What does the itinerant speak?

When I’m in Kolkata I abandon my hissing ‘S’ and thicken my palate to say ‘SH’. Back in Orissa, I have to jump off the boat of the elite and the ‘bhadralok’ (the genteel in Bengali) to participate in perhaps a bit more rustic sounding but the earthy Oriya.

In Hyderabad, I let my imagination run wild. With no compulsions to speak the native language (Telugu, although I must confess my brother in law is Telugu and I feel obliged to learn the language now that we have relatives not sharing the same lingo as ours), my Hindi has a smattering of Urdu, it’s much more nasal and the characteristic ‘ich’ is generously prefixed to the last word of almost every sentence.

So why this harangue of my prowess over dialects across the country? Let’s just say I’m two timing. Actually heck no! I’m four timing and hope to have more regional influences under my belt well, actually my tongue!

I was born in Rourkela, a model township in the eastern part of Orissa (Located in Eastern India). In the following years, I was moved cradle, walker, pram and all progressively (gradually evolving with the classical notion of mobility of the modern urban human today J) across different towns within Orissa gradually settling in Bhubaneshwar. My father worked for the State Bank of India and eventually got transferred down south. So we moved to Hyderabad. I steadily forgot Oriya, focused lesser on my native tongue (now it may get confusing J but we are Bengalis settled in Orissa for over two centuries) and improved in my English (Although I must confess I mess up easily in this language :P. I once called myself a novice in something I was very proud of when my handsome evening date pointed out that the word meant amateur. It was embarrassing but thankfully it also provided us some comic relief from the high tension atmosphere of a first date.)

Kolkata happened next. I was suddenly the ‘probashi Bengali’ (a non Kolkata Bengali) amidst the sea of Presidency students versatile in Tagore, Satyajiat Ray and almost anyone breathing the great literature, nuances and mannerisms of the community of the very Bengalis. I was re christened ‘Ronjona’ instead of the ‘Ranjana’ I’d been for the last 18 years. But I didn’t grumble or cast off these identity changing efforts by Bengali brethren. Instead, I found myself drawn to texts that I hadn’t read as a child and wanted to learn my favourite lines from Ray’s popular film for kids ‘Goopi Gayeen Bagha Bayeen’, for eg

Duniyae kotho aachey dehbar

Kotho ki janar, kothoki sheykhar

Shob e tho baaki kichu dekha hoye naaye

Ghorey keno boshey aachi bekar’

There’s so much to see in the world

So much to know, so much to learn,

So much left, nothing’s been seen

Why am I sitting useless at home?

And so I began loving the city and feeling more at home here, with the smell of ‘Chaathim phool’ pervading the crisp wintry evenings, exploring bylanes for extinct cafes, watching plays for twenty five rupees and buying time over scrabble at Park Street with my then college sweetheart.

But even that feeling at being home was short lived and then I was suddenly pushed from the East to the South this time Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu. With no clue of how Tamil had to be spoken forget comprehending most of the words and neck deep with my Television training at the Asian College of Journalism, I was waiting for this phase to transpire and arrive at a new city. And it did happen.

My first job as a journalist took me to Mumbai in Maharashtra. In Mumbai, in your day to day life, you wouldn’t encounter any pressure to communicate in Marathi with the locals (except for the occasional and now perhaps the more frequent episodes of Raj Thackeray insisting on ‘Mumbai’ instead of ‘Bombay’, getting his goons to bash up north Indian immigrants AND recently stunning the nation by giving a complete half hour interview in Marathi to an English news channel).

Coming back to the point, I figured I’ve loved all the places I’ve grown up in in my little life so far. I’ve however, not been emotionally loyal enough to any of these places to learn the native language in earnest (such as Telugu, Tamil , Marathi). Perhaps, I did take my itinerant and cosmopolitan advantage over my peers for granted, even boasted about it to those who were biased enough to make fun of or caricature a region and it’s people without being able to first laugh at themselves. I found their myopic outlook towards languages and cities other than their own immature to say the least, because it was the assorted experience of different regions that taught me how to adjust to and learn from new environments.

Ah well! I was never quite the linguist. But the itinerant hopes to improve. And having bid adieu to Mumbai perhaps for a while, she’s meandering through cities, adopting families not her own, looking for new opportunities in her field even outside it, all of it driven somehow all of it as a process of looking for new experiences to help some old ones fade into oblivion.

At present this itinerant is back in Hyderabad and well the city of palaces, ‘mehfils’, the one and only Hyderabadi biryani, attar….makes me want to say “Iskey baad kya pataa nahin par miya kuch der ke liye man kar raha ki rahoon…iddherich’!”

(‘I don’t know what’s after this, but brother, for a while my heart wishes to stay only here’)