Yaar
Yaar
Hindi, Marathi, noun
Friend
One day, my kid came home from school with the word yaar. It’s not so unusual an experience—to move to a country and find your child suddenly fluent in a language you stutter and stumble through, reading traced by a slow finger, syllable by syllable.
I did not know what yaar meant, though I had heard it plenty over my past seven years in Pune, India. Here, where people speak Marathi, Hindi, or often both at once, it is a common enough word. I had heard it online, on the street, in the university classrooms where I teach, and now, suddenly, in the mouth of my trilingual child. “Arre, yaar” my kid whined as he fiddled with the clogged soap dispenser. He did not want to take a bath, yaar. He did not want harbara usal, a thin curry made of sprouted chickpeas. He wanted plain rice with butter, yaar!
Like my kindergarteners, I am learning Marathi from context clues. I thought yaar was exclamatory, a drawled-out extension of the already undular arrey, a way to make that long-hanging ey at the end longer, for emphasis. Like the way that Russian nicknames are longer than Christian names. Like how a former boss used to call me Lilechka, the way bulking my name out rather than whittling it down to Lil felt so loving. Arrey just means “hey,” like “ey,” like “wow” or “pay attention,” like “oh no!” and sometimes as strong as “goddamn it.” I thought arrey and yaar travelled together, like a hero and his sidekick on horses.
Arrey is really a pack animal, running with eyo and aiyo in South India, with baap re (oh, father!) and deva (oh, god!). Swap for aga, which is a little more respectful and can be used to and by women. Marathi’s “aga bai!”—“oh lady!”—is a soft place to land in an English world full of “oh man!” Aaigo, “oh, mother!” Arrey yaar!
“To be a foreigner is to be perpetually wasting arrows, missing the mark.”
To me, yaar was like “ugh,” like “oy”—pure voice, language without mimesis, sonic refusal. I loved it. I put it into my mouth like a found stone into a pocket. Learning Marathi was one thing—to buy vegetables, to negotiate with a rickshaw driver, to tell the teacher at school not to worry, it’s not pinkeye—without resorting myself to charades. But this was not enough: I wanted this language so inside me that it would bubble out on its own. It’s not that I wanted to be Marathi, really. Perhaps because, according to the logic of the patriarchy, I already was. I had married in; I was a Brahmin daughter-in-law. This was not about identity, but simply the sounds my mouth could make. I decided, not really consciously, to start with yaar.
Yaar like argh, like ya. It felt to me like punctuation, the way that when I lived in Germany I would end sentences with ja, as if to encourage pre-emptive agreement. Sometimes, when I wasn’t sure whether I was using yaar correctly and wanted to split the difference, I would land my texts with ya instead of lol or an emoji. Just an opening or a softening, really.
It started to dawn on me that maybe texting “I want jelly art ya” or “2000 rupees is a bit much ya” was incorrect—maybe this post-positive “ya” was infelicitous. “Unhappy,” I tell my students, “is what some classical linguists call speech that does not fulfill its communicative function.” I love teaching about infelicitous speech acts, because my life is so full of them. To be a foreigner is to be perpetually wasting arrows, missing the mark.
So, a few months in, I googled it. Yaar is not so complicated, actually. Yaar means “friend.”
Friend: like a forehead slap. Friendship was everywhere, though I didn’t recognize it, not speaking Hindi, having memorized only dosti for “friendship” in the filing cabinet of my mind.
It was in the word langotiyaar: friends since we wore diapers. It was in the title of the movie Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, an 80s buddy comedy I watched in my Southern California apartment way before I moved to India. It was in Tera Jaise Yaari Kahan, crooned by playback singer Kishore Kumar in 1981, from the Carvaan music players that come pre-loaded with classic hits. On one of my annual 16-hour flights back home to New York, I watched Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, a wedding movie where the real love story is between the two male friends. One of the hit songs from the movie was “Tera Yaar Hoon Main?”—who is your friend?
Yaar was suddenly confusing. It was no longer a sound—it meant something. Like a child recognizing herself in the mirror, I had slipped from the space of pure possibility into the symbolic realm. It sucked.
