Did I know Hindi?

When I got married I joined my husband who was working in a city in the north. As we were taught only our mother tongue Tamil and English in the school, the few words in Hindi I did know were all picked up from the Hindi films I had watched. (When I was in sixth standard, the anti-Hindi agitation came to a head and our Hindi classes stopped. Our Hindi Pandit was designated as the new moral science teacher as she had been made redundant by the new rule banning Hindi from schools!)

Around the time I was in high school, English films were banned in India (along with Coca Cola etc.,) and so, even the small towns we lived in during the course of my father's transfers through Tamilnadu, started screening blockbuster Hindi movies like Bobby and Aradhana. From these movies we picked up a smattering of Hindi words. Well, I knew 'acha' meant 'good', 'aavo' meant 'come' and all the other 'kuthe kaminey and neechey' were swear words uttered by the distressed towards the villains and were of no use for day-to-day use in my new life.

My parents, little sister, uncle and aunt came to settle me in my new home. The shopping seemed very easy to me as my Mom and Aunt managed to buy things after pointing at the things they needed for cooking during the week they stayed with us. Even my little sister managed to get curry leaves from the corner vegetable vendor by herself! I thought it was no big deal that I didn't know Hindi as I could very well manage with English. Alas! Little did I know that the vegetable seller, the newspaper boy, the electrician, the old newspaper buyer, the milkman- in short, all the persons we come into contact with in our daily life- knew very few words in English! My people left on a Saturday and the next day being a Sunday my husband took me to a movie and the market. I was very much impressed by the fluent Hindi he spoke to the shopkeepers and despaired what I could do all alone in the house when he went to work!

Before leaving for work the next day, a Monday, my husband wrote these words in a note:

'Sahib ab ghar mein nahii. Baadh mein aavo. Shaam che baje ke badh!' (Sir not at home now. Come later. After 6 pm).

I was to memorise these words and recite them any person who rang the doorbell during the course of the day. I told these words to the ruddywalah who, seeing the hitherto locked-during the daytime-house being occupied- came to see if there were old newspapers for disposal. I managed to get along just fine with these words and English. People were ready to oblige the new bride the banker had brought from down South and tried to understand what I wanted to say, from the accompanying gestures. Being mostly Marathis they were amazed to find a person who knew neither Marathi nor Hindi and gave me pitying looks which made me feel very dumb.

I learnt most of my basic Hindi words from the maid servant and brushed it up from the 'Learn Hindi from English' book my husband owned from his college days where he studied Hindi as a second language. I showed her all the groceries and asked her to teach me the Hindi equivalent of each item. She used to tell me the names both in Hindi and Marathi but I had to choose one language at a time and I thought that hindi being the national language might come in handy even if we got transferred out of Maharashtra and so, concentrated on the Hindi words. When I went to buy vegetables and fruits, I asked the friendly lady at the shop the Hindi names of each item and learnt them too. She also taught me the Hindi names of numbers, right from 1,2,3... and 10,20,30..... I learnt fast so much so that I could manage most shopping and money transactions with my rudimentary Hindi knowledge.

I found out that the street vendors who sold onions potatoes and tomatoes on wheeled carts selling at much lower prices than the shop and ventured out to call them from the balcony and started buying these items from them. One day I could see a man and woman team selling something in a covered basket and voicing some word whose meaning I couldn't make out. Smitten by curiosity, I called out from the balcony to stop them and went to see what they were selling, some kind of fruits....?

They spoke something in Marathi (or Hindi?) which I couldn't understand but I gestured them to open the basket. They opened and out came a cobra, hissing and flashing its forked tongue! Imagine my shock! It turned out that the day was Nag Panchami on which day it was very auspicious to worship snakes in Maharashtra and these villagers were giving doorstep service to the women in the city, earning extra money from this unique once a year business opportunity!

Wearing flowers

When we were in school, every day we used to wear fresh flowers in our plaits whenever available. We used to hear that some schools did not allow girls to wear flowers as the jasmine and other flowers invariably got loosened from the strings and dropped on the school floor. The trash was an ugly sight no doubt and we could understand that rule. But we used to pity those girls. Wearing fresh flowers uplifted our mood and brought the great outdoors inside the classrooms in which we were cooped up.

