Where Are the Horses?

Published in Aug 2023 in Volume 1 of “sub:version”, an academic journal of RV College of Architecture, Bangalore. Theme – ‘Bangalore as a palimpsest’, featuring various aspects of the city through multidisciplinary lenses.

“Yella OK. Cool drink yaake?” (That’s all okay, but why a cool drink?), exhorted maverick actor Upendra, plastered over every other billboard in Bangalore in the early 2000s; United Breweries had launched its home-grown beer, popular today as Kingfisher. I diligently noted the tagline down – it was now the third sentence in my Kannada arsenal, after “Kannada gothillaa” (I don’t know Kannada) and “nimma hesaru yenu?” (What is your name?). I, a new migrant to Bangalore from Bombay, was part of the great migration of software engineers’ spouses, a Bangalore phenomenon that had accelerated since the late 1990s.

This was the first time I didn’t know the local language, but being interested in languages anyway, I set about integrating with the city’s fabric. The sentences I knew would only allow me to ask somebody for their name and then replace the cold drink in their hand with beer; if I wanted more meaningful conversation, I needed to quickly expand my vocabulary. But where could I find a Kannada teacher?

A view of Bangalore from the rock formation at Lalbagh Botanical Garden.

In the part of South Bangalore where I lived (considered the city’s outskirts in the early 2000s) and still live in, the crowd was (and remains) cosmopolitan. My apartment complex – one of the very few in Bangalore then – was filled with the sounds of Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and English. My search for a Kannadiga neighbour proved futile. Determined, I began self-learning - from the radio, auto drivers, and our domestic help. I soon gained fluency in ‘household chores Kannada’, but sweeping, mopping, and lamenting over the grease removal inefficiency of a dishwashing soap were hardly popular topics in social situations. I needed more.

Radio to the rescue! “Onde ondu saari kanmunde baare” (please appear before my eyes at least once) crooned a love-struck Ganesh in ‘Mungaru Male’, a blockbuster movie at that time. I took notes: “the same saree keeps coming before my eyes”, marvelling at the hero’s capacity to remember a saree, a quality not usually ascribed to men. Mind you, my context for interpreting Kannada was through my proficiency in Tamil and Hindi, two languages which did eventually give me the advantage to learn Kannada much quicker than those who knew only one or neither of those languages. And Bangalore’s youth largely got by using ‘Kanglish’, a convenient mix of Kannada and English. But all this also meant that I was constantly attributing hilariously wrong meanings – many months later, I was dejected to learn that Ganesh didn’t really remember the heroine’s saree, and that ‘saari’ actually meant time in Kannada. Learning from songs eventually also proved to be restrictive because there was a limit to how many people I could profess my love to, or invite for a midnight rendezvous by the lake.

‘Auto Kannada’, picked up during my chats with auto drivers (while clinging to the side-bar of the speeding auto for dear life, even as Bangalore’s cold breeze decimated my humidity and heat-acclimatised bones), turned out to be my most impressive progress in the language. Auto drivers were always happy to talk – about the weather, route shortcuts, their professional woes, and how inflation in Bangalore had made things unaffordable for them (an unfortunately true repercussion of the software boom). They were the ones who taught me the correct Kannada pronunciations of tricky English spellings of localities like Arekere, Chikpete, Bidadi and Kathriguppe. Or mouthfuls like Bommanahalli, Sampangiramanagara and Agrahara Dasarahalli, all of which had far too many letters and syllables than I was accustomed to. Through these lessons, I learnt that ‘halli’ meant village, ‘kere’ meant lake, and ‘pete’ meant market: it was also a glimpse into the development of the city’s form and what its focal points were.

One of the many lakes (keres) at Bangalore.

A gathering space in a Bangalore 'halli' (literal - village, but also suburb), now almost never seen.

Talking to auto drivers and eavesdropping on their conversations with fellow-drivers at auto stands or the very few traffic lights that the city had, I also picked up slang words and tonalities. The word ‘goobe’ (owl) was extremely multifunctional, and I used the mild expletive liberally with traffic violators, and as a term of endearment with friends and close colleagues. I couldn’t quite understand the nuances of the popularly used ‘chatri’ (cunning) though, wondering when and why I would need to call a person an umbrella, which is what it meant in Hindi. Of course, I didn’t give such careful consideration to the usage of words like ‘yeno’ (the belligerent version of ‘what’), ‘baro’ (an impatient ‘come’) and ‘hogo’ (cranky ‘go’), confidently putting a pile of drawings on my boss’s desk with a casual ‘nodo’ (snappy and attitude-filled ‘take a look’) thrown at him – he turned red and told me how I probably didn’t realise that ‘nodo’ lacked respect, and was only to be used with friends or youngsters in the family.

As my vocabulary grew, so did my confidence. I was picking up Kannada’s tongue-twisting tenses and plurals, and one fine day, having learnt that ‘-galu’ is a suffix for plurals, I eagerly tried it out on my auto ride home from work. By then, Bangalore’s pot-holed roads were imprinted in my memory, and I had created a pot-hole map in my head. Wanting to warn the auto driver about an upcoming, back-breaking ‘three-potholes-of-various-depths’ stretch, I put my knowledge of ‘-galu’ to use. The slow head-turn I received from the auto driver, with a shocked expression, after I had unleashed “mundhe hallagalu barthaidhaare” on him, is one for my history books. Of course, since he was looking at me and not the road, he missed the potholes, and my spine suffered the consequences, leading me to admonish him gently: “naanu helidhini, alvaa?” (I told you, didn’t I?). He ignored the admonishment, and equally gently asked me “yaavu ooru, maa?” (Which city are you from, madam?), an indicator that he had guessed that I wasn’t a local. How? I thought I had nailed it! I was told by a chortling friend the next day that ‘barthaidhaare’ isn’t the way to pluralise inanimate objects; it is in fact a sign of respect or pluralisation only for people.

Undeterred, I forayed into ‘construction Kannada’, a prerequisite for my professional work as an architect. While working on the design of an international school, my boss would often drop by my desk to discuss it. For a few days in a row, he pointed vaguely to a corner of my drawing and asked “gode yelli?” (Where are the walls?). I nodded and ignored him for a couple of days, but could sense that he was slowly getting frustrated, asking “gode yelli?” multiple times a day. Making a presentation drawing with plants, people and other templates was supposed to be the last stage of the drawing, but irritated by his badgering, I completed a few things, took a printout, and plopped it on his desk with a “here are the godes!” One look at the drawing and he thundered. Just as I started fearing for my job, he burst out laughing - ‘gode’ is Kannada for wall, and not horses (ghode in Hindi), as I had presumed. I felt foolish when I saw the equestrian track in the school design, which I had peppered liberally with drawings of horses.

This also solved a huge mystery – during site visits, when fellow-architects would ask the mason or contractor “gode yavatthu kaththaithiraa?”, it was an enquiry about when the walls were going to be built, and not my perplexing (and now obviously nonsensical) translation of “When are you going to tie your horses?”

All these linguistic mishaps did not dissuade me from further attempts at speaking Kannada. I am happy to report that over the years, my Kannada grew from strength to strength. The day I was extremely proud of my progress was when a bus conductor asked me if I knew the bus stop I had to alight at. I nodded and told him in Kanglish, Bangalore’s lingua-franca, “next stop nalli illithaaythini” (I will alight at the next stop) – a pronunciation that I would have fumbled with earlier.

I had finally arrived - at my stop, and in Bangalore.

One of the four watch-towers built by Bangalore's founder, Kempegowda I, in the 16th century. This is at Lalbagh Botanical Garden.