ABSTRACT
Alijaun, a ten-year-old boy from Balsall Heath in Birmingham, UK, told me with great conviction that ‘pani tastes di erent than water’. Pani is Panjabi for water. In his bilingual experience, taste is evidently not just a function of the body but also a function of the mind and of language and the culture it carries. To translate pani simply as water does not translate the meaning of water in di erent environmental and social contexts; it does not convey tasting di erent.
