I had schooling at Biratnagar beside the Bihar borders learning vernacular Nepali and other languages. Nepali was the medium although Hindustani teachers were there for Sanskrit, Hindi, English, and other subjects.

All these were but compulsory papers for half-yearly and yearly class promotion tests. In the ninth grade, we chose between Nepali and Hindi for the SLC exams.

Until the early sixties Biratnagar had only one school for SLC exams centre in the entire Morang. As I knew, only a negligible number of students were for the Hindi paper. One evident reason behind this was the recently waged, city-centred Bhasha Andolan (conflict between

Nepali and Hindi) under the hidden agenda of its supporters. An unconfirmed report was that some leaders had backed Hindi from the western parts of the Koshi river. But before the leaders knew that their music had a wrong tune, their followers had backed off. Nepali stayed uncontroversial in common parlance among school and non-school populations.

After school years again, added experiences came from the city surroundings. I observed that old age people communicated in Bengali, Marwari, Maithili and other Hindi offshoots when their first generation had fine Nepali skills. For now, this old age population too had learnt sensible, broken Nepali.

After the college, remote outskirts made me quite clear when people there (like Dhimal, Tharu, Jhangad, Muslims, etc.) spoke either Nepali or their particular tongue. They did not speak Hindi nor understood it.

I learnt Hindi through multiple sources, which were friends, teachers, business concerns, Bollywood movies, etc. Then I saw our Hindustani teachers speak Nepali in the native smell of Hindi. My associations also benefited me in the common potency of Maithili, Bhojpuri, Bengali, and Marwari.

When the mind and heart speaks a non-native vernacular, learning it also fires one’s interest and effort. If my Hindustani teacher speaks Nepali, it is their second language; if a British speaks Nepali, it is their foreign language.

After long years of association and formal education, I have learnt Hindi as a second language and English as a foreign. I learnt all other vernaculars of Maithili, Bhojpuri, Bengali and Marwadi, in a broken manner, to the pride and pleasure of Nepali on the tip of my tongue fired by mind and heart.

The first language Nepali associated with others has lifted my culture indeed.