[Apologies for the long hiatus - I was a little busy with wrapping up work. I'm on a break from work - maybe for a very long time!]
"Acchi baat, amma," the fruit vendor says in reply to my order. In chaste Hindi, that phrase doesn't even exist. It's a Telugu phrase, meaning 'Very well'. And in the true spirit of Hyderabad, it's been appropriated and put to use in a different language.
When my daughter was two years old, she hadn't begun speaking yet and that was a cause of concern for my husband and me. Wherever we went, we heard about the prodigious verbal output of her peers and wondered why our child was so silent. My mother came up with a reason and I'm not sure she wasn't right - we spoke to her in three langauges, can you blame the child for being confused? It's then that we realized that we tended to slip into Hindi, Telugu and English with equal ease while expressing ourselves. And so does my daughter now - it's a reflection of the melange of languages we hear around us.
Bagaar annam, sataainchinaadu .... just a few words that have both a Hindi and Telugu root and are common currency. Temple bells, the Venkateswara Suprabhatam at dawn and the aroma of roasting kebab and biriyani - can any place in the world compare to my Hyderabad?
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