English...I think

It happened for the first time when I was just about nine years old. Someone asked me how come I spoke such good English. I bridled, rather annoyed that someone should question what, for me, was something I had taken for granted ever since I started talking when I was about two and could articulate beyond the few recognisable noises I made, or so my parents told me around that time. I may have started with Marathi or Tamil or whatever whoever says even today that I did, but for years now my English is the strongest language in my vast and varied repertoire. And it is indeed both vast and varied, varying from the choicest of affectionate expressions in Portuguese to some very loving words in Japanese to the most sweet and personal expostulations in a mixture of Malayalam, Bengali and Serbo-Croat.

I may exaggerate a trifle, I think, but the basic is still truth. When I was 13 and we lived in the United States, everyone at the local junior high school I was made to attend asked me if I spoke English and, when they found I did indeed, demanded to know how come mine was as good as it was…and occasionally still is, never mind that I work with a newspaper and everyone knows that no known newspaper uses what is even today known as ‘good English’. It’s called ‘journalese’ and would never pass muster as the language that most of us were taught in school, when we were younger, more innocent and bright enough to learn. But then I was, usually, most annoyed, because they didn’t know what they were saying, in more ways than the obvious. After all, they didn’t speak ‘English’ at all, just the strange argot known as ‘American’. It has a weird accent (that I must admit I have imbibed some of) and even odder phraseology (ditto) and is rarely if ever recognised as such in the more commonly-English-speaking nations of the world, like the UK, India, even the EU.

When I was in high school, purportedly studying madly for my International Baccalaureate exams but actually more worried about everything from the state of my nation back home to the blossoming of the spot on my button nose, I was in a Higher English class, taught by the very dishy six-foot-something Anthony Short who was nothing like his name. He was perhaps the one man I would have liked to take home to Ma and Pa, except that he was more than twice my age, was nicely married with children and successfully snubbed me in perfect verse when I wrote about my summer vacation in laboured rhymes. I was trying to be different and he taught me more than my share of the grow-up-little-girl lesson very effectively and succinctly. And his charm came primarily from the fact that he never questioned my fluency in the language, but tried to channel it into greater comprehension of the literature I had never read but learned to enjoy and the writing I never thought I would one day make into a profession.

So when a Japanese classmate asked me how come I spoke English, I managed to smile past my gritted teeth and swallowed a rude rejoinder with the full knowledge that both my parents and Mr Short would parse it to smithereens and show me just how I could have been far more effective by saying far less. And once I went off to college, neatly bypassing the English-fluency-for-foreigners tests – to be absolutely honest, I was terrified that I would not pass them – I could with perfect accuracy say that I had studied English in an international school in Switzerland, making the story less long-winded and more acceptable to those who didn’t know any better.

Once I started working, I got better known for my funky language skills through whatever I wrote, which was widely published both in print in various parts of the world and on the Internet, which is a world without any real frontiers. And that gave me the chance I had been waiting for all these years, ever since I was a little girl and someone asked me that first question: How come you speak such good English? I now look at anyone who does and say, very blandly and with a totally straight face: Would you call it ‘English’?