand. I put the piece of chalk in the little girl’s hand and make her write ‘I’. Not wearing a SOCK will make her SICK.

None of this is conscious, no, not intentional at all. It just happens – I suppose it happens to many, except that I might be more prone to it. I know that mosquitoes throng only around me in a room of eighteen people. This is perhaps like that too, how am I to know? The frequency of these visitations – I notice that I’ve begun calling them ‘vowel attacks’ – begins to increase. I also begin to notice a pattern: most of these have to do with items of clothing. Just as not wearing the sock would make the child sick and the hat resemble the roof of the hut, similarly with names of other items of clothing – the change of vowel in the name can give us a history of cause and effect of how the piece of clothing might have found a name, and sometimes even a story about its function. It is possible that this speculative history is completely a result of the putrefaction of my imagination.

A few days pass and I wait for the bug to leave. I think I’ve been cured – though the truth is that I’d started missing the effect of the bug a little bit – until my husband discovers a hole in his trouser pocket. POCKET. The word sticks to my consciousness for hours, even when I try to force myself to think of other things: orange juice, fresh bedlinen, someone massaging the back of my neck, and other favourite indulgences. What is the difference between a POCKET and a PACKET? The function of both is the same – to hold, to carry. Since the mouth of the POCKET remains open, like an O, it is POCKET. A PACKET is sealed or closed, like the two limbs of A that meet like a closed clip. There is no relief from these thoughts, for, soon after, another arrives: PICKET. POCKET becomes PICKET because of the multiple sets of ‘I’ joined together: I-I-I-I-I-I. PICKET fences keeps things safe too, like a POCKET and a PACKET do.

I am not young anymore, not young enough to create my own paracosm around these vowels. What am I doing then? What is happening to me? What exactly is this spell I am in? I am aware of the absolute inconsequence of my thoughts, that my mind would do better if it were to graze on something else, but I have no control. Am I losing control…

One day I wake up with a hurt toe. I try to remember the history of its injury. TOE. The bug goes buzzing in my mind. And then it strikes. TIE. The entire body – and, of course, the shirt collar – tied together by this rope-like fabric. In its name is its function: TIE. Is ‘I’ the opposite of ‘O’? I don’t know. I can only see that the opposite is happening at the other end: the body has given away, it cannot be TIEd together anymore, the shank is losing its unitary hold, it is scattering into TOE, into TOEs, many of them.

I’d begun to see these visitations as an occasional event, not more than one a day. There had been no reason for me to arrive at this conclusion about their frequency, but it might have been my physical condition that made me decide that in this matter they would behave like the daily ablution. I was wrong. The vowel bug was now behaving like a sneeze – there was always one waiting inside, just waiting to react to an allergen. If only I could have identified the allergen… Was it me? I’m sure it was me – I had metamorphosed into an agent of my own destruction.

We choose our own poison – I’d heard that a lot as I had moved into middle age. It was a truism: some had drunk themselves to death, others had done the same thing by working without rest, some had eaten what they loved, and some loved others but not themselves; even those who had done nothing had destroyed themselves by doing just that. This was perhaps my poison of choice: language, my obsession with it, turning to it to find a history of everything, everything that mattered to me and even things that seemed inconsequential to my existence, such as extraterrestrial life. And now this is where I was – I had become a fruit fly circumambulating around language.

When I saw a BELT, I could no longer see a belt. I saw a BOLT. You tell me – isn’t a BELT like a BOLT, in that both lock ends together? Like a footballer kicking off the ball from the centre of the field to start a match, something kicked out a vowel and replaced it with another. And it would start. What? I wish I had a name for it. Name? Name would mean language. It was growing into a fear of what I had loved with such intense curiosity: language.

