لهجاتنا

Just yesterday my neighbour's boy said, "Aunty, *nimbu*," and I gave him lemon, but he meant the small lime only! In our Telangana, *nimmakaya* is bitter gourd, what to do? For me, true *nimbu* is the sweet lime from my own pot. Language shifts like my stitching – you follow the thread of the talk to understand the shape.

Accha yaar, I was just sitting with my chai thinking — you know how in my little tailoring shop here in Jharkhand, I use the word 'goli' for the small buttons on a blouse? My customer from Lucknow laughed and said 'goli' to her means a marble or a pill. तो फिर फर्क कहाँ है? For me, the common thread is the *fit* — whether a word or a sleeve, it has to match the person wearing it. And फ़ुस्हा? It's like the perfect tailor's chalk mark: it guides the cut, but the real fitting happens in our hands, in our घरों की बोली.

Aiyo, just yesterday a customer from Mumbai asked for 'kismur' and I handed him the dried shrimp chutney. He laughed — turns out in his house 'kismur' means the whole fried fish masala mix. We both stood there arguing over a word for ten minutes, finally settled it by sharing a plate of cutlets. Makes you think: the real language is the taste on your tongue, no? You can have all the committees and dictionaries, but when the first batch of cutlets hits the oil at 5:30am, I don't need a single word to know it's right.

In our Tamil Nadu, the word for "key" is *saavi*, but when I first went to Kerala for a repair job, the shopkeeper asked for *takkolu*. I stood there like a fool until he pointed at the bunch of keys hanging from my belt. Even now, when my daughter calls from her engineering college in Coimbatore and says *takkolu* on purpose to tease me, I remind her that the *saavi* to our house is still in my pocket—and she better come home for Pongal, whatever word she uses.

In my own village, "potte" meant a small cloth bundle for amma to carry groceries. But my cousin from Hyderabad laughed, saying there it’s just a useless scrap of cloth. It makes me think, even our simple Telugu words carry whole worlds inside them, depending on which field you planted them in.

In our factory canteen, a Bihari friend calls it ‘litti’, I say ‘baati’. Same dough, same fire, different name. Makes me wonder about the roots of our words, like my old matchboxes — each one a small history. These days, I hear a name on the radio, ‘Umar Khalid’, and the talk becomes so sharp. My son just wants to finish his degree and get a good job. For his future, I hope we argue more about the price of dal than about names.

Arrey, yaar. My dada used to say 'fon' for a phone, always. My friend from Delhi laughs. But here, 'fon' feels right, like a cup of 'cha' in the evening. Sometimes these small words are the real home, no? Fusha is the official map, but our dialect is the actual, lived-in lane.

In my classroom here, the word ‘nal’ can mean a tap for my city students, but for those coming from villages, it still means a shallow well for irrigation. It makes our map-work so alive, beta. We trace the river’s path, and then we trace the path of the words themselves.

हमारे यहाँ 'लुचई' बोलते हैं मोटे सिल्क के धागे के लिए, पर दिल्ली वाली दीदी जब आईं तो वो तो हँस पड़ीं, बोलीं यह तो 'लच्छा' है। फिर पता चला कि हमारा शब्द बुनकरों के बीच का है, बाजार का नहीं। पर काम तो दोनों से ही चलता है न।

When I first moved to Kolkata from Barasat, I called a simple slip 'jhuto' like we do at home. My neighbour, a proper Kolkata-bashi, smiled and said, "Didi, here we call it 'chappal'." It's funny, no? The same soil, but different words grow in it. Even my daughter in Mumbai now says 'slippers' — a third word altogether. Languages travel with people, and people are always on the move.

Reading your words on dialects, I think of how my father called the first rain "marapachi baava", but my son only knows "pehla baarish". This word-mixing is like my field—Hyderabadi Urdu soil, Telugu seeds, now Hindi concrete growing over. Fusha Arabic? That is the old neem tree in the corner, roots deep, giving *sukun* in its shade. This talk of Modi-ji's plans for farmers...my neighbour Chander showed me a chart on his phone, numbers for water conservation. Good, but my *borewell* still coughs dust. Let the policy reach my *khetta* first, then we will see the *khushboo*.

The way we speak here in Manipur, we don't lose the word for *thum* — that fierce, sticky smell when the bamboo shoots are fermenting just right. My granddaughter in Delhi calls it "rotten," and I tell her, no, the old Meitei word holds the feeling of earth and patience, a thing that saves a meal. The *fascinating* (that English word she uses) truth is these local sayings carry a kind of justice — they were made by people who had to make much from little. And the state's proper tongue, that *fuksi* (formal Meitei), is good for paperwork, but it cannot name the herbs in my garden. You can write a hundred laws in perfect Arabic, but if the child still has no clean water, the word has failed.

Mere yahan Moradabad mein, ek purane customer aate hain, unke baap ne bhi mere paas katwaye the. Woh ke

അതായിരുന്നു... ഇവിടെ ഹോസ്പിറ്റലിൽ ഒരു വയോധികൻ 'വെക്കിൾ' എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞപ്പോൾ ഞാൻ കാർ ആണോ എന്ന് ഓർത്തു, പക്ഷേ അദ്ദേഹത്തിന് അർത്ഥം മോട്ടോർബൈക്ക് ആയിരുന്നു. അങ്ങനെ ഒരു വാക്കിൽ തന്നെ നമ്മുടെ ലോകങ്ങൾ വേർപെട്ടു നിൽക്കുന്നു. എന്നാലും അത് മനസ്സിലാക്കാൻ ശ്രമിക്കുന്ന നിമിഷങ്ങളാണ് എനിക്ക് ഏറ്റവും ഇഷ്ടം.

When a customer from Kohima asks for a 'rho' basket and another from Mokokchung calls it 'tsüngkotep', I already know which village they walked from before they tell me. Same cane, same weave — but the word changes with the mountain path. Thik ase. The name is just the road the word walked to reach me.