Some girls had gardens around their houses and used to wear single roses. Or even twin jasmine flowers or 'kanakambaram' straight from the bush, with a green leaf to provide volume and contrast colour to the arrangement perched on one side of the head, usually just above an ear. Other girls (like me!) who had to buy from the vendors used to burn with envy on seeing the different and unique colours a home grown variety yielded. The common kankambaram was a boring mild orange in colour but these girls wore dark red or pleasant yellow kanakambaram strings.

Some girls wore hibiscus flowers. Not the common red five petalled ones but the 'adukku'(Layered) sembaruthi flowers in every hue of red, yellow, pink and white. Of course, the mothers would yell at us admonishing us not to wear any and every flower we found on our way to the school. It would encourage the infestation of head lice (according to the old wives' tales)! But we were so crazy after flowers that we never heeded their words and the moment we disappeared round the corner, we would pluck the hibiscus or 'arali' flowers dangling outside the compound walls of our neighbours!

Now I know why South Indian ladies (of my generation only- already girls of younger generations in the big cities have got rid of long hair and wearing flowers!) visiting other places manage to pluck a flower or two (theirs or others', it doesn't seem to matter to them) and wear it just above their ears. I grew out of this habit years ago when we moved to a North Indian city.Wearing flowers was not a daily habit as it was down South. Women wore flowers only when attending marriages or some such formal functions and festivals.

Pocket Money!

The other day I heard my sister telling us that they are giving three thousand rupees as pocket money to her college going son. When my mouth fell open, she explained that it included his fuel bills and mobile phone bills.

A few years back, I remember my kids getting a hundred rupees each when they went to high school. It was for the purpose of buying birthday greeting cards for their friends and other such petty expenses. This was before the age of mobiles and so we parents did not feel the pinch as do parents of the present generation. Besides the kids didn't have their own vehicles mostly except for bicycles. For filling in air for the wheels they needed only a few coins and the parents usually accompanied them to hand out the charge for 'bigger' expense like a puncture!

This started me thinking about my own school/college days. The notion of pocket money was not even heard of. As I have said elsewhere, we were given only bus fare and we used to save ten paise everyday. I still remember how I used the saving of 3 days to buy flowers for my Mom at the Srirangam railway station and got a big hug from her. The next few days saw her telling everyone of our neighbours about the 'jathipoo' her daughter got for her. This practice lasted for the three months I travelled by the passenger train from Lalgudi to Trichy town.

When we shifted to buses in the next town, I used the money to buy 5 'pottukadalai urundai' (Sweet fried gram balls) for 25 paise and 'treat' my friends to one sweet ball each!

Happy New Year!

As I recollect my earliest new year celebrations, I remember my mother taking 'head bath', it being a 'nalla naal' (auspicious day) equivalent to any of the countless Hindu festivals. Of course she used to wash her hair for 'varushapirappu' as well as 'mathapirappu' (new month). People would come to our house to wish my father a happy new year-with fruits, sweets and gifts-a custom carried over from the British Raj days when government officials were greeted with gifts on the first day of the New Year. My mother had bought a big coffee vessel just to keep hot coffee to serve all the visitors coffee on this day.

The season would be pleasant with just a nip in the air (as it is now) and the trees would look like they had been washed and waxed, as winter follows the rains in our state. 'December' flowers would be on girls' hair and school-going children would be enjoying the last of their winter vacation, the schools being reopened mostly on 2nd or 3rd January after a fortnight of Half-Yearly holidays including Christmas and New Year. We would have returned from our grandparents' place by then. On very rare occasions, we would have stayed back to celebrate Pongal festival.

With the promise of another bout of holidays for Pongal festival, returning to school would not be as boring as after the shorter Quarterly exam holidays in September. We were contented and happy on this day. The fad of new year resolutions had not caught on. Nor were we old enough to analyse the bygone year's merits and demerits. The new year brought no more challenges or expectations other than having to remember to put the correct number in the year's column when we wrote the date in our school notebooks!