Just finished reading David Green’s essay ‘If you don’t speak English you can’t belong in Britain.’ The piece is in response to a high court case brought by Rashida Chapti who is challenging the requirement that her 57-year old husband from India must learn English if he wants to settle with her in the UK. Chapti’s lawyer is arguing that the immigration requirement is racially discriminatory and obstructs the right to family life.

Is it? Is it such an unreasonable expectation for immigrants to learn the language of the country in which they are consciously making a choice to live in? What do you miss when you live among people whose language you don’t speak or understand?

I learned this lesson just last week while visiting a friend in Austria. My friend is an Indian woman married to an Austrian and settled there for the past 15 years. She also holds the honor of being the only Indian in town. Within a few minutes of our arrival, her in-laws stopped by to greet us. Both of them are in their late 70s and don’t speak a word of English. I know exactly two words in German – auf wiedersehen and Edelweiss – both picked up from the movie ‘Sound Of Music.’ But in that moment we didn’t need words. We greeted each other in our own languages while smiling, making eye contact, and shaking hands. Enough contact for all of us to know we liked each other even if none of us understood the words we used to say it.

But this meeting was different. My friend had warned me about her in-laws: they were the most loving, kindest, sweetest and gentlest people I would ever meet. Though fully warned I was completely unprepared for the warmth that overtook me in the first few seconds of meeting them. They were everything my friend said they were and more. Having lost my parents at a young age, they embodied the very picture of what I envisioned my parents would have been like at that age. I took to them instantly. The feeling was mutual my friend told me later. Her in-laws had taken to me too.

Over the next few days we met many more times. Her father-in-law (who by now I was calling papa) would proudly show me the various gardens he tended around their home. They were gardens overflowing with flowers and vegetables, and worthy of featuring in landscape magazines. I couldn’t stop clicking pictures and stopping to marvel at the incredible patience and love that went into building and maintaining these gardens. Then there was the food: homemade schnitzel, kugelhopf, spätzle, cakes and breads cooked by mama that would give the best restaurants a run for their money. We had found another language to talk in – the language of food (you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten good homemade Austrian food). I made sure they knew how much I loved this food with loud lip smacking, several helpings, uhms, ahhs, and the one other word I had picked up in that time – schön (beautiful) – which I repeated over and over.

During one such heavenly meal I declared loudly, “You must come to America. You must. You must. You must.” It was a simple invitation from a grateful and appreciative guest. Nothing prepared me for the brief, but dark cloud I saw pass over my host’s face. I had touched a nerve and for the life of me couldn’t figure out what I had said wrong. Papa smiled and stood up to leave, indicating he was about to show me something. He returned with pictures of Wiener Neustadt during WWII. (Being an industrial base producing fighter planes for the Axis-countries, Wiener Neustadt was a heavily targeted city by Allied bombings. It is estimated some 50,000 bombs were dropped on this city and all but 20 buildings were left standing by the end of World War II.)

It took me a few seconds to realize I was talking to a survivor of World War II. At 78 now, he would have been but a child of nine or ten during one of the darkest periods in world history. As a teenager he would have experienced the rebuilding of an entire city from the rubble it had been reduced to. Today Wiener Neustadt is a throbbing, vibrant and beautiful city. Nothing like the pictures of destruction preserved carefully in plastic report covers that my host produced at the mere mention of America, or ooh-ess-ah (USA as he pronounces it).

A dozen questions flew through my head in that instant. I wanted to know more: his experiences, feelings, views of the war and its aftermath, how all of it might have affected his life and decisions. I have read dozens of books and watched movies and documentaries of this period. Here I was, for the first time in my life, in the presence of someone who had actually experienced it first hand. But we wouldn’t be able to share an experience so important to both of us because I did not speak his language.

In the end that’s what life is about – meeting people, sharing experiences, living and learning and hopefully changing the world a little bit at a time in our own little corners of the world. I agree with David Green when he says, “Language is the means by which we can defuse controversies, offer compromises, and explain our point of view in the hope of finding common ground. Without a common language, interactions become more crude and more likely to be based on sheer emotion, and perhaps a kind of tribalism.”

I fell in love with Austria and Germany on this trip – the food, the history, arts and culture of those countries. But I will learn German before I go back. Knowing the language will make my next trip there that much richer, fulfilling and more meaningful.

I hope Mr and Mrs. Chapti can take off the blinkers, open their minds and hearts and accept that learning the language will only serve to make their lives in the UK a better experience. Otherwise they will just be another pair of NRI immigrants availing of the physical comforts of a foreign country while their hearts and minds pine for home, India.

~Genevieve