Mind Your Language!!!

“Do you remember how our English was in those days?” asked Harry, with the air of a man dredging up a national scandal.

“I remember mine,” I replied. “Yours was pretty good. Mine was decently bad.”

“No, no,” he said, waving a hand, “I mean the school as a whole.”

Ah yes. The Great English-Only Campaign.

“They had imposed a fine of 25 paisa on anyone who spoke Marathi or any other language in school,” I reminded him.

“Three months?”

“Roughly. After that, the rule faded faster than chalk on a wet blackboard.”

English was not our native tongue, but some managed it with flair.

“Kapil and Gautam were good,” I said. “Sonia and Deepa too. And the Mehendale twins—Tushar and Rahul—handled it like old chums.”

“Rohan?” Harry asked.

“Ah yes. Rohan was fluent, but that came from discipline. He read dictionaries like we read comic books. It was Amit who said that about him.”

“You and Amit were good too,” I added. “I, on the other hand, was influenced by American movies.”

“You thought you spoke American.”

“I did. Only later did I realize it wasn’t even remotely close-English.”

Those who debated and gave speeches managed fine. The rest of us fumbled through like blindfolded acrobats.

I remember a letter written by Khopdi to Rao Madam. I had it with me until a few years ago. In that letter, he wrote:

Dear Vice-Principal Madam, The boys sitting behind me—Nitin,Pranesh, Prashant—trouble me a lot. They hit me, pluck my hair, and pinch me. But do not punish them. Instead, give me two tight slaps. I will go home and tell my parents. They will also give me two more tight slaps. Thank you.
Abhijit.

He was driven to desperation when this happened, and he was about to give the letter to the Vice Principal when I intervened and forcibly took it away from him.

“Remember Aseem?” I said. “We were doing The Emperor’s New Clothes and he was asked to read out that chapter. He stood up and read the original,

The Emperor marched in the procession under the beautiful canopy. Everyone in the streets, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! But the Emperor had no clothes.

Aseem read it like this, pronoucing "Empire" instead of "Emperor",

The Empire marched in the procession under the beautiful canopy. Everyone in the streets, “Oh, how fine are the Empire’s new clothes! But the Empire had no clothes.

Harry nearly choked laughing.

“And Pranesh!” he said. “Didn’t he once ask Kohle sir to pardon the question?

“The beating he got that day truly did pardon him.”

And there was that odd thing on the stairs. If someone bumped into a girl, instead of a simple Excuse me, it came out as a snarled, Get out of the way or I’ll kill you! No menace intended, but the delivery was... alarming.

Some, like Abhinandan and Avinash, were constant chatterboxes until asked a question in English—then, pure silence.

And that, dear reader, was our English: never perfect, often amusing, and always remembered.