He Learned My Language to Say Goodbye
His farewell was fluent; it was staying he never mastered.
He said goodbye in perfect Bengali, and that is how I knew he had been planning it for months.
You cannot improvise Bengali. Not the way he spoke it that morning at Gate 14, with the soft dental sounds in the right places, with the verb conjugated for tenderness, with my grandmother's word for beloved, the old village word, the one that does not appear in any app.
Somebody taught him that word. Somebody drilled him. While I was falling asleep on his shoulder during those last three months, believing we were fine... Julian was doing homework.
We met the way people in two countries meet now, which is to say through a screen, and then through a series of airports. He was a structural engineer from Rotterdam who had come to Kolkata for eight months to work on a bridge. I was the interpreter his firm hired for site meetings, which is funny, if you can stand that kind of funny, because the entire relationship began with me translating him.
Our first non-work conversation was about pigeons. There was one nesting in the site office air conditioner, and he refused to let maintenance remove it until the eggs hatched, and he stood in front of the unit like a one-man embassy while the contractor yelled at him in Bengali and Julian smiled and said, "Tell him I said the pigeon was here first." I translated it. The contractor laughed so hard he had to sit down. We were together within a month.
Here is what nobody tells you about loving across a language: you build a third country. It is small. Its population is two. Its official language is a pidgin of English, bad Dutch, worse Bengali, and a hundred private words that mean nothing anywhere else on earth. Toothpaste was tandpasta was our word for anything unpleasant but necessary. Phone calls to his mother were tandpasta. Filing taxes was tandpasta. The word for I love you, in our country, was said in English but with the stress on the wrong syllable, on purpose, the way he said it the very first time by accident.
English was the house we lived in, and it was a rented house, and we both knew it. He dreamed in Dutch. I argued in Bengali. When he was truly angry he went quiet in a Dutch way, flat and orderly, and when I was truly hurt I went loud in a Bengali way, operatic, my mother's daughter. We used to joke that our fights needed subtitles.
The bridge finished. Bridges do that. His firm offered him Jakarta, and we did fourteen months of long distance, which I will not describe except to say that there is a specific loneliness that lives in the four seconds of lag on a video call, in watching the person you love freeze mid-laugh into a smear of pixels, and I got to know that loneliness so well I could have made up its guest bed.
Then he came back. One last visit, he said... before a decision. Three weeks in Kolkata in the wet season. And those three weeks were, I would have sworn on my life, the best we ever had. He was present in a way he had never been. He put his phone in a drawer. He learned to make luchi, badly, gloriously, flour to the ceiling. He sat with my father and watched cricket for six hours and asked intelligent questions about field placement, and my father, who trusts no one, lent him an umbrella. In my family that is a covenant.
I thought he was building up to a proposal.
I need you to understand how reasonable this belief was. He had asked, casually, twice, how weddings work here, who pays, what the priest does. He had asked what my mother's ring size meant to me. He had asked me to teach him phrases and then practiced them at night... on the balcony, in a low voice, and once when I surprised him out there he shut his notebook so fast the pages snapped.
He was studying, all right.
At the airport he did not go through security. He set down his bag, took both my hands, and began to speak in Bengali. Long, careful sentences. The airport noise fell away the way it does in films, except this was not a film, this was Gate 14 with a floor cleaner beeping behind us in reverse.
He said, in my language, in my grandmother's language: that he loved me, that he had failed me, that Jakarta was five years, that he had watched me during the long distance months turning into a translation of myself, thinner in every sense, and that he would not do to me what the distance was doing. He said the old village word for beloved and then he said the word for goodbye that you say when you do not mean see you later. Bengali has both.
He knew the difference. Somebody had taught him the difference.
I asked him, in English, the only question that mattered: "You did all that work. Months of work... Why not spend it learning to stay?"
And he said the thing I have carried ever since, the thing I still turn over like a stone from a river I am no longer allowed to visit.
"Saying goodbye is one sentence, you can memorize it. Staying is grammar. You have to get it right every day, forever, and I kept failing the daily test."
Then he picked up his bag and went through security.
I stood at the glass and watched his plane, and I remember thinking, with the deranged clarity of the newly bereaved, that the window needed cleaning, that somebody should really clean this window, as if the smudges were the problem, as if through clean glass I could have seen this coming.
For a long time I hated the elegance of it. Grief is easier when you can call someone a coward, and he had made that impossible. He broke my heart with more effort, more preparation, more respect than most people put into their vows. My best friend said it was the most romantic breakup she had ever heard of, and I did not speak to her for a week, because she was right.
It took me two years to write about it. I circled it, I wrote around it, I wrote poems about airports that were secretly about him and poems about him that were secretly about airports. Eventually I stopped writing around the wound and wrote into the memory itself: the balcony, the notebook snapping shut, the floor cleaner beeping in reverse. I put one of those poems up on a community wall for poets, mostly to stop myself from deleting it, and a stranger in another country commented that she had been the Julian in her story, the one who left beautifully, and that she thought about her person every time she heard her own language spoken with an accent.
We wrote to each other for a while, that stranger and I. Both sides of the same airport glass.
Last spring, at a conference in Delhi, I heard Dutch across a hotel lobby. Two engineers arguing about, I swear this is true, a bridge. My whole body turned before my mind had voted.
It was not him. Of course it was not him.
But I stood there and let the language wash over me, that flat orderly music, and I understood maybe one word in ten... and I realized I was smiling.
Because here is the thing about the third country, the little one we built with a population of two. You cannot be deported from it. It has no airport. Its borders closed years ago, but I still hold citizenship, and so does he, wherever he is, and some mornings I say tandpasta to my toothbrush in an empty flat and it means exactly what it always meant.
He learned my language to say goodbye. Fine. He said it fluently, and it landed, and it healed clean, the way honest cuts do.
But the word for beloved, the old village word? He gave that to me in his accent, and now it is mine in a way it never was before. My grandmother's word, returned to me with one small flaw in the vowel.
That is the version I hear when I read it in old poems.
That is the version I will teach no one.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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