From my argh-shaped freedom came a stream of hard questions: Who, then, is yaar? The biologist with whom I am on waving terms on campus? The tea stall guy? My cool-girl students, in the same sagging jeans I wore as a teenager, who call each other “bro” with a perfectly rolled r? My kids’ friends? “Yaar,” as I tousle their hair? Their parents?
“Yaar is easy to say, but hard to mean.”
My increasingly big moves—from New York to California, California to Germany, Germany to India—drew into clear, sharp focus that I was not only saying goodbye to my friends, but to the possibility of ever making close friends again. But of course, I’ve been wrong each time. India, in particular, has revealed itself to be full of friends. Heroic friends sleeping in a folding metal chair overnight in the general ward of the hospital. The food systems expert who reached out on Twitter in 2018 and, in turn, introduced me to the steady friend I call every day without fail. Friends at dinner who have marvelled with us: Look at us, making new friends in our forties. Friends who see me solo-parenting for a week and invite me to dinner, to the playground, to see some dumb animatronic dinosaurs at the mall, anywhere, anything.
Except: When a stranger at the vegetable market offers to take my kid home with her, she’s kidding, right? And if someone I barely know asks for my number then texts “Please let’s meet?”—is she being serious? And if a third near-stranger, like someone from a gym class, offers to drive my feverish toddler to the ER in the middle of the night, how am I to understand this?
Marathi is very good at holding relationships in order. Like many Indian languages, there are different words for maternal aunts and paternal ones, different words for close-cousin or distant-cousin, terms designed to create distance, like the mocking, ceremonial sasubai (mother-in-law) instead of the one adopting one’s mother-in-law as aai, mom. And of course so many family terms are used to create a sense of closeness, of belonging. A male stranger a generation older is kaka, a male stranger around your age is dada, which means elder brother and also says “I see you are Maharashtrian and I am, too.” Bhaiya, brother in Hindi, is everyone: Everyone is bhaiya. A safe bet.
But friends are neither strangers nor relatives. This is the magic of friendship. And like all magic, that of friendship exceeds ordinary speech. Yaar is easy to say, but hard to mean.
Can you call your husband yaar? A colleague explained that she does, teasingly, call her husband yaar, because they had a love marriage. “So I will say to him things like, change the channel, yaar, if he is watching something terrible.” But my husband is something beyond yaar. He is the guttural y, like a heaved sigh, the snarling r. Decades of marriage are the long aa, doubled in English transliteration. I don’t subscribe to the traditional, Brahminical custom of not referring to one’s husband at all: calling him simply “him” or “that one.” But there is indeed something un-namable about marriage, unspeakable. He is not “my partner.” Nor is he mera yaar.
Learning a language is like this. A word opens, prismatically, into so many definitions. There is the dictionary, common usage, and the gulf between them. There is always tone, and when you are translating your life into a language whose tone you don’t fully understand, there is always an eyebrow waggle or tight little grimace or stifled laugh, all of which you hope are somehow physiological, universal. I have had three Marathi teachers, none of whom taught me the definition of yaar. But I have told them, brokenly, everything I can think of. I have listened with my whole body. I have prayed for my jokes to land. But what I really wanted to know was, are we friends?
I ask them about formal verb forms, or the respectful, plural pronouns for “you.” What about my elderly downstairs neighbor whom I meet on his daily morning walk: formal or informal? What about the kid’s pediatrician who spends an extra 15 minutes shooting the breeze? What about my advanced students, the Ph.D. students and mentees? What if they add me on Instagram? What if they come to my house? What if they meet my kids? What if they babysit? The Marathi teachers have no answers for this.
I want to ask: “Through this Marathi, can you hear me?” I am always really asking: “If this is not yaari, could it be?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lily Kelting is an assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University in Pune, India. She is currently writing an academic book about the revival of heritage foods around the world, interweaving examples from the US South, Nordic region, and Western India. Her writing has been featured in Emergence Magazine, Vittles, Gastro Obscura, the Kitchn, and elsewhere.
Read Lily’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Patrick Hendry.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
