‘This is the age of asparagus ...’

I realised I speak English with a funny accent when someone at a shop couldn’t understand what I was saying, but kept smiling as if she did.

I was sure she was just faking it because I then told her that my cat died the other day due to lack of exercise and she just kept smiling and nodding.

That happens to me a lot. One day, when I was lost, I stopped my car and asked two Filipinos sitting by the sidewalk if they knew where a certain street was, which I had been trying to find for hours. They eyed me with puzzled looks and then slowly turned and looked at each other. “Sorry, don’t speak Arabic,” said one of the guys finally.

And I hadn’t even told them my name. Whenever I introduce myself, Iranians think I am an Iranian, ( A government official in the free-zone island of Kish told me that she always read my articles online in Gulf News. “I thought you were Eee-Ronian,” she said, when I told her where I was from); Egyptians welcome me as if I am their long-lost brother, Pakistanis ask me whether I am from Sindh and while in Canada, I was thinking of changing my name.

I bring up my accent because after years of living in multi-cultural Dubai, I think I am now an expert linguist. “How did you know he’s Russian?” asked my wife when I told her that the front-desk manager at a hotel was a Russian. “Didn’t you catch the way he said, ‘Zank you’”, I told her. “Any way, his name, Sergei, was on his shirt tag,” I smiled.

My elder son says the way I speak English is a cross between a BBC TV anchor and a mango seller from my hometown. The poor mango seller was forced to speak English because both my sons neither spoke Hindi nor Urdu, which, to the mango seller was as shocking as someone who likes bananas.

During our holidays in India, my younger son once came up to me one day and said there was a strange-looking woman at the door with a broom and that she seemed to be cursing.

Anyway, my accent must be due to years of watching Hollywood movies, listening to the BBC and All India Radio. It’s a good thing I don’t work at a call centre or I would have driven some poor woman in New Hampshire crazy: “Harry, there’s a nut job on the phone who says he is going to whip his horse with a parachute. Should I tell the cops, dear?”

But despite the years of watching movies, I still couldn’t understand what Clint Eastwood was saying most of the time while he squinted. Luckily for me, his characters on the screen just shot people without much discourse.

And years of tuning in to Radio Ceylon and after listening to umpteen requests for a song by Jim Reeves, from a certain lady called Sarah in Kolar Gold Fields in Bengaluru, I became a fan of western pop music.

However, the other day, when I snuck into a night club in downtown Dubai, there was a Filipina entertainer on stage who had a wonderful voice, but try as hard as I could, I couldn’t follow the words of the song she was crooning.

Which was fine by me, because you don’t usually need to speak or understand what others are saying at such places because of the high volume of the music and you just have to point or gesture at the waiters.

I have to confess, for years I thought the lyrics of the song by Fifth Dimension went like this: ‘This is the age of asparagus ...’