Five months of lockdown; have you learnt French yet?

As soon as the implications of the lockdown dawned on us, many of us promised to pick up a skill. How have we done so far?

Multilingual polyglot girl learning new words from a dictionary

It has been six months since the lockdown started. We are sitting at home. We are commuting less. There are ample opportunities for self-improvement. This is especially true if we are men, and our women are taking care of the children. The more enlightened men have more to do. In the future you will not complain about how expensive school fees are. You will send more thank you notes to class teachers, and you will never forget Teachers’ Day.

But for the childless of either gender, or male traditionalists from the parts of India where men are men and the livestock is nervous, self-improvement has been the order of the day. As soon as the implications of the lockdown dawned on us, many of us promised to pick up a skill. How have we done so far? I can only speak for myself.

My first choice was learning a foreign language. The question was, which one? Chinese seemed to be the logical choice. But it has over 20,000 characters. I learnt later that your average civilised Chinese person can manage with about four or five thousand, but even that seemed a bit much. Then Doklam happened, which added an anti-national angle to the whole enterprise.

French was another option. It would give me a certain

savoire faire , I thought, an esprit de corp or a eau de toilette . I would be able to read Asterix in the original. I would be able to impress people in French restaurants. I would learn how to pronounce croissant properly. But then I developed a slight sinus problem, after which, French was no longer an option. The one thing you cannot do is pronounce French with a sinus problem.

The next option was to learn how to play a musical instrument. The key thing was the choice of instrument. My favourite is, and always has been, the bongos, but my wife refused flatly. She also vetoed the violin. After going through a thorough process of elimination, all I was left with was rhythmic pot banging and the Hawaiian guitar, the pots because of patriotic duty, and the Hawaiian guitar because of prior experience.

When I was a youth in Calcutta, and my mother asked whether I wanted guitar lessons, I agreed eagerly, imagining I would become a Bengali Eric Clapton, with girls climbing all over me. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a Hawaiian guitar, an instrument much beloved of cultured Bengali mothers. For those who do not know, it is a plumpish instrument that you place flat on your lap like a baby who needs a diaper change, and is played with the help of a steel cylinder and fake finger nails, useful for slashing your throat when the pain and humiliation become too much for you. It is used mainly to play Robindro Sangeet and Nazrul Geeti, and, if you are an optimist, ‘Smoke on the Water’.

The first question that any Bengali girl of good sense asks before deciding whether to reject a potential boyfriend is “Does he play the Hawaiian guitar?” The popularity of the Naxalite movement in the early ‘70s in Calcutta can also be explained by the fact that many young boys ran away from home to avoid playing it. Faced with this as one of my only two musical options, memories of pain and suffering came flooding back to me.

So, it looks like pots and pans for me. I have found myself a metal ladle, which weighs just right in my hand, and I am working on my sense of rhythm. When the number of COVID-19 cases hits 100,000 per day, and we are blamed for not banging pots enough, I will be out there on the street, and you can rest assured that my skills will astonish the neighbourhood.

No pots or pans were damaged in Shovon Chowdhury’s most recent novel, Murder With Bengali Characteristics.