Farrukh Dhondy

“He wrote an epic Called Tale of the Tub Which was just one word It was Rub-a-dub-dub”.From Bachchoo ka BachpannaFeb.13 : Teaching yourself a language from a guide book or a tourist pamphlet can be a hazardous business. My German, for instance, is not up to scratch. I pride myself in having done one formal course for a couple of idle weeks in my boyhood in Pune. I had abandoned chemical engineering college in Mumbai in favour of a career doing nothing and attempting to write deathless prose in imitation of Lawrence Durrell — an enterprise which in turn came to nought — and had been induced by furious parents and aunts to “do something useful”.

I determined to go back to my old college and complete the science degree, with physics, which the brief foray into chemical engineering had interrupted. But I had a few months to kill before term started and looking around found that there was a residential course in German offered by the Goethe Institute. It was advertised as elementary and was called Grundstuffe fur Auslander with all the appropriate umlauts.I expected to be taught how to say “this is a pen, this is a table. The pen belonging to my aunt is on the table belonging to my uncle”. No such luck. The Germans, as their reputation which went before them, were serious. They taught us right away to say our names and claim them in Deutsche and to say good morning and good evening and even good night.The instructors spoke no English, Hindi or anything other than German — this was the direct method and was referred to by the other students who had come from far afield as a “German bath”. At first it felt like a very deep one as one was left to sink or swim in it, but it was an effective method encouraging the new linguists to think in German.Soon, after a week of picking up grammar and vocabulary, we were having tea with the director of the institute and had enough German to answer a rather complex question. The Herr director went around the circle of pupils and asked each of us why we wanted to learn German or why we had joined this course and what we intended to do with what we had learnt. Most of them said they were going to Dresden or Berlin soon, having secured employment or some such thing. By the time my turn came I had cheated by looking up the English-Germany dictionary to supplement my answer and told Herr director that I was studying German in order to read Das Kapital in the original. It didn’t go down too well. He frowned. I should have said I was learning German in order to waste my time and not be disowned by my parents for wanting to be a writer — a profession my father, a military man, maintained was for idlers and women.Some of the German came back to me this last week when I went to the University of Saarland to teach their post-graduates something about the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. I walked about the town in-between seminars and the rusty phrases came back. I could certainly ask the way to the railway station and buy a ticket for a bus, order another beer or a glass of wine of any colour and thank the bartender for it. I had no occasion to pose any more intimate questions — though, from a song of the Seventies I do know how to say “would you like to go to bed with me — this evening!” in French.On passing a bakery-cakery which exuded very tempting and sentimental odours, I walked in and thought I would try the Saarland pastry for size. I brushed up the phrase in my mind and boldly asked the young lady behind the counter for a “cake with cream, please”. The poor woman went pale and her eyes opened wide.“What?”My pronunciation was, after all these years, a bit rusty, so I said it again, slowly. I was dressed respectably enough and didn’t look like a prankster. The poor girl started to address the other customers behind the counter. An enterprising young man guessed from my accent that I was not fluent in German and he ventured some English.“You are not German”, he said.“No”, I said. People were staring at me now.“What want you?”“A cake with cream”, I said.“Ahhh”, he said “ach! Yes, yes, yes, yes — it is like that”. He grinned and translated my request. The customers and the girl behind the counter began smiling and nodding.“Ach so”, the girl said and then the German for “a cake with cream — ‘torte mit Zahne’”.It sounded the same as what I had demanded, with possibly a twist or so to the words.“You have been asking this lady for a dead person with teeth”, the young man said — “tote mit zahnen”.I paid for my corpse with teeth and walked out in mild linguistic disgrace. I could hear them muttering behind me, “These foreigners… come here… frighten our shop assistants... eat all our dentated dead…”I tell the story as a warning to those who have this week picked up a small pamphlet which the Guardian has issued free with its newspaper purporting to teach the unwary the grammar, alphabet and guide to pronunciation of Hindi with a few useful phrases thrown in.It’s a pocket pamphlet of 22 pages with an introduction by writer and musician Amit Chaudhri who recalls the scorn in which Hindi was held by his Bengali Marxist uncle.There are no instructions on how to buy cakes with cream or how to enquire the price of a doggy in the window. Under a section called “At the Market” there is the very useful phrase “Are you robbing us? Tell us the proper price!”My final word in this review of the Guardian’s guide to Hindi is that Amit’s introduction is very good and truthful, but as a book of useful phrases for the traveller, the six postcard-size pages are quite inadequate.My friends are off to India soon and I am compiling a short phrase book of Hindi for them myself. I think they ought to know the Hindi for “No, f*** off! I do not wish to sleep with you this evening or ever!”“Don’t be ridiculous, you think I don’t know the black market rate?” and “This stuff smells like it’s mixed with birdseed/talcum powder/sodabicarbonate…etc” and, of course, “Do you sell corpses with teeth?”

Farrukh Dhondy