The Secret Language

The English that is spoken in India is no longer the language that the British empire left behind. In fact it's not even one language anymore.

There is a straightforward (if slightly odd) version of Indian English that gets everyday tasks done. This is the English where you reschedule an event to an earlier time by 'pre-poning' it instead of by advancing it, or where you politely request someone to introduce themselves by asking for their 'good name'.

But lurking behind this functional language is a second underground language that sounds deceptively similar. To truly understand this second language you have to appreciate that it is a language of fantasies.

Pradeep lives in a slum across the street from one of Mumbai's newer shopping malls. I was with a small group of people who met with him in the course of our work. To get to where he lives we stopped at a street fronted by small stores. In front of the stores there were three live goats that had been decorated for the upcoming Id festival when they would be ritually slaughtered. Flies buzzed idly around us as we found a little corridor that we had to walk through to get to the one-room home where Pradeep would meet us.

This wasn't his home. In fact we never figured out whose home it was. But Pradeep insisted on meeting us there instead of in his own home, which he was worried was not presentable. Soon it became obvious that he wanted to dissociate himself from his home and his family. At one point he made a telling comment when he talked about the things he did to cultivate a 'funky look' to fit in with his friends at college. He made it clear that his parents approved of neither his friends nor their contagious funkiness. And he implied with unspoken eloquence that their funkiness symbolized their relative affluence; an affluence that he keenly wanted to partake of.

We heard the phrase 'funky style' used by many different people. And every time it carried the same undertones: a funky style is one that allows you to make an uncompromising statement that you are an individual distinct from the family and the community that you have come from. It is a signal that you are brave and flexible enough to fit into an exciting, demanding, competitive world where sometimes style is substance. (And it's a gentle hint to your parents that you have a little bit of a rebel inside you.)

Vinay already knows he fits into the exciting, competitive world around him. He hasn't made his mark in it yet. He still takes a train and bus to work, which means that he commutes for 3 hours everyday. But he is confident that he will work his way up the corporate ladder and buy a car so that he can drive to work instead. That's not his fantasy; it's his plan.

He reserves his fantasizing for a different sort of escape. He wants to go bungee jumping in Australia or New Zealand. In his words, he has been 'passionating' about it for two years. In truth, I don't think he really cares where he jumps off a bridge as long as it's in a place far away from home.

"Passionating" is a word that is as vividly expressive as it is hideously ugly. When Vinay said he had been passionating for 2 years I just knew that for those 2 years he had been playing and replaying in his head a movie of what he thought bungee jumping would look and feel like.

Ryan was the driver who took us to meet both Pradeep and Vinay. While negotiating a particularly bumpy road he turned to me and said wistfully half in Hindi and half in fantasy-English "The roads in 'Foreign' must be very smooth, not like what we have in Mumbai."

To him, the word 'Foreign' was not an adjective. It described a specific place. It's a place he has seen on TV and in the movies and which probably exists in his mind as a unique mash-up of New York City, Interstate highways in the US, airports in Europe, and other such internationalized images of life in richer countries. For Ryan the word 'Foreign' does not describe all the places that are outside India. Instead, it describes his idea of the place that is not India.

'Funky', 'passionating', 'Foreign' - these are all part of the vocabulary of a language that linguists have not yet discovered because it impersonates English so well. The words seem deceptively familiar but if you listen carefully you can hear the dreams of men and women who yearn for a whiff of the extraordinary to come into their lives.

If you could have heard Pradeep and Vinay and Ryan whisper their dreams in their secret language, I think you would have had the same wish as me: that they would experience the fantasies that they had thus far only imagined. And that what they experienced would be everything that they had hoped for.