When I moved to Brazil in the late eighties, I was already in love with the music and the sound of the language. So, I became fluent in Brazilian Portuguese quite quickly. Soon curious minds were asking me what language I dreamed in. I didn’t know the answer then, because I thought that my dream world was almost always like a silent movie. On the few occasions that it was not, and the situation was tense, it seemed to me that strong emotions were expressed in English, with some choice Bengali curses thrown in for good measure.
One day, however, the answer came to me in a little episode embedded in a longer dream. In the dream I was watching a play, which was a political satire. After a scene in which a major scandal occurred, set in motion by a crass mistake made by some apparatchik, several actors dressed as crows came on stage to comment on the snafu, in the manner of a Greek chorus. I was mystified by the crow disguise, as the factual title of this piece indicates. Just then I heard a voice behind me saying, laughingly, “É uma tremenda cagada!” It became clear that my dreamverse was engaging in some multilingual word play. Some explanation is probably called for here. Kak (কাক) is the Bengali word for crow and the final “k” is sometimes voiced in speech when followed by a vowel, sounding like a “g”. “ada” is the Portuguese augmentative suffix, so that “cagada” could be interpreted multilingually as a bunch1 of crows, while the regular (slang) meaning in Portuguese is, of course, screw-up. This was, in fact, an early clue that my dreamverse loves to engage in multilingual word play.
And there are still no crows in Brazil, or in south America for that matter, even though all manner of foreign invaders from the plant and animal kingdom are here, including myself.
1. I know that the collective noun phrase is a "murder of crows", but it seemed a little exaggerated here!
Wow!
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