A Tamil by birth who spent the first 23 years of life in Kolkata and another 24 years in Nagpur, I am quite conversant in Tamil, Bengali and Marathi, in addition to Hindi and English. Living in a predominantly cosmopolitan city like Kolkata, over the course of my social, student and a little bit of work life there, I got the opportunity of getting acquainted with people from other States, particularly Kerala, Odisha and Gujarat. In the process, I picked up some stray words of Malayalam, Odia and Gujarati as well. Now, having relocated to Hyderabad a little over five years ago for employment, I have managed to gain some knowledge of Telugu also.
With the increasing migration of people between States, the country is becoming more cosmopolitan, especially major cities. As a result, nowadays we often come across people using more than one language while speaking. The use of English words while speaking in any other language has become a common practice. Similarly, use of Hindi or other Indian words while speaking in English is also not uncommon. This is perhaps due to the lack of complete knowledge of any one language. In any case, this is due to an urge to express and convey one’s thoughts clearly in a cosmopolitan environment and therefore, quite understandable.
But for someone like me carrying the lexicon of so many languages in the mind, this often creates confusion. There are plenty of words which are pronounced exactly the same in many languages but convey a different meaning in each. The best example is the word "or" in English and aur in Hindi — though pronounced similarly, they mean exactly the opposite! When someone speaks to me in Hinglish (which is the most common mixed dialect these days) and uses "or/ aur " between two words, I often end up arriving at wrong conclusions. If someone calls out a lady as his Bou , I have to look at the relative ages of the man and the woman to comprehend their language, because it means wife in Bengali but mother in Odia.
The other day, my Telugu-speaking colleague in office, on being questioned about the dirty tables, replied that the housekeeping guy had marichu poy . He had uttered these words in Telugu to convey that the guy had forgotten to clean the tables, but for a split second, I mistakenly mourned for the poor guy, since in Malayalam it mean he had died. During my initial days in Hyderabad, while I was staying in a small apartment building, I had once approached the security guard for a one-time cleaning of the interiors of my car and he had demanded such an exorbitant amount that I had to abort the idea. It was later that I realised that while talking to him in Hindi, I had used the word undhar which in Telugu means "all". The poor guy had lost out on the deal since he had quoted for cleaning all the cars on the parking lot and I was lucky enough to escape the ignominy of paying for the cleaning of my unknown neighbours’ cars.
With the exposure to so many languages and the added insight into the unique cultural and social habits of various States, one naturally develops the capability to seamlessly bond with people from any part of the country. But on the flip side, it leaves me with a geographically rootless feeling which manifests in the predicament I undergo when faced with the common question we Indians are habituated to ask any new acquaintance, "Where do you belong?" or "What is your native place?" While my preferred answer would be India, I am often tempted to add to the confusion by replying — Mujhe patha nahi or Enakku Theriyaadu or Ami Jani Na or Mala Mahith Nahi or Naaku Theliyadu or just "I don’t know". Perhaps that’s true!
