A City That Doesn't Speak My Language
I learned to order food with my fingers and make friends with my eyebrows.
In my first week in that city I confidently ordered what I believed was chicken and rice and received, with great ceremony, a bowl of something grey that moved when I poked it. I ate it anyway. When the whole staff of a six-table restaurant gathers to watch the foreigner's face, you eat the grey thing, and you nod, and you make the thumbs up, and you spend the walk home wondering if it had eyes.
I had moved there for a job, a two-year posting I accepted on a Wednesday after a breakup on a Monday, which is not a decision-making process I recommend so much as confess. I knew exactly eleven words of the language when I landed. Four of them were numbers. One, I later discovered, was not "thank you"... but a word you say to horses.
The city itself was gorgeous and completely indifferent to me, the way cats and great cities are. Eight million people, all of them apparently in a group chat I could not join. Announcements poured out of speakers on trains and I would watch everyone around me sigh in unison at news I would never receive. The bureaucracy was a haunted house. I once spent four hours in a government office being sent between counter three and counter seven by two men who, I am now sure, were doing it as a form of theatre.
So I adapted, in the way of all stranded creatures.
I evolved.
I learned to order food with my fingers: point, then hold up one finger, then point at whatever the confident man at the next table was having, which is the single greatest restaurant strategy ever devised. I learned that a phone photo of a plumbing disaster is worth a thousand words I did not have. I learned to perform "my landlady says the hot water is fixed but it is not fixed" as a small silent play, complete with shivering.
Mostly, I learned eyebrows.
You do not know what your face can do until it is the only vocabulary you have. Raised eyebrows plus a smile: hello, yes, wonderful, I accept. One eyebrow: are we being cheated, brother? Both eyebrows plus stepping back from the durian: no thank you, I choose life. The woman who ran the noodle stall under my building became my first friend entirely through this method. I pointed, she raised her eyebrows to ask the usual?, I raised mine to say obviously, and within a month we had whole conversations, rich with gossip I could not verify, about the man from the third floor whose bags of empty bottles clinked with shame at 7 a.m.
I will not pretend it was all charming. There is a specific loneliness that lives in a crowd whose jokes you cannot catch. It has a delay on it, like thunder. All day you cope, you point, you eyebrow, you manage, and it is honestly fine... and then at 9 p.m. you are eating noodles alone above a street of laughter aimed at nothing you can share, and it arrives. I called my mother so often that she started screening me like a telemarketer. "Beta, you called at lunch. Nothing has changed since lunch."
Around month four, in an act of either courage or desperation, I enrolled in a beginner class at a community centre, Tuesdays and Thursdays, in a room that smelled of chalk and instant coffee. My classmates were two retired German engineers, a Filipino nurse, and a nineteen-year-old who was in love with a local girl and learning at roughly the speed of light while the rest of us slid backward. Learning as an adult is a humiliation with a certificate at the end. I stood in that room, a person with a master's degree, and said sentences a local toddler would have edited. But it did something the textbook never promised: it turned the city's wall of sound into a wall with cracks in it. A word here. A price there. Once, gloriously, an entire train announcement, which turned out to mean the train was delayed. I have never been happier to be inconvenienced.
The Night the Words Ran Out Anyway
Here is the part I did not see coming.
The night I finally broke down in that city, language had nothing to do with it, and neither did its absence.
It was a Sunday in my seventh month. My grandfather died back home, over the phone, in the sense that all faraway deaths happen over the phone: my father's voice, very calm... the way he gets when he is holding the ceiling up. There were no flights until morning. I remember standing in my kitchen afterward holding a cup of tea I had made for no one, and then I did the arithmetic of time zones and realized the funeral would happen while I was over an ocean, and something in me just sat down on the floor.
At some point I went downstairs because the walls were too close, and the noodle stall was closing, chairs going up on tables.
The woman took one look at me. One look.
And here is what she did with our shared vocabulary of zero: she put a chair back down. Pointed at it. Went inside... and came out with a bowl of plain broth and sat across from me while I ate it crying, this stranger's grandson at her counter, and she never once tried to say anything. She just pushed the tissues closer and refilled the bowl and, near the end, reached over and patted the table twice next to my hand, which in every language on earth means: I know. I know.
Fluency is not the ability to say anything. It is the ability to be understood while saying nothing at all.
I flew home, did the rites, came back eleven days later with my grandfather's fountain pen in my shirt pocket. The first evening back, I went down to the stall. She saw me, raised both eyebrows: a question, gentle. I tipped my head: it is done, I am standing. She nodded, and made the usual without being asked, and put extra egg in it without comment, and grief and dinner sat together at a plastic table under a building, the way they have always done.
I used the fountain pen that night, first time. Not for anything grand. I wrote about the bowl of broth, in my own language, badly, and kept going on other nights until it turned into something I did not hate, a piece about new beginnings and how they never feel like beginnings while you are inside them, only like weather.
I finished the two years. I can now hold a conversation in that language, wobbly but roadworthy, and I know the word for grandfather, which I learned on purpose, first thing, when I got back. On my last night, the noodle woman refused my money and I refused her refusal and we had our longest argument ever, entirely in eyebrows, and I lost... as I had always lost.
People ask me what it was like, living where I could not speak. They expect a story about hardship, and it was that, some days. But mostly what I remember is this: I went to that city with eleven words, and it turned out I only ever really needed the ones nobody says out loud.
A chair, put back down. A palm patting the table, twice. The usual, with extra egg.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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