Checks or Sex?

The first language I learnt was my mother tongue Hindi, then my family
relocated to the USA when I was 4 and I forgot Hindi and learnt English. We came back to India when I was 7 and settled in Nagpur. I had to relearn Hindi and had Marathi as a third language. Then 17th July 1978 I joined Christian Medical College, Vellore to study MBBS. The South of the Vindhyas is almost like a different country with a totally different languages. If you had to survive you had to pick up some functional Tamil. We had some Tamil classes where we were taught bookish Tamil. But as all of you know the man on the street rarely speaks the bookish version of a language. It is always the street version.
So the major learning of the language was by the interaction with the Hostel watchmen, mess boys who were euphemistically called ‘thambis’,which in Tamil means younger brother. This is similar to the Chottus, Munnas & Pintus we have in the North. Learning expletives is very useful because as we are all aware on the street the language is heavily coated with curses.
The next step of my journey took me to Ludhiana Punjab where Punjabi was the language. Of all the languages Punjabi is the easiest to pick up if you know Hindi!
Finally I was back in my hometown and I am placed in an environment where it is taken for granted you speak Marathi so I really had to brush up on the language and I am still in the process of perfecting it.
And how can I forget! Being married to a Malayalee, visits to the in-laws forced me to try to understand a smattering of the language or forever be relegated to the status of an out-law!
I became a polyglot, though not fluent in any of the languages except for ‘the Queen’s English’.
This constant endevour to learn new languages gave me a Prof. Higgin-eque approach to languages.
All of you must be thinking, “When will he cut to the chase and talk about sex!” Well I am coming to that just be patient.
In our Hostel the Thambis had typical Tamil names like Anbarasu, Appavoo, Pichamuthu, Vadivelu, Paneerselvam and so on. Being a cosmopolitan crowd in the hostel not all were familiar with these Dravidian names and the younger generation tends to give people monikers. So a Selvaraj became ‘Silverass’, one Thambi who had a strong resemblance to the runner Carl Lewis was christened Carl Lewis. Then there was also a Kapil Dev and a ‘Creep’. Creep was the most interesting and a mean moniker. His actual name was T. G. S. Munnusamy Gounder but when asked his name he would say “Nan per Greep (that is not a typo) ” or my name is Creep. Since he predated me in the Hostel I asked my seniors the origin of his moniker. The short and sweet answer given was “because he looks like a Creep!” Creep unfortunately suffered from congenital syphilis and now though no active disease he had the deformities of the nose, teeth and eyes associated with the disease.
But coming to the deliberate misspelling of Creep to Greep, well he was Christened Creep by the then resident of Mens Hostel but because of the influence of his native tongue he used to pronounce his Moniker as Greep.
Our native tongues influences the way we speak a foreign language to a large extent and I have made some observations in Tamil speakers.
They normally have difficulty in differentiating from ‘ka’ (as in crow), ‘kh’ (as in Khan),  ‘ga’ (as in grow). I remember trying to teach a Tamilian classmate the difference between ‘Khana’ (food) and ‘Kana’, for him both were the same. For the same reason Creep substitutes the ‘ka’ for a ‘ga’ pronouncing his name as ‘Greep’. Similarly the name Padma is also pronounced by some people as Badma or even Fadma because again ‘pa’ (as in Party), ‘ba’ (as in Bakery), ‘fa’ (as in Food) are all represented by one alphabet. I remember a classmate telling me that the letter for ‘ha’ (as in Hare Ram) was adopted from Sanskrit so you find a lot of Tamil purist don’t use it and Mahalakshmi will be pronounced as ‘Maggalakshmi’ and Bahadur Singh will be ‘Baggadur Singh’. Then we have the example of ‘t’ (as in Total), ‘th’ (as in Thought), ‘d’ (as in Dumb). Those who have lived in the south know that a Sangeeta will become a Sangeetha, an Anita will become an Anitha and so on. But the ‘th’ at the end will be pronounced more like ‘d’ so will sound like Sangeeda. Similarly is it Murlitharan as the cricketer likes to spell it or Murlidharan or Senthilkumar or Sendhilkumar .
Finally we come to the ‘sex’ part, two of our female classmates went shopping. They went to a clothes store and asked the shopkeeper to show them ‘checks’. They were horrified when the shopkeeper shouted to his assistant, “thambi sex kunduva” (thambi bring some sex). They were further aghast when the shopkeeper asked them, “Enna madari sex vanom, chinna? Persaa?” (What type of sex do you want small or big?) Well our classmates did not know whether to be indignant of to laugh out loud. Checks and sex could also be confused by a native Tamil speaker for the same reason Charles is pronounced as ‘Sarless’.
I hope I have not hurt the sentiments of any Tamil speaker I could have given similar examples for Marathi, Punjabi, Hindi or Bengali but would not have been relevant to the story!