Story of my Origin - born Tamilian, celebrated my first birthday in Kerala, spent rest of 15 years in NCR, next 9 years were spent in Karnataka, married to a Malayali and back to NCR. This not only makes me multi cultured, but also multilingual. I'm good with Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and Hindi. So are my parents.
Now this capability has also landed us many a times in a funny situation. To state some of them, when my mother had just began learning Hindi, she used to goto super market and ask for Moti(pearl) instead of Methi. My granny had a great broken Hindi vocabulary. Once she went on a rikshaw and udhar jao was the only words she used in giving directions, every now and then poking rikshaw puller's back. Granny dear's Hindi was responsible for driving away 3 of our maids. My dad till date has a confusion on 'main, hum,tu,aap'. Once a colleague of his asked him where their boss was, my dad being an expert in Hindi (or so he thought) said hum aagaye,par manager abhi aayega(respect to self only). One common confusion which every south Indian will agree about Hindi is identification of gender of an object. For e.g., Pencil is a female, Pen is a male( really!!!).
Cut to Karnataka, my mom and dad were now busy learning the language. Granny never tried Kannada, she learnt it from her experience;). So dad took us to vegetable market(me n my bro still hadn't learnt Kannada). He would bargain perfectly and get all the vegetables. Wow!! We were impressed. In the next few months, me n bro were good with the language and so was my mom. Again a visit to vegetables market. Dad again took the lead. He had a standard dialogue aidu rupaige kodi ( give it for five rupees), and we realized it was irrespective of what amount the shopkeeper said. If he said a kilo was for 2 Rs, my father still wanted it for 5!!!
Next was my mum, she once called up her friend in Delhi and started conversing in Tamil. It then became a point to think before any call. Once a neighbor asked my mom nimge hubba ideya ( do you celebrate this function). For some reason my mom thought hubba meant holiday, so she replied maklige hubba ide namage illa (my kids have the function but not me and my husband), leaving our neighbor wondering on what it meant!!!
Latest is me. I learnt Malayalam after marriage. One day my mother-in-law, who is also my malayalam teacher, said idana kalayaradu (do not throw it). Me being a learner, knew the meaning of idana(this) and kalayan (throw) and I translated it to 'throw this'. By the time my MIL was back, the thing was disposed off ;). Thankfully maa understood and at times still understands my language chaos!
In spite of all this, I love being multilingual, love following all the cultures and hope to improvise and learn more languages.
Most of the time while getting back home I join a friend of mine who drops me at a metro station. In my second or third visit itself I noticed a bhelpuri wala. This man is not like other local market tapri wala. He was clean and seemed well organized. He had 4 plastic covers, each containing onion , tomato, coriander and green chillies (all uncut). Highlight were the fresh lemons. He had papers folded like cones. A box with masala and a cover with loads of mixture. Like any office goer returning home, I too was slightly hungry for some munching. What better than bhel. I liked the way he customized my bhel by checking for the quantity of chilly and lemon. I liked it so much that I got one more for my sis. Thus began the love for bhel. One day it so happened that my husband was about to pick me up and I was waiting just next to the same bhel guy. I was an observer that day. In a span of 20 mins this guy served around 8 customers. Interesting! I began talking to him(shhh......
Hilarious.......
ReplyDeleteThis was a good one.. :-D I could visualize amma killing tamil when we r at dad's place, nd her funny Hindi in front of frnds.. :-P
ReplyDelete@Heena,
DeleteSo true ;)