Veynes: Where My French Began to Unlearn Itself

A return to the forgotten edge of the Hautes-Alpes, 18 years after I said I’d never go back. In 2006, I landed in Veynes, a small French town that no French teacher had prepared me for. I was trained in the language of Mitterrand, wine diplomacy, and soufflé. What I found instead was raw, rural, and strangely moralistic—but I also found friends who still remain closest to heart. This is not a story about learning French. It’s about unlearning France.

J’y retourne jamais ! I will never go back to Veynes! This is what I muttered to myself when I left Veynes in April 2007 and stepping into a train back to Valence and then on to Paris without knowing what lay ahead or how the next 18 years would be shaped.

Almost seven months had passed already and I was already done with my Hautes-Alpes sojourn. Never had I  imagined that the experience I was about to undergo would not have anything to do with the rigorous training I had received about France for four years within the French diplomatic network in Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi between 2002 and 2006.

La culture c’est comme la confiture, moins on en a, plus on l’étale ! This was exactly what one of my French teachers told me prior to my departure from Kolkata for Paris. Whatever she said had seemed like Hebrew to me because back in those days I was far more enamoured with France blinded by the glamour and glitz of  the Rive Gauche that I couldn’t register the highly critical tone that was embedded in her voice as she pronounced those words. Kolkata was my Paris and my first email address was rittfrançais.

Upon reaching Veynes, I understood nothing of the language despite having once been the finest students the Alliance Française du Bengale had ever produced! From De Béranger’s son Coeur est un luth suspendu, sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne to a baffling « ma bagnole m’a lâchée » a sentence that still echoes in my mind, I strongly felt a void open within me and my heart was fraught with deception. My French teachers had deceived me.

I wasn’t armed with enough syntaxes, idiomatic or colloquial expressions to be able to understand Pascale, my would be colleague at the Collège François Mittérrand of Veynes, in the Hautes Alpes.

I still recall that terrible moment. Within less than 24 hours, I was teleported from Kolkata, my rooftop room to a dawn embrace with Tété in Paris – the poor chap dragged himself to the airport at 5:00 a.m. to greet me—only to find myself in Veynes, being picked up by Pascale barely thirty minutes after my arrival.

I still recall that moment. I got off at Veynes-Dévoluy around 3.00pm, went upto the France Télécom phone booth and called Pascale. Bonjour, je m’appelle Writtwik et je suis votre nouvel assistant d’anglais. Je viens d’arriver à Veynes et veuillez bien venir me chercher à la gare. I held my breath and delivered carefully prepared sentence to Pascale. And it worked. She understood me and I, the incurable narcissist, got instantly carried away by the elegance of my own efficiently pronounced sentences. I didn’t even listen to her. She probably told me that she would be late by a few minutes.

Indeed, she was late by 30 minutes and the first thing she did was to greet me with three bises (provençal style kisses on cheeks as a gesture, in Paris we do it twice and post covid la bise has almost become extinct) and said “Ch’uis navrée, ma bagnole m’a lachée”! I looked at her, flabbergasted, I had not understood a word. I didn’t know “navré” I didn’t know what even a “bagnole” was.

For me désolé and voiture were the words engraved into my brain and connected to neurons and programmed linguistically. I was angry not at my incapacity to decipher that code but at my teachers, my ambassadors, my directors both at the Alliance Française and at the French Embassy in Delhi. They had not prepared me for this. Merde!

I had paused for thirty seconds, nodded my neck both ways only to hide my weakness. Poor Pascale probably had no idea as to what was coming next.

My journey began in Veynes in 29^th September 2006. And in May, 2025, I was back for the first time. And this time Sophie was there.

The seven months I lived in Veynes made me discover what France profonde was meant to be. Sophie was my principal coordinator and was responsible for welcoming and supervising the induction of language assistants on behalf of the Rector’s office of the Académie d’Aix-Marseille. In Veynes, Sophie, Françoise and Pascale were family.

For a month or so, I had stayed with her, in her old house in a nearby village called La Roche des Aranuds.

The France I had discovered in Kolkata within the French diplomatic network was something that in today’s jargon, la Grande Bouffe. Every single day in Kolkata would make me discover the delectable taste of Paris: jambon-fromage, saucisson, the musical highs of World Music Day or the 14 July, wine flowing à flot!

But the France I had encountered at Sophie’s lacked the glamour that I had so dearly expected, she didn’t have a red carpet to welcome me and the food she cooked had nothing to do with the carefully scripted soufflés or vol au vents or “chef’s special” we were trained to appreciate at Embassy gatherings. Sophie was not wearing Dior and her cosmetic ranges never adopted Chanel. Sophie was humane.

I kept my disillusion to me and pretended to be settling in. The only person I could share my grudges with was Tété! Near Sophie’s house at La Roche, there was a telephone booth and I would use my carefully kept one euro coins to call him and talk talk and talk.

I have no idea how he interpreted my confusion, but his intermittent laughter only made me more angry.

The conditioning of Indian minds about France inside the ateliers of Alliance Française in India can be devastatingly fatal—especially for those who try to assimilate every learning outcome into the organic process of altérité. I took everything à la lettre—and I made blunders.

From getting naked in inappropriate settings, to buying pornographic magazines from the faith-loving, church-going local newsstand owner, and talking about Amira Casar—whom I had seen lying naked, hymen ruptured, in Anatomie de l’Enfer by Catherine Breillat—the French of Veynes were simply not prepared for my immoral appropriation of their sacrosanct culture.

They had expected someone who would reinforce their benevolent idea of Calcutta, where everyone supposedly lived in slums, as portrayed in Dominique Lapierre’s Cité de la Joie and devoutly repeated by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.

“France saved you from the poverty you grew up in,” confirmed a local priest—someone who had spent a few months in the early ’80s in a slum near Kidderpore, an infamous neighbourhood of Kolkata.

But my references were so far removed from their perception of India—or of Calcutta—that their cognitive capacity to absorb or accept new information would have required a full reboot.

Tu n’as pas de plumes! My first day at school was quite interesting. Sophie introduced me to the teachers I would be working with and to the students I would be helping improve their English. Students of the sixième were my first contact in the class and I told them that I was Indian. The kids laughed and wondered why I had no feathers around my neck or head! It took me a fraction of second to understand what they meant. They got confused with the Native Americans and thought I was coming from that part of the world. Sophie was my saviour. Again.

I was concurrently posted in the local professional school as well and there my supervisor was Françoise. India for Françoise was about a journey she undertook may be back in the seventies by car from France to Delhi via the Khyber Pass. Yes, in those days, backpackers could actually go to India by road. I didn’t know that. I don’t remember whether I ever visited her home but she was the one who introduced me to the concept of slow food movement in the neighbouring villages of Veynes. And thanks to her I was introduced to the local ballrooms. Even today I find myself humming “Jean petit qui danse!”

Françoise, Pierre, and Sophie—meeting them again this time brought back some memories, which I think should not become a deep dive. Veynes is always special to me.

I started my journey into the unknown here, and the experience I gathered shaped my perception and made me grow up. Some untold stories, therefore, will remain untold—unless otherwise decided. And so, I move on to the second leg of my journey: Aix-en-Provence. Merci beaucoup!