The calligrapher's tale

I have terrible handwriting; despite the efforts of a clutch of convent nuns, my English script refused to follow the precise curlicues of copperplate, and my lines remain unruly, displaying a tendency to walk off the page entirely. My Bengali and Hindi handwriting was even worse when I was young: one language inevitably flowed into the other, so that I would write entire sentences in a hybrid script that I thought of privately as 'Bhindi'.
What I never quite understood was a peculiar separation between the Mother and the Other Tongue(s): in English, I seem to need to pack in as many words as possible, and over the years, have perfected a kind of miniaturised script that needs a magnifying glass in order to be legible. But in Hindi and in Bengali, I sprawl. I need room. My letters are large, dashing; my words breathe. And I like both styles. I love the feeling, in English, of words constantly tumbling over one another, pushing and shoving for room; and I enjoy the expansive, roominess of writing in Bengali. For all of this, I've never experienced the special relationship that a calligrapher has with words, as Nassim Mobasher chronicles in 'Writing and Dancing':

"I wonder if this is illegal in this Islamic Republic classroom: making our words dance in public. Provocatively moving our alphabet on the page, with suggestive rhythm that’s bound to dispatch public morals into decadence. 'Loosen your seen’s,' he says to me. I can’t! Not with Big Brother watching.
This is calligraphy 101, and we are being taught the art of Nastaliq calligraphy: 'The Bride' of all other forms of calligraphy, as our dancing instructor... I mean, um, professor, refers to it. She's beautiful, this bride of ours. She is also an Iranian bride, Ms. Nastaliq, because the art of calligraphy was a movement that was very much pursued by Iranians, or so our books say (they tend to be very Iranocentric)."