If EAF Wouldn't Be

The language called English, found its way in my life through -- would you believe -- a battle of words, how funny! Between my father and mother, I am glad to announce that my mother emerged the winner and put me into an ‘English Medium School’, which has, in turn, also become the punching bag for everything she wishes to blame me for – my manners, choices, opinions, oh, and certainly, my poise with pronunciation. Yes, ‘English Medium School’ has made me a horrible person (don’t you dare doubt it) – uber-liberal, commitment-phobic, and with a twisted mind. Oh no, that her highness separately assigns to my father’s lineage – “they are cunning, calculative, narrow-minded, limited, and we are straight-forward, short-tempered, fun-loving and risk-takers!” There you have it – your author in a mess of genetic diversity, convent fed habits, self-taught perceptions – with an unavoidable affection towards her friends – the twenty six characters of the English language.

Your author is a mess alright, but you have been with her for so long, that you must have be believing in some kind of charisma that works for her. Hey, if you don’t, please, I would like you to believe in it. Why the effort? Because of friendship, why else! For what am I without A to Z? I now have my Nobel Prize award receiving speech ready, “I would like to dedicate this award to the first friends of my life – the English Alphabet Family!” That’s rather novel, what do you think? Well, we will see if we can work our way to upgrade the speech when I get a confirmation of being nominated for the Nobel. Till such time, let me take you back to EAF. Sounds a bit like an UFO’s code, but it is just the acronym for English Alphabet Family.

Childhood memories often live in the form of scars and jars. I have a stitch on my chin to prove I was always athletic (or, restless, in the least). Barring that, I carry memories of slaps and whacks for ruining walls and befriending any stray piece of paper. Writing instruments fascinated me. To keep me chained all that was needed, was a pen and paper. To have a child like that in today’s age must feel like a blessing, but my mother disagrees. Excess – her term being ‘oti-oti’ – of anything is bad, she still insists. Mothers never get to know when their daughters outgrow them. The EAF caressed me like a lover, kissed me with the possibilities of their fonts, cuddled me by building garlands of words in various combinations. I took to them like a fish takes to water. And the water was so luscious, so delicious, so engrossing that, as visible, I still haven’t quite been able to come out of it.

And here I swim, backstroke – looking up at the sky where members of EAF take turns in playing hide and seek with the stars and clouds, I try a dive and EAF here gets inside the bubbles that I release in a laidback delay, and with open eyes I see them transform into grasshoppers and mermaids. While I turn sideways in doing freestyle, my buddies tease me with ripples that whisper myths in my one-side open ear. And I swim.

EAF has not only been my friends, it would not be wrong to say they are family. They are twenty six shades of me, out in the open. They are not just my first friends, now tied fast, but they are what we call, in no-Queen’s English, “Friends Forever”. 

If EAF wouldn't be, there would be no me.