Questions Lost in Translation

Last Friday I spent the whole day at South Point School's village campus. After a morning of rather confusing logistics, I eventually got on the bus and was surrounded by children. After getting to the school I proved to be an immense distraction to every student there and instantly became the bane of every teacher's existence. I had no idea how to control it, and everything I did was interesting to the students.

There were a few highlites, not the least of which was being flat out laughed at when I pronounced the word "jagged" like "jagg-ed" and not the ever-popular "jaggd". I swore to them that that was how it was pronounced in America and NO ONE believed me. They also asked me for help in their homework and when I corrected it, they would tell me I was wrong. And I'm not saying these kids don't know English. These kids have been taking all their classes in English for, at minimum, three years, which is no small feat. When I was their age, the idea of bilinguality wasn't even within the limits of my 9 year-old and subsequently tiny brain. That being said, I know that the sentence, "We went to the bazaar in market time for buying carpet," doesn't make sense in my native language. I would tell them, "No, but seriously guys. I'm from there. I remember America," and in response I just had a group of four girls cover their mouths due to their erupting laughter. In any case, I was right and they were wrong. Hah.

After that lovely experience, I ate lunch by myself. I watched dozens of children running around the sizeable courtyard, and watched a few groups of boys watching me. Spilling some rice on my dupatta, I then watched myself being laughed at. It was a touchingly reminiscent of my life in 5th grade, and I really appreciated the opportunity to go back.

Then, a few boys came up to me.
Him: You have hair like a boy cut.
Me: Yeah. It's even shorter than yours! (Silly me, trying to make light of the grave situation of gender play)
Him: Why. (This wasn't a question, even though it was masked as one.)
Me: I just wanted to cut it.
He walked away.

After that I was asked several variations of the question, "Allison ma'am, are you girl or boy?"

My first response: I'm a girl.
My second response: (sigh) Yeah, I'm a girl.
My third response: I'm still a girl. (This one was met with a lot of confusion, but then complacency)
My fourth response: You said "ma'am", didn't you? You did.

School finally got out at around 3 PM, and we all went home. The bus ride back was great.

In other news, I've been teaching English to Salman Raghib Sahab's kids and it's been SO GOOD. His three older children are incredible (he has another who is about 9 months old and doesn't have too much of a personality outside of a strong and palpable hatred for me). His oldest son is named Shahnivaz, whom I have previously mentioned. He is 17 and he can speak pretty quickly, but he makes a lot of silly grammer mistakes. The next is named Shaheriyar, and he is 12. His English is fairly good, but getting him to talk is probably as hard as getting him to put his face in a garbage disposal. His daughter, Zoya, is the youngest of the group that I'm teaching; she's eight. She's also one of the smartest people I have ever met. She learns faster than her two brothers and is SO EFFING CUTE. OH MY GOD. I think Salman Sahab is a little weirded out by how much I talk about his daughter's intelligence. I'm almost weirded out by how much I talk about it.

The best moment of English class 'chez Raghib' is when Shahnivaz said, in the middle of a question I was asking to Zoya, "Did you know I ride bike way fast?"

Let's analyze this question. Firstly, did I know? How could I know? Does everyone know? What are the chances that someone on the street would stop me and say, "Hey! Now look, foreigner here to exploit my country's fractured economy under the auspices of studies, a boy who lives here, he rides bike way fast."

Secondly, let's consider the sentence structure. I ride bike. We can all agree that what this sentence needs is a nice article. Something to ground it a little. Hindi doesn't have articles, so I understand that it's hard for Hindi speakers, and trust me, I empathize. Subjunctive? "It's sort of a tense, but more of a feeling," is literally what I was told in 7th grade French. I thought it was a joke when I heard it. It, as is probably obvious, was definitely not a joke and it probably successfully shaved ten years off of my lifespan. Subjunctive still remains to be the single most confusing part of language for me, despite the ten years of French, and now nine months of intensive Hindi. Subjunctive is just as messed up to me as articles seem to Indians, I'm sure. But, you still need to use them. The last part being perhaps the strangest part of the question, "way fast" is weirdly colloquial to be put in a grammatically ravaged sentence. It makes him sound as if his English is fine, but he was just so excited to say it that he couldn't be bothered to use the extra syllable an article would have caused. Actually, the second part was probably true.

Luckily, afterwards he told me all about it, and I thankfully now know he rides bike way fast.

Outside of teaching and other children-related things, Sara and I have started running the mornings together. I'm going to take a moment to let that sink in. I, I'm Allison Carney I think some of you have met me, am running for exercise. There is nothing chasing me, I am just running. I won't say for fun. But, suffocating in India has turned out to a not entirely unagreeable experience.

It's been kind of fun and nice to see my improvement and feel the difference in my body. But, hands down, the funnest part is the men who decide that talking to me is an okay thing to do. And by talk I really mean incessantly ask me if I need help or want to ride their bicycles. The second question is interesting because I am, at that point, already running in circles on a track. I am obviously not late for any appointment, and am simply not getting there fast enough. That and I had ridden my bike there.

Now the best moment was when, after several men asking me various questions, a man of about 20 came up to me. I immediately put on my don't-talk-to-me-I'm-a-huge-bitch face and kept walking. He asked me, in perfect English, if I was a physical fitness teacher. I did a double take, looked forward, looked down at myself, and looked back at him. I don't think I even said anything. He repeated his question a little slower, as if he were checking for grammar mistakes. I eventually worded a response something like, "Are you kidding?" After which I discovered he was very much not kidding and wanted to be able to run a farther distance. I softly told him that I was a beginner (which I thought was clear after the 10 minutes of running that nearly killed me), and that I couldn't help him. He thanked me and jogged off.

The moral of this story is that questions about me being a regular exercizer will throw me off more than questions about my gender. Dually noted, India.

-allison