If narrated along the lines of events of cosmic significance that occurred light years ago, it was two hair-cuts back that I encountered for the first time a menace, for want of a better label, called the great language barrier. It was in Pune, where I used to live then, that I was accosted in chaste Arabic by a hair stylist — who was till then looked upon by all as a pure Marathi manoos who also took pride in his spoken Hindi.
It was an Omani dialect, I was later told by a sportsman of Muscati origin, who has been gamely trying to tame the intricacies of English language in various colleges in Pune for the past decade or so. In Pune, there are many such in their late 30s, early 40s endlessly pursuing degree courses, but that is another story.
I had been Shirke’s customer for a while and his sudden attempt to make me respond to ‘Kaifa halak’ instead of the regular ‘Aaap kaise ho’ had me stumped during what turned out to be a very strained 20-odd minutes of furious hair-cutting. It didn’t help that there was a lot of light banter in Arabic going on between Shirke, his colleagues and about half a dozen bearded gentlemen, evidently not of Indian origin. It panned out that many hair-cutting salons in localities in Pune thickly populated with expat students mainly from West Asia have been hiring barbers with spoken Arabic skills. “Kalli valli” (Forget it/ who cares), Shirke said in an attempt to humour me as I paid him in Indian currency.
It was with a sense of relief that I stepped into a hair-stylist’s shop in Kochi a few weeks back, secure in the belief that this is where one got to unwind and shoot the air in god’s own language. It was with jolt that I heard the query “Aage baal chodna ya kyaa?” in answer to my request for a close crop, reverently uttered in Malayalam. Left with no option, I responded in Hindi and sure enough, Iqbal, who hails from a small town near Lucknow, asked plaintively, “Aapko Hindi maaloom hain to Malayali mein kyon pooch rahein hain?”
Like his cousin and a few friends from UP, a number of youngsters had left Mumbai suburbs to move into ‘Keral’ where stay is cheap and money is not too bad, says Iqbal. With the surge in the flow of migrant labourers to Kerala from West Bengal, UP, Bihar and Orissa, it is Iqbal’s bet that soon, Malayali barbers will be forced to learn Hindi, even Bengali and Bhojpuri.
At a personal level, the language barrier suddenly came crumbling down. Perhaps, I’ll just relax in the hair cutting saloon during the ensuing visits and get to learn the basics of a few new languages over the next few months. ‘Kalli valli’, as Shirke would’ve said.