I is for India

Do you remember the times in Sesame Street when a muppet would sound out a word? Often the syllables of the word were themselves puppets and they would move gradually together as the furry monster progressed from “hah ta” to “haht” to “hot,” by which point the letters had joined and, possibly, done something to illustrate their meaning, such as glowing with warmth, to continue the “hot” example. In my declining Sesame Street years I wasn’t that fond of these shorts. You see, big all-day-at-school kid that I was, I’d moved on to whole-word, as opposed to phonetic, mastery of most of your three letter words. (With the obvious exceptions of all those three letter words you learn only once you start doing crosswords, like “emu” and “ort.”) But now sounding out words is my new favorite travel game and it makes my rickshaw commutes to the National Archives seem almost short.

I like to sound out Hindi words because, although my vocabulary is fleetingly small, I do know the alphabet. I am sort of proud of that because the non-familiarity of the characters makes it feels like I’ve mastered some super secret code. Super secret meaning, in this case, that it is just the 500 million or so of us who know it. What makes sounding out particularly enjoyable is that so many words in Hindi—especially the sort of words that make it onto signs, like “metro” and “gate”—are transliterations of English words. So I’ll be going along, sounding out words that mean nothing to me and then there are these great epiphany moments when a word pops out of the sounds. Example: I’ll be reading along “dah-lee-poh-le-s” and, ureka!, that’s “Delhi police.”

For illustration, I include here the two kinds of signs I can read. Albert is Vanna White-ing the first type, which is a sign that is actually in English. It says “A Block.” Which is right next door to where I live, on B block. The second type of sign I can read, like the road sign here, contains Hindi proper nouns. Everything on the line in English is reproduced phonetically in Hindi, including “Captain.”

It is very interesting to notice what gets transliterated versus translated. For example, if you are standing on the Metro platform in Delhi, enjoying the deliciously well air-conditioned feel of the place, a sign on the wall tells you, in Hindi characters, to stay behind the “peelee” line, using the Hindi word for yellow. But the train you are about to board is called the “bahloo” line, transliterating “blue” instead of using “neelee,” the Hindi word for blue.

So, that’s what I’m doing for fun these days! Field work is an endless party, I tell you.

Random note: I have moved on from digestive biscuits to Bounty chocolate bars. I’ve had them before but I had forgotten how vastly superior they are to Mounds bars, which use the same basic coconut-wrapped-in-chocolate concept. This is because, first of all, the Bounty candy bar is slightly salty, which creates a nice counterpoint to all that sticky sweetness. And, second, they are quite a bit fatter. Possibly, if I had paid more attention to learning the metric system in middle school I would already have known 1 bounty > 1 mound.

Random note 2: I think that anyplace that is in the tropics and does not have reliable AC should avoid upholstered furniture. It can’t be washed without encouraging what is already a latent tendency to mold and, as a result, becomes extremely dusty and grim-covered. In fact, I think the most important question for most home purchases in this climate is “will I be able to prevent this object from supporting its own ecosystem?”

Random note 3: I have a cockroach living in my bathroom. I’ve known this for about a week but I was content to peacefully coexist since (a) he only came out at night and ran for cover whenever I turned on the light and (b) I don’t like hunting cockroaches because there is the possibility that, in its panic, your prey will do something gross like skitter across your feet. I also don’t like dealing with their distressingly large carcasses. However, yesterday the roach ran into the cupboard beneath the sink and I shut him in there. I now wonder if that wasn’t a cruel thing to do as stomping on him would have been a quicker end. But he won’t necessarily be starving, since that cupboard was hardly an antiseptic environment. And, also, I think the only way to really kill a cockroach is with basilisk venom or fiend fire, so he’s probably just really mad at me and especially likely to do something upsettingly disgusting if I let him out.