Delhi boy and Mallu gerl

One thing that I find it hard to explain to people is that I am NOT a Mallu even though both my parents were born and raised in Kerala . My mother tongue is Konkani and I speak it fluently.  (and if you really want to know, I am  a  Konkani GSB). But I also speak Tamil, Malayalam,Hindi, Kannada and can understand Marathi and used to speak Gujju too! (apart from English of course) :)
I grew up in several places all over India and I find it hard to answer the question
"Where are you from?" (I am a TRUE Indian)

So it somewhat amuses me when my good friend Mayank Mittal presumes I cannot speak Hindi. Whenever he texts me in Hindi, he takes care to translate the same into English within brackets. I always reply back in proper  'Shudh Hindi' surprising him. (I proudly boast to my north Indian friends that I scored a 84% in CBSE Hindi course A and I can tell my purushvachak sarvanaam from my anishchayvachak sarvanam and I can also reel off several  dohas and samanarthak shabd and what not!)

  

Satish assumes the same (even after 16 years of marriage!) and teases me about my spoken Hindi. Yet when it comes to teaching the kids Hindi grammar, he backs out and calls me. And I make frantic calls to Mayank asking him to make sentence with  ‘behti ganga mein haath dhona’  :-)  

After all, it is more than twenty years back that I had scored those marks :P :-)

Yeah, I do admit my Hindi is mostly mugged up from text books and movie dialogues :-) (I grew up on a diet of Hindi and English movies) and I am indeed more comfortable conversing in English than in Hindi. And I would rather run a mile than read a book in Hindi. (The CBSE course A ensured that I had enough of Hindi for a lifetime!)

Satish has mostly grown up in the North and his Hindi and is more fluent than his Konkani. He also speaks Bong.

Between Satish and me, he is the  'Hindiwallah' and I am the 'South Indian'. He is the Delhi Boy and I am the mallu gerl (that wasn’t a typo), he is the Bengali Babu and I am the Tamizh ponnu   and that’s how it will always stay I guess.

When we were visiting India from the UK last year, I badly wanted a Salwar Kameez. (as I mostly wear western clothes or sarees) What better place than Amritsar to get one made? I proudly got an authentic  Patiala salwar kameez  stitched. I was so happy with it that I decided to wear it immediately. We were taking the Shatabdi from Amritsar to Delhi and I proudly wore my new ‘Patiala suit’. I had shopped for some lovely bangles and bindis too and happily wore all of that. (which was something I rarely got to do in the UK)

In the train, the attendant was handing out the complimentary newspapers to everyone. He took one look at me and Satish. Then he painstakingly pulls out two bunches of newspapers. He hands over the Punjabi newspapers to me  and he passed on the English newspapers to Satish!!

Satish could not stop laughing.

I politely handed back the newspaper to him and asked for the English one and said “Mein angrezi pad sakti hoon.”

These Hindiwallahs I tell you!! :D

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ps: You can interact with me on my Facebook page.  I reply to almost all comments and I check it very regularly. :-)