Being multilingual in India is no big deal. Pretty well everyone I know, from my grandparents to my nephews, speaks more than one language. Of course, for any ambitious Indian, English is a must (no matter how warped the accent may be), and then there is the mother tongue (for my family, that is Bengali), and thanks to the omnipresence of Hindi – from television and cinema to advertisements – that rounds out the top three in most cases.
I didn’t think it was a big deal that I spoke more than three languages until I started travelling. In New York, when I applied for a mundane job with the UN, the first question they asked me was about the number of languages I spoke and how well I spoke them. It has been the same with every job I’ve had in journalism.
I speak English (of course), Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and a smattering of Nepali and French. While I can read and write Hindi, Bengali, Nepali and French, I can not say the same for Tamil or Urdu. It’s all very complicated and is a result of a somewhat nomadic upbringing, not to mention the fact that my parents spoke two different languages at home and English was our common factor. Add to that my decade of boarding school in Pondicherry in Southern India (a former French colony), where I learnt English and French, and the constantly transferable job my father had with the World Health Organization, and it becomes clear that I do not have a propensity for languages but that the environment I grew up in forced me to adapt to the many languages spoken around me.
It can get problematic. Last week while I was interviewing a source for a story, I struggled with a word. While it translated to a beautiful flower in Bengali, it meant buffalo in another language. My multilingual brain was fried.
These are the moments that my editors do not see. The glamour behind being able to decipher a feeling in a foreign language and being hung up on the exact meaning of a word is a fine line. I tried to deduce the logic behind the word. Did the source really pay thousands of Bangladeshi rupees for a beautiful flower or a buffalo? What were the chances? In journalism, you don’t take such chances, so I called the resident linguist: my mother.
She was rushing to the airport, so she couldn’t be much help. I called the second best in the business, who had taught me the difference in phonetics between Urdu and Hindi words: my father.
Turns out a buffalo is still a buffalo and a flower is just that. And it all depends on the pronunciation, which was obviously lost in translation over static phone lines between me and the source.
In spite of all those languages, it was back to the drawing board for me.
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