Subhash Jaireth

That deep time is an unending time.

And that's how I feel about literature and poetry as well.

Oh, my mother tongue was Punjabi, which is in North India.

And as I write in one of my essays, we could read and speak Punjabi.

We couldn't write it because the script in which Punjabi was written, we never bothered to learn it.

So we couldn't read and write, but we could speak it.

We were Punjabi Hindus.

There are Punjabi Sikhs, there are Punjabi Muslims, and there are Punjabi Christians, but we were Punjabi Hindus.

So that was our mother tongue, so-called mother tongue.

But our real functional mother tongue in the household was Hindi.

which is similar to Punjabi, but the script is different.

So we could read, write, and speak Hindi very well, except my father.

My father, who couldn't write Hindi, but could write Persian using Arabic script and English.

And the third language which we had in our household was English.

There is also a difference here.

This was our everyday speech.

When we will talk to each other in one and the same sentences, and you can talk to any Indian now, we will use words from one or the other language almost constantly.

So that was our everyday speech.

But in addition to the everyday speech, there was the literary speech as well, which came to us through newspapers and through magazines and what we learned at schools and universities.

So there was always this sort of osmotic relationship between the everyday speech, which was what I call it a khichdi, a hodgepodge,