The Ring of ‘Sylheti’
Tell you this, Sylhetis are proud people and proud of their uniqueness! This will take a lifetime for anyone to understand but for a Sylheti, the ring of Sylheti in an unknown place or setting is pure music to their ears!
I lived a few months in London once upon a time and weekends would mean visit to Primark. Yes, Primark was perhaps not for the elite but we commoners would rush anyways in the hope of scavenging something that we would end up liking and which wouldn’t be too harsh on the purse!
So while scavenging between T-shirts and tops or waiting for our ‘friends’ to finally finish their searching, paying, there would ring a familiar sound, a familiar language to be precise which transported me back home immediately or left me wondering if what I heard was indeed what I heard. I would stop doing what I was doing and stopped minding waiting for that friend who took eons to find a top and would carefully listen to the words spoken, conclude that it indeed was Sylheti and wait to hear more as long as they were not gone or my friends didn’t call me to join them for our next adventure.
Back to my room, I would call up my folks to tell them about those 2–3 minutes of Sylheti I overheard in an unknown place, on a far away land. I would even tell my folks about certain words I heard which we no longer used but which were part of our grandparents’ lingua franca.
And , once we traveled through Brick Lane in London, and sitting in the bus I noticed the shop names and the road signs were in the Bangla script and not in English! I had read the book by the same name and I could immediately connect! It gave me a certain joy to know that another Sylhet existed somewhere in London, and it made me sad that they were us once upon a time.
Why am I remembering all these today? Well, this evening as I took a break from my work and stood at the balcony, I heard some familiar words and literally pressed my ears to listen and convince myself that I was hearing what I was hearing. I was surprised as it is not usual to hear someone speak in Sylheti where I live and so I called my sis in law to validate. The news was immediately passed on to my father and after some initial enquiry, he set out to look for what every Sylheti looks for! He came home a while later only to confirm what we suspected and also fetched some additional details as to where the family was from!
Well, that was a little bit about the sound of Sylheti! Any non Sylheti wouldn’t understand why someone would spend ten minutes writing about trivial things but they wouldn’t know that Sylheti is an emotion!
