When a countryman asks me where in India I am from, I say “Andhra Pradesh”, the southern Indian state. As soon as the words slip out of my mouth, I am addressed in the language of the state, which is Telugu. Seeing the bemused look on my face, the person stops short and I can see the question in his eyes.
Why don’t I know the language, they ask. And then I start my spiel about my parents being from very different states and deciding to speak in English which was a common language. So, we grew up speaking English and we learnt Hindi in school. The last named was a by-product of having lived in the north for many years and it was our second language in school.
Going home recently to deal with some paper work, which entailed interacting with officials in government offices, I realised that I was at a disadvantage. Speaking in Hindi or English just didn’t do the trick. That’s when I took a friend along who knew the vernacular. What was interesting was that he was a Goan, but was born and brought up in Hyderabad. So, he learnt the language in school. He donned the role of interpreter with elan, making me wish I had taken the trouble to learn the language.
At my sister’s home, it was a similar story. All her house help speak Telugu and don’t know any other language. So, she has picked up a smattering of the language, but when the conversation becomes too convoluted for her to handle, she calls her husband to help her communicate. My brother-in-law is a Parsi who also learnt Telugu in school.
On the other hand, there is my mother’s language which is Khasi. Now, not many people, not even in India, have heard of it. But my brothers learnt a smattering of the language when they went to Shillong, the capital of the northeastern state of Meghalaya, to study for a couple of years and stayed with my grandmother.
I think many of us fail to learn a new tongue simply because we feel self-conscious about evoking laughter by mispronouncing words and not being able to master the right accent. However, I admire my mother whose knowledge of Hindi was fractured to say the least, but she had no qualms about using it in front of our friends who spoke chaste Hindi and Urdu. At first we felt embarrassed, but when we saw how much our peers enjoyed the way she took liberties with their mother tongue, we too began to appreciate her spontaneity.
Extremely self-conscious
I have observed that most people are genuinely pleased when someone takes the trouble of learning their language and are usually encouraging. I remember my first visit to Germany and, finding my friend’s partner rather unfriendly. I wondered if her attitude had anything to do with my presence in their house. Beginning to feel uncomfortable, I voiced my concerns to my host. He laughed off my fears and said it was just that she thought her English was very poor and was extremely self-conscious about speaking it. As soon as I knew the reason for her aloofness, I made it a point of drawing out responses from her and insisting that she didn’t use her partner as interpreter. Soon, we were having conversations and even managed to make the third person feel superfluous at times!
Despite having lived here for so many years I haven’t made any attempt to learn Arabic apart from a few words which are in common use.
All I can say is shukran to all those who have acted as interpreter on my behalf whenever I have found myself out of my depth, linguistically.