Accented

I used to have a best friend in second grade. Deepa Asarpota. We loved each other so much that I had to have what she had and she had to have what I had. We had the same stationery, shoes and ribbons. We even made sure that we had similar sandwiches wedged inside similar Cinderella lunch boxes. So when Deepa asked me to lend her my 'pancil', it was only natural that I began to refer to all my writing apparatus as 'pancils'. I had color pancils, mechanical pancils and fancy pancils that were better than normal pancils because they glittered. My dad however, had enough of it all. After about 2 weeks of writing 'P-E-N-C-I-L' a thousand times on his legal pad while saying it out loud, all was righted and my pancils were pencils again.
But the more peer I interacted with, the more muddled the rest of my words got, because no two people said the same word the same way. I didnt think I could trust Deepa, or Treena (who inspired me to pronounce 'gave' like 'have'), my parents, or for that matter, my English teachers- who changed every year, forcing me to adapt to a new system of impressing each one.

English words toting three alternative pronunciations were doing party jigs in my head and American television did a whole lot of nothing to help. So no one understood why I danced with joy when Homer Simpson on Star TV started saying "Marge, Marge, ye dekho Bart ne kya kiya."

I went on to study at a convent in Abudhabi. Everything was formal and completely different, and so very structured. Soon my 'yeah' became a 'yes', my 'naah' became a 'no', and I became my worst nightmare. My vocabulary was a mixture of casual Hindi, more casual Tamil and extremely formal English. My brain was spilling out sentences composed of self inflicted verbal confusions and random cultural dialects. To add to it all, I took to saying 'Insha Allah' after sentences, for some reason preferred saying 'donkey' in Arabic.

On a fateful day in March, I was sent to a family friend's place for a kids lunch thing which consisted of a bunch of her son's friends and me. More to escape another of her son's morbid discussions about his developing biceps femoris, I sidled away to the bedroom to peruse their generous video library. And when I heard the words 'gym', 'punch' and 'lift' being used loudly in the same sentence from the living room, I decided I wasn't missing much, and popped 'Pride and
Prejudice'- the series featuring Colin Firth in the VCR. For three hours I was engrossed, amazed and captivated by the polite and perfectly desirable British. I went home dazed, and practiced saying 'Why-yes-that-would-be-perfectly-delightful-thank-you.' a jazillion times in the bathroom mirror. I had found my linguistic niche, it was British, and I was going to adopt it...Until I heard about Ramadurai.

Ramadurai was a good friend's cousin who had been in the United States for barely a semester before he decided to visit back home.
Within that semester he had begun to roll his 'r's, and say 'wanna', 'gotta' and 'gonna' to the general Indian public.
Sure enough, the boy was teased till he cracked and started crunching his 'r's again and saying 'want to', 'got to' and 'going to'. He had tried to adapt to the United States to clear some of his own linguistic confusions. And look where that got him.
It was a bit rich, I thought, that the same people that swore by Raybans, jumped into Lee jeans, and wore lime green muscle shirts that said 'Gap' on them would tease Ramadurai for trying to be American.

I had realized a long time ago that American movies are the devil's spawn. They're the pied-pipers of the world. Before people actually live in the US, they desperately want to live in the US. They want to live the life portrayed in romantic comedies, dress like the white protagonist, and talk like him or her, because thats what being cool and hip was all about. So markets started hosting products with Amercian brand names slapped onto them, and it worked. So why, was everyone after the poor kid with the artificial accent? Everyone adopts American cultural commercialism, and this was Ramadurai's way of doing it. But all that being said, I had no desire to dig myself a Ramadurai-esque grave in the popularity charts. So I ignored the Colin Firth in my head, and stopped wielding the British. .

The idea of going to college in India felt so liberating, because I thought no one cared about how you spoke English. Everyone had their linguistic flaws, so I assumed that no one cared about the other's pronunciation mistakes.

I had assumed too much.

Indian people noticed and mocked different Indian accents in English, without realizing that their own English was extremely accented too.
The Hindi speakers mocked Tamil or Malayalee English- "You said dezicion instead of decision, Ha-ha." The Tamilians got defensive and tried mocking them back with something equally dry. The idea was- if you're wrong, find about 20 people that are wrong with you, so together everyone can be right.

When even a country whose majority spoke broken English as a second language judged it, what would a country like the United States do? I thought terrified, when I received my student visa to study here.
Maybe I could find British friends, practice Colin- Firthiness again, and maybe all would be well.

I stepped on to American soil terrified of saying anything lest i be mocked and ridiculed. I met Indians and stuck to them. After all, I had learned to handle their comments all my life. 4 more years wouldn't kill me.

Around my second week there, I decided to stop converting currency and treat myself to a sandwich from a place called Subway.
The black lady at the counter ambled to the front and called me a "Weeowaa."
"Huh?" I said.
"weeee-o-waaa" she said, slower this time, like that made the world of difference.
"I...what?" I said, looking back at the long line of lunch-time customers waiting for me to get it.
"you wan wee brey or waa brey?" she said, shifting her weight to the other foot.
"I'm really sorry ..." I said.
She sighed and went into the kitchen.
When she came back, I let out a long 'Oh,' of realization. She held wheat bread on one hand, white bread on the other, cocked an eyebrow, and repeated- "wee or waa."

I walked back home with a sandwich that didn't turn out the way I wanted it to because 'weeowaa' was just the beginning in a long series of trick questions. I resolved to do something about the language barrier, and slowly started braving interaction in classes. My accent started out being the normally muddled British Indian, but slowly, very slowly, it began to change face without my knowledge. As much as I hated it, I began to sound like the Gujarati guy I worked for when I waited tables to pay for school. He chose certain words to twang with an accent, leaving the others in their half baked, very Gujarati state. It was ridiculous. So I decided to twang all my words.

I became a linguistic chameleon. I was all about twanging with Americans, I got all British with my friend from New Zealand, and reverted back to my desiness with Indians and Pakistanis. And all this was completely effortless. I never even tried. It was like I had all the versatility lodged in somewhere and had unleashed a monster.
Fortunately, I have not been faced with an Indian, an American and a Brit at the same time. Yet. Thank God.

One would say that I lacked the self esteem to stick to the way I spoke, to be confident enough to stand by my own accent's side. One would possibly be right. I don't know. But I do not think that mistakes in pronunciation should be accepted as a part of culture and defended. The truth was, I wasn't confident enough to stand by my English-Indianness. More than social acceptance, it was a barrier that somewhat diminished my expression. I couldn't pull off my favorite American phrases without sounding like Devang Patel saying 'vanna go for a ride'.

'Vanna go for a ride'....Most Indian languages have a 'V', but never a 'W'. And I have spoken some of these Indian languages all my life and as a result don't have a 'W' in my spoken vocabulary. I have tried feigning a 'W' with some success, but still dread the day when once again I will wear my favorite birthday present and someone will ask me an unnecessary question like "what's that you're wearing?", and make me struggle with "woven woolen vest"

I don't know why I do it at the end. Maybe I want to fit in. Maybe I think it's cool. Maybe it's wrong. But maybe I can find 20 of us that do it , so together we can be right.

~Aruna Rangarajan