This is from a time in the early 1980s. One day, when the problem of harrassing women threatened to get out of hand, a colleague of my father’s in the police department came up with a brilliant idea.  In a well-publicised event, he presided over an unusual rakhi ceremony, one that involved some girls of Cuttack’s leading women’s college and loiterers who spent their mornings outside this college. Perhaps the participants were coerced, even coaxed, unwillingly, but this bit of news was deemed important enough to appear in the newspapers,  even in the big English ones published in Calcutta. It even featured in the now defunct Sunday magazine.

But for those of us in school – and Cuttack had two English medium schools, catering separately to boys and girls – we knew this wouldn’t make much of a difference.  The very participation of those involved made a mockery of police intentions; for us girls, the streets would be as unsafe, as dangerous, as “occupied” as before.

For me, the bigger news was an event scheduled middle of that week, July 29.  

An ordinary July day, deep in monsoon season, though wet less and humid, when I rushed home from school hoping to catch most of the royal wedding.  That day, unlike others, I remember not being afraid.

Like other girls, I sat self-consciously demure and decorous in the rickshaw, but was somehow inattentive to the eve-teasers on their bicycles who followed predator like,  as they did every late afternoon, the long line of girls returning home in rickshaws, tossing comments at random, breaking off into Hindi songs, all the way down  Cantonment road, then where it branched into Tulsipur, or to  Buxi Bazaar and Manglabagh,  I didn’t even have to pretend to not hear them, for in my mind, I could already hear church bells ringing.

It wasn’t a wedding that required me to dress up in any way I simply had to tune into the radio,  an old Telefunken,  black with a silver grizzled front where the voice came from, clearer even more once you pulled the antenna up as high up as it could go.

I was an hour too late but I did catch most of the royal wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana. The news broadcasts from the BBC would air clippings from the ceremony every hour, and I listened to those as well. Till, finally, toward late evening, I had to put it away and do my homework.

But long after, I continued to think of the wedding, and later drew family charts depicting the transition of different British royal dynasties. I knew mine till the time of William the Conqueror in 1066, all the lines, branches and sub-branches that stretched back from the  Houses of Windsor,   to the Hanovers,  the Stuarts and the Tudors, the ever conflict ridden Houses of York and Lancaster,  then the Plantagent-Angevin and even earlier.

It was the year Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, bringing a unique kind of magical realism complete with spice and chutney to the fore.

It signaled the emergence almost of postcolonial literature and thought in South Asia, though Edward Said’s Orientalism that majestically revealed how the “gaze” was created and the need to look at it back in the eye, appeared in 1978, and it’d be only a year later, that Ranajit Guha, the Indian historian based in Australia brought out the first volume of the Subaltern Studies in 1982, giving an arguably new turn to how Indian history and historiography was seen. Equally famously, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities would appear in 1983, detailing how nations too are imagined into being, as an act of deliberate construction.

But all this I knew later, of how in many ways 1981 was the year right in the cusp of world events and even changing thought patterns.  It was the year when, via the BBC, I learnt not merely of the Royal Wedding but of much else besides.

It began with the release of 52 American hostages held in the embassy at Teheran, followed by the hunger strike by Irish nationalists with the death first of Bobby Sands. It saw the assassination of two presidents Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh, of attempts on the lives of Ronald Reagan and the Pope John Paul II.

The BBC newsreaders favoured everything with equal seriousness – reports of assassinations treated with the same equanimity as those detailing the appearance of armed intruders into the Queen’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace.

Speculation on the continued ill-health of the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and his desperate clinging onto power despite a series of strokes and illnesses was as measured as announcement later that year of the Priness of Wales’ pregnancy.

The clipped, emotion-void voices of the BBC’s announcers and news readers (except when they bantered on rare occasion with each other) took me away from Cuttack, the little of it I was ever allowed to see.  A city with its small streets, the wider Cantonment area, the old Fort, and its many bazaars congested with traffic, rickshaws and men who “eve-teased” on their bicycles. It was a place where I first became familiar with the term, that category of fiendish beings whom no one, not even policemen uncles took seriously, and who I, as most of my peers, did not know how to resist.

And because the art of resistance is one hard to acquire – we were unaware too of the possibilities of a language of protest and lacked even a support system of a kind – all we did was to adapt a response that mirrored our confusion. We giggled, we looked away, we behaved well, and perfected a self-conscious pose.

Then I always had that radio.  Tuning into it, I would stumble into Radio Moscow, clear, and deliberate, always over-emphatic for some reason.  The more twangy and chirpier voices from the Voice of America, the gentler Radio Australia and then there was the impassive and imperturbable BBC. London for me was where the red band stopped on a certain shortwave mark.  If it moved ever so slightly, a buzz would irritatingly intrude.

Sometimes I learnt to move the radio a particular way to receive the voices or the signals clearly.  Often I’d hold onto the antenna.  Everything about it took me away from the world around me - not just its small news, but even the intense wariness that was somehow becoming natural. It made the world bigger even as the immediate one around me shrank to a few lines, marked out by areas never to be ventured into.  I did not understand the roadside comments, most of it in Odia which isn’t not my native language, but I did become more familiar with the chimes of Big Ben, the music of the Lilibulero that signaled the news.

Every time I listen to this debate over English versus the others, I remember this time.  

It confuses me, though I owe much to it.  There is a world always beyond your own, though I only knew it from the voices I heard, ears glued to the radio.   English became the language of difference, a way of breaking free, and of autonomy.

Thanks to programme like Assignment and From our Own Correspondent – shows you can catch on the website many years later, English somehow became the language I learnt to think with, and to argue in – first secretly with myself, with received knowledge. It’d only take me a step more to instinctively discover books in the library and those in a bookshop I found, taking up almost cranny space in Manglabagh, a shop that stocked medical textbooks and other guide books, but had, hidden away in a certain shelf, books by Georgette Heyer, Denise Robins (the writer who knew the secrets of a woman’s heart, as all blurbs claimed) and also Barbara Cartland.

Books that again dealt with royalty to some measure and those I had to read in secret.  For many of us, our relationship with English is a bit like that: A secret rejoicing, one that is treasured, and somehow hard to explain and then, just as necessary to defend.