I tried to hold myself back, to distract myself, to direct my attention towards other things. Nervousness distracted me more than life, and I often tried walking on tiptoe so as not to wake up language, or at least what I knew as language. That was no cure, sometimes only a sense of loss. As soon as that word came to me, I was thrown, like a Brownian particle, in the middle of another attack: LOSS; if this sense of LOSS continued, I would be LOST. From ‘S’ to ‘T’, it wouldn’t take very long. I wanted to laugh at myself, at this fly I was becoming, but the intimations of being human remained. This is not a vowel attack, my brain reminded me. These were consonants, S and T. I therefore had more to worry about now: it wasn’t just one species that was out to get me, they had got their neighbours along. I wouldn’t be able to call it only a vowel attack anymore. It wasn’t that finding the right name for the disease would cure me. I tried to ignore myself.

A few days passed. I was beginning to forget the attacks like one doesn’t – can’t – remember a common cold. Until it strikes again, that is. The allergen was LACE. Chantilly lace that an acquaintance had received as a gift, an inheritance from her grandmother-in-law. She, aware of my little passions, had carried it with her for me to see – this 19th century artistry. As we looked at it, wanting to feel it between our fingers but resisting temptation, treating it like a canvas that one is supposed to only see, I felt it coming.

I know that by saying ‘I felt it coming’ I am making it sound like a sneeze – perhaps that is what it feels like, I cannot be sure of what it is in retrospect, whether it was anything at all. But it did come, the vowel attack: ‘A’ was kicked out by ‘I’, and LACE became LICE. My eyes, which had so long been taking in what was in my friend’s hands, now began scanning her hair. My friend had no idea about this of course, of what was happening inside my mind and my eyes. Soon my eyes were on her neck, more specifically on her NECKLACE. But it wasn’t a NECKLACE that I saw. I saw the tiny globules of gold and the gems of her delicate necklace as insects that had formed a pattern around her neck. A NECK-LICE.

That was not all.

I got up to make her tea, just so that my mind had something else to vulture around. It was exhausting, this hidden life that I was ferrying around inside me, unable to discard it even as I knew that it had no real value for me or anyone else. Where was I, what was I, when… ‘What’s the time?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say.

She looked at her WATCH… I forget everything else, the time she said it was, whether I gave her tea at all, or anything with it. For she had become someone else. A had once again been kicked out by I. I saw not her reading her WATCH but a WITCH, a witch with NECKLICE around her neck.

Looking for relief, I escaped to the bathroom. There I was, in the mirror, still recognizable, almost like what I had seen the last time I’d met myself there, on its reflecting surface. I felt the vowel attack coming. It was my DRESS. Again, it wasn’t my DRESS – it might have been greyish in colour – that I saw but something else: O displacing E. I saw myself – with all these recent histories – for what I was: DROSS.

It is hard to spot these tendencies – these parallel mental lives – in people. My friend left soon after, unaware of what she had set off, ignorant of where my eyes were now stuck: at the HEM of her dress, where I held my mind tightly as if it was a mountain, refusing to let it succumb to any more of these vowel attacks. I wasn’t going to let I displace E, for HEM to become HIM, as if the hem of a dress was related to the way a man looked at it. But by trying to resist the vowel attack, I was also preempting it. This I realized only later. When my friend turned back to get into the lift, I saw the ZIP of her dress, running from the back of her neck to her waist. And it was as if I could see how ZIPping could ZAP, ‘get rid of… with sudden force’, as the dictionary tells us about ‘zap’.

I am nowhere close to being cured. I’ve wondered about what kind of specialist I should seek. It is possible, though it is slightly hard for me to admit this, that I do not want to be cured. This, I’ve been tutoring myself to believe, is only a manifestation – side effect, if you want to be harsh – of an uncommon love.

I will have to end this essay now (Or is it a story?). I feel an attack coming. What happens when E comes and settles at the end of a word? How a BIT might actually be the size of a BITE and why MAT could bring a MATE. These are important things that I must find out before I die.

Footnotes:

*Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree (a work of nonfiction), Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.