I Learned English From Song Lyrics
My first dictionary had a chorus and a cassette deck.
My first English teacher was a cassette deck with a jammed eject button. You had to open it with a steel ruler, gently, like a surgeon, or the tape would spill its brown ribbon guts and my cousin Montu would know I had been in his room again.
This was Siliguri, the late nineties. English lived in two places in our house: my father's bank documents, which nobody could read, and Montu's shelf of cassettes, which nobody could resist. Michael Jackson. Boyzone. A tape with no case, labeled in Montu's handwriting: ENGLISH SONGS GOOD.
That label was the first English sentence I ever fully believed.
My method was not a method. It was hunger with a rewind button.
Play four seconds. Pause. Write what I heard, phonetically, in the back pages of my maths notebook, the ones the syllabus never reached. Rewind. Play the same four seconds. Correct. Rewind. The song "Words" by Boyzone took me two evenings and cost me most of a pencil.
I did not know what the words meant... that was tomorrow's problem. Tonight's problem was catching them, live, like moths.
Meaning came later and it came crooked. I learned "lonely" before I learned "table." I learned "forever" before I learned "Tuesday." I could not have asked for directions to the railway station, but I could inform you, with feeling, that my heart would go on.
School English arrived in the morning with its dead sentences: This is a cow. The cow gives us milk. Cassette English arrived at night, breathing. One of them was a language. I decided early which one.
My mother, hearing the murmuring behind my door, the same phrases over and over in the dark, told the neighbors her son had become religious. She was not entirely wrong. There was a candle involved, because load-shedding ate our evenings, and there was repetition, and there was, I suppose, worship. A boy, a candle, a deck with a jammed eject button, and the BBC of the heart playing at low volume so nobody would know.
My father asked me once, over dinner, what "tearing up my heart" meant, having caught four seconds of it through the wall. I explained it meant the singer was very sad because of love. My father considered this. "He should eat first," he said, and went back to his rice. It remains the best piece of literary criticism I have ever received.
Of course, I heard half of it wrong. This is the part nobody tells you about learning a language through a speaker the size of a biscuit: you do not receive the song, you receive your version of it. For one entire year I believed Céline Dion was singing "near, far, wherever your arms." Not "wherever you are." Wherever your arms.
I pictured arms the way a drowning person pictures them, arms as a place you could actually go, a country with a population of two. I sang it my way at full volume when the house was empty. My version, I want it noted, is better.
The mishearings piled up in the maths notebook like a shadow songbook. I had "the ants are my friends" blowing in the wind. I had a girl who apparently wanted to "dance with somebody who loves tea." English, as I first knew it, was ten percent grammar and ninety percent guessing with your whole chest.
The reckoning came in Class Eight. Essay examination, topic: "A Person I Admire." Somewhere in my second paragraph, describing my grandfather, I wrote that no matter where he went, near, far, wherever his arms, the family gathered inside them. Mrs. D'Souza underlined it twice in red and wrote in the margin: "Where have you copied this from?"
I was summoned to her desk. I stood there, thirteen, terrified, and told the truth. "From Titanic, madam. But I heard it wrong, so it is mine now."
She looked at me for a long moment...
Then she did something teachers rarely do in front of the whole class: she laughed, once, loudly, and put down the red pen. "Wrong," she said, "but wrong in an interesting direction. Continue." She gave me eight out of ten and a suspicious look that lasted until March.
Wrong in an interesting direction.
I have been going that way ever since.
Years later, in my first month of college in a bigger city, I saw a poster for an open mic and wrote, in one sitting, the first real poem of my life. It was about my grandmother's kitchen, and its spine, its load-bearing line, was "wherever your arms." The mishearing. The mistake. When I read it aloud, a girl in the second row closed her eyes at that exact line, and I understood something I have never been able to unlearn since.
I did not learn English. I memorized how it felt to mean something, and the grammar came limping after.
Fluency, it turned out, was never the prize. Everyone in that room conjugated better than I did. But I had spent my childhood pressing rewind on feelings, four seconds at a time, and that is its own qualification. Later I typed the poem up and entered it in a monthly poetry contest, mostly to prove to the Class Eight version of me that "copied from Titanic" was not going to be the final verdict. It did not win. The next one did better. The cassette method transfers: play, attempt, rewind, attempt again.
When I finally started studying the craft properly, working through actual lessons on writing, I kept meeting my cassette deck wearing academic clothes. "Close listening." "Learning by imitation." "Ear before intellect." I sat in workshops nodding while privately translating everything back into the original terminology: four seconds, pause, rewind, steel ruler, don't tell Montu.
Montu knows now, for the record. He is forty-three, an engineer in Dubai, and when I told him what his shelf had done to my life, he was quiet on the phone for a moment... and then said, "You owe me one pencil," because he is Montu, and some people express love only in inventory.
I think often about that boy in the candlelit room, and about how much of what I call my voice is really just childhood playing at low volume underneath everything. Every poem I write about longing still has a chorus structure. Every poem about memory still rewinds itself, returns to the same four seconds, listens harder the second time. You can take the boy away from the cassette deck. The tape keeps playing.
Last winter, clearing my parents' house, I found it: ENGLISH SONGS GOOD, the label faded to a whisper, the ribbon miraculously unspilled. There is no machine left in the house that can play it. There is no machine left in most of the country that can play it.
It plays anyway.
That is the thing about the songs that raised you. I stood in my childhood room holding sixty grams of plastic, and the whole side A went through me in order, every track, every scratch, every beautiful mistake.
I sang along quietly... near, far, wherever your arms.
The wrong words. On purpose. Forever, which I learned before Tuesday.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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