Language woes

"But you speak good Marathi..." is something I hear a lot. You see, because of my rather North Indian sounding name people somehow don't expect me to speak the language of the state where I was born, raised, studied and am now working. It is only when I explain the born and raised part does their confusion seem to ease away a bit. 

However, it not being my mother tongue, I lack the fluency and the vocabulary that a native Marathi speaker possesses. I get mixed up in the tenses and genders. (But hey, that is something a Marathi speaker does to Hindi as well)  Somehow, despite my best efforts, this deficiency does get exposed during every Marathi conversation that I have, forcing the speaker to switch to Hindi or English. Honestly, that hurts just a little bit. But I have no problems in accepting that my Marathi is constrained, and that I am working on it.

So what about my mother tongue? Once again, I am almost there but not quite. I can neither read nor write Punjabi. I can understand it very well. I can even speak it, but here's where things get bizarre. I don't speak Punjabi at home. Well, for the most part anyways. When I was a little kid, my parents in a stroke of genius decided that they would teach me Hindi so that I'd pick up the language and thus have no problems in  "talking to people outside the family" (their explanation). Suffice to say that while my parents succeeded in their plans, with so much Punjabi being spoken around the house I picked it up too. Unfortunately, since I don't get to speak it much, any half decent Punjabi speaker identifies the rustiness in my speaking and quickly switches to Hindi or English. A complete fail here as well.

Then I must be good at Hindi, no? I used to live under the same impression. But the two years (and beautiful ones at that!) I spent in the Hindi heartland of the country taught me that what I thought was Hindi, was in fact Bambaiya, which is Hindi of unsure genders and tenses, along with a spattering of Marathi wherever applicable. I can still see the bewildered looks on people's faces whenever I called an amrood a peru, got confused between a kakdi and a kheera or between halwa and sheera and so forth, whenever I announced main jaata hai or told an elder aap chalo/aao/khao etc. No luck here either.

So this brings us to English, the language of the queen, the medium of instruction (officially at least) at all my places of learning. One would expect me to be good at it. But my cup of woe still overfloweth. My school was dominated by Hindi, nay, Bambaiya, college was a Marathi bastion and Kanpur, as we know, is a chaste Hindi speaking area. So whatever English I know, I have learned from books, newspapers, movies and television. While this means that I possess a decent enough vocabulary, the 'text to speech' interface is still pretty primitive and I can still be found fishing for words in a conversation with someone who speaks the language more fluently than I do. Being able to think in English and speak it are two different things altogether you see.

So there we have it. Gaping flaws in all the four languages I claim as my own. I do not know if and when the day will ever come when I will be able to confidently communicate in either of them. If it doesn't, maybe I'll  invent a language of my own.