Also fortunately for us, we've managed to pick up a bit of Hindi over the years, and key phrases do come back to us when they're needed. That's a good thing because, in the region where Hindi is the lingua franca, there seems to be even less English.
So when we're in the Hindi belt, we make use of what we know. But, as you can see below, it's not always easy. Here, we're being entertained at a grain dealer's shop in Bhopal, a spontaneous bit of hospitality involving tea, conversation and absolutely no English. We managed, but from the looks of it, I'm struggling:
Rob, too, made a supreme effort on the street to be understood by one talkative fellow, who as we eventually realized, wasn't speaking Hindi after all.
As Hindi was flooding back into my brain, I started worrying that my newly, partially learned Spanish was being washed away. I couldn't remember any of it, and I felt sad. I was bemoaning my loss on our first night in Mumbai. When I opened the curtains the next morning, what should I see on the building next door but:
Yes, Spanish -- accompanied by a Hindi transliteration of the Spanish name. It turns out to be the office of an NGO started by a photojournalist from Spain, devoted to helping children in Mumbai's slums.
We saw lots of signs, billboards and labels in languages we couldn't read, in scripts we couldn't decipher. Here's a "bhelpuri center," a snack cart in Bhopal -- which we know because we can (often) read Hindi:
At left, more food advertising,
this time at an otherwise familiar-looking
fast food place in a Chennai
shopping mall
(Would a
Tamil speaker
please translate?):
And then we come to Malayalam, the language of Kerala. Malayalam is said to be the fastest language in the world, based on the number of spoken syllables per second. I believe it! It flies by my ears in an aural blur.
Worse, for us barely-more-than-monolingual Americans, Malayalam contains sounds (many) that don't exist in English. Or in Hindi, either.
There's a sound that I can occasionally almost produce, a not-quite-a-consonant that's somewhere between an R and an H. Sort of. In English letters, it's rendered as a ZH, which is definitely a red herring. Hindi transliterates it closer to a PH, which isn't a whole lot better. See the road sign for some place names:
Written Malayalam is every bit as inscrutable to us as the spoken word. Which is why we stayed on in ignorant bliss at a hotel with this sign on the back of the door to our room:
Big, bold, red and clearly no-nonsense. Except, it was total nonsense to us -- until we asked a friend to translate it for us on the last evening of our 4-night stay there.
It warns, roughly (and gruffly): "Keep your doors and windows closed and locked at all times, for your safety." The presence of 3 rowdy bars in the building may have something to do with it.
That night, as always, we kept our door locked -- but our windows open, as usual, for the sweet night air. Perhaps we slept less soundly that night. But we definitely were relieved to check out in the morning.
Here's what one of my Tamil-speaking friends says, in answer to my question above:
ReplyDeleteThe Tamil on the McDonalds sign isn't anything exciting, it just says "McDonalds" (well, maictonlds).
(Thanks, Rianna!)