Something is stuck on your face

After the somber tone of BJ's last post concerning life in Delhi's slums, I'd like to bring the attention back to what I know you really care about: my progress mastering Hindi.

As with all things here, my journey as a Hindi learner has been an uneven one. I can barter with a rickshaw driver and almost sometimes express myself to a shopkeeper, but habitually forget words like "this" and "is", once again reducing communication to a pantomime that a monkey could pull off. In our class we have plowed through the verb tenses, covering compound past tense ("I walked"), past continuous ("I was walking"), a weird verb combination that in Hindi that means specifically "I have already walked". The only thing we have yet to learn the conditional tense--which I desperately desire ("I would buy this, but it looks like a cow sat on it" seems like it could come up a lot).
However, at no point have we stopped to learn any vocabulary words that might go along with these constructions, and have rather surged ahead into what I would consider quite specific territory. In our last class, for example, we practiced saying "Something is stuck on your face" (Aapke muh par kuchh laga hai, if you were dying to know) and a few sentences I had a slightly harder time making sense of in English, including "we didn't like your going" and "I got frightened with snakes", but which I can only trust will serve me immensely well in Hindi if we are memorizing them before learning to say such things as "apple" and "shirt".

I suppose I should not say that I do not know any vocabulary words---I do know that barf means "snow" and banana in Hindi means "to prepare food". You may also be interested to hear that farsch, which is the Russian word meaning chopped meat and hence in my mind always conjures up a in image of a pile of chopped liver in a dimly lit butcher shop in the Soviet countryside, means "floor". I have also learned that a Hindi speaker will almost never use the words "please" or "excuse me", and that there is simply no expression meaning "have a nice day"----which, frankly, doesn't particularly surprise me.

But what struggling to learn Hindi in this city has impressed upon me the most is the myriad ways in which the language you speak defines you. This is of course true in America, where the drawl of a southern accent tells a different story about the speaker than the broghue of the woods north of Boston, but in India the differences are even more pronounced. In my office, which is populated entirely by university educated South Delhites, my colleagues speak to each other in heavily accented English, only rarely slipping into Hindi for the occassional bilkool (absolutely) or thikkay (okay). The only Hindi I ever hear is when the chai wallah comes on his morning rounds or the sweeper being given instructions. One's English ability in India is, like in so many other parts of the world, often directly correlated to your lot in the universe. Those with little access to education and who are resigned to life in the slums rarely learn it, even though in a country with 18 official languages it would be their only means of communicating with a Marathi speaker from Mumbai or a Telugu speaker from Hyderabad. And yet, even in those who cannot speak English and are barely literate in Hindi, such as our recently departed cook (don't worry, she is not dead, I just fired her), English has seeped into the marrow of the language. Hindi speakers never use the Hindi word for drinking glass, school, student, telephone, police, pencil, and a host of other words---in some cases original Hindi word is so far out of use that it is barely recognizable.

While I would make an educated guess that this is more likely a result of a century of British imperialism rather than globalization, it is still startling to hear babble punctuated with "Mein school gaya, aapke paas cake hai?" or, on the rare occassion you can squeeze an apology out of a local (usually for something really truly agregious involving a vehicular-corporal collision, like nearly amputating a few toes with their Suzuki Maruti or accidentally mauling you with their 5 ton cart of custard apples), to hear a wizened 4' tall old man in salwar khameez and a skullcap mutter "sorry".

And now, after many years of promising I would never turn into the sort of person who would post pictures of puppies on the internet, I leave you with a photo of a pilla, another word I am increasingly finding a use for. These pille are currently living under an abandoned car near our apartment......that is until I trick BJ into letting me adopt all 6 of them.