LIFE ON THE OF-SIDE
BESPOKE ENGLISH COINAGE
A remote-area posting, they said, was essential in the early years of one’s career – a good learning experience. Ashley fresh from the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie, certainly expected to learn a lot, though not quite the way he had envisaged.
Having spent his formative years surviving the rigorous, somewhat snobbish crucibles of the ICSE board, during its twilight-dependency on the University of Cambridge, he arrived with a comfortable, perhaps insufferable, certainty that his English was superior to that of anyone he was likely to encounter. His spellings were pristine, his syntax flawless. He was a product of an ivory-tower education, steeped in the linguistic traditions of Her Majesty’s realm.
Here, somewhere in Central India, however, lay the autonomous-varsity turf of the hinterlands. It was here that he would be introduced to a dialect that did not merely deviate from the standard; it waged a veritable war against the language. To say it was a “far cry” from the Queen’s English would be an understatement. A triumphant, primal howl would have been closer to the mark.
The first true ambassador of this fast-fraying edge of the linguistic frontier was an official from the employees’ welfare department. He marched into the young officer’s office with a case for financial assistance for an employee’s wife. A meticulously prepared report of his field investigations was placed on the table. By all accounts, it was a model bureaucratic document, complete with the date indicating that it had been typed on the 16th of Octomber.
Ashley paused, tapping the page with the tip of his ballpoint pen.
“Whatever the merits of the investigation,” he said, “the spelling here needs to be corrected to ‘October’.”
The clerk looked at him quizzically.
It was a look that Ashley would come to know intimately over the years – a mixture of pity and mild amusement, with a whiff of superiority. It was the very look that schoolchildren gave one another as they tumbled over the iambs of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”.
“It is spelt O-c-t-o-b-e-r.”
“I am sorry, Sir,” the clerk replied, a massive, embarrassed grin spreading across his face. He looked mortified – on Ashley’s behalf – deeply uncomfortable that his city-bred superior could blunder at the fundamentals.
“But I think my spelling is correct.”
“Why don’t you refer to a dictionary?”
“Sir!?” The clerk sounded almost insulted. “No need to refer, Sir!” he declared, his eyes flashing with the triumph of an oncoming, unassailable logical deduction.
“Everybody knows … last four months of the year are September, Octomber, November, December. All ending with YEM-BEE-EE-YARR, Sir!”
All the ems were emphasised for Ashley’s benefit.
He could almost hear the echo of an abracadabra somewhere. The sheer sorcery of the clerk’s spelling left him nonplussed. Caught between the urge to laugh in the man’s face and the temptation to marvel at an architectural logic that boldly bypassed the hallowed foundations of the Oxford English Dictionary, Ashley’s head went into a spiral.
“Um… uh… oh,” he stammered.
“So, Sir. You want to change it?”
Notice, the clerk had chosen the word “change”. Not “correct”.
“Uh… no. Let it be,” Ashley muttered, waving his hand in a meaningless gesture. He could already visualise the clerk in the staff room later that afternoon, trading triumphant back-slaps with his colleagues, narrating how he had been forced to teach the new boss the basic mechanics of the Gregorian calendar.
Ashley turned back to the file, his palms growing slightly damp as he braced himself for whatever lexical landmines lay ahead. But his visitor was in an expansive mood, clearly eager for an intellectual exchange.
“Sir, you were born-and-brought-up in Bombay?” That was one word. Not hyphenated.
“Yes,” Ashley replied, immediately on guard, bracing himself for the inevitable follow-up: Do they not teach you spellings in these metropolitan schools?
“I been to Bombay, Sir. Last year. Official work.”
The clerk puffed out his chest, immensely proud of a coastal excursion funded by the state exchequer.
“Oh, really?” Ashley said, relieved to be pivoted away from the calendar. “Was that your first time? How did you like—”
“Very morden place, Sir,” the clerk interrupted, “but the peepuls there are so crowdy.”
“Crowdy?”
The word tripped Ashley up so badly that he let morden slide past completely unaddressed. In perplexity not far different from Moses in a similar situation, he let the peepuls go.
“Yes, Sir. I had to go to the Secretariat from Churrichgate Station. It was horribal, Sir! Pushing, dashing on the platform. Then rushing on the road. No walking. Every peepul is running.”
“Ah, yes. I see what you mean. There are a lot of peepul … er, people.”
“Yes, Sir. But the great city is detiorating.”
“Deteriorating,” Ashley interjected, enunciating with deliberate, slow-motion clarity. “De-ter-io-rating.”
He was no longer even attempting to tutor the clerk. He was simply trying to anchor his own pronunciation before it detiorated under the man’s gravitational pull.
“Yes, Sir, detiorating. You see the slums and gabrage everywhere…”
“Garbage. Ga-rba-ge. Right.”
Before the clerk could reiterate the omnipresence of the urban gabrage, Ashley gently tapped the folder.
“Let’s get back to the matter at hand.”
“Yes, Sir. Kindly adjust, Sir.” It was Ashley’s turn to look at him quizzically. He would come to understand that term as to compromise, not be too strict about the rules. Adjustment could extend to simply overlooking a peripheral document or a relatively insignificant piece of evidence. It would lead sometimes to a tight-rope walk between welfare or compassion and ethics or integrity – how much adjustment could be done?
The clerk was now at his persuasive best.
“Kindly adjust, Sir. This lady needs urrgent assistance because that fellow, her husband, is slightly dismantle.”
Ashley blinked, the cogs in his head grinding to a halt.
“He is what?”
The clerk raised his right index finger to his temple and executed a vivid, clockwise screwdriver motion against his skull: “Dismantle.”
“Oh, and how do you spell that? D-I-S-M-A-N-T-L-E?”
“No, Sir!”
This time, the clerk’s gaze transcended mere confusion. It bordered on pure, unadulterated intellectual contempt: “D-I-S-M-E-N-T-A-L. Dis-mantal, Sir!”
Ashley stared at him, completely captivated.
Dis-mental.
Disturbed mental faculties – stripped down to their bare components.
It was, in its own bizarre way, an absolute masterpiece of etymological efficiency. Paired with the choreography of the screwdriver gesture, it was a structural improvement on the English language that Cambridge could never have conceived.
“You, please do one thing, Sir. Just approve it. She is eating my brain anyway.”
The sheer brilliance of it broke through Ashley’s defences. How could he fight a tide of such magnificent, bespoke creativity?
“Oh! Yes, of course,” he murmured, picking up his pen.
And he just had to “do one thing”. Another expression that would follow him everywhere he went. He did that “one thing.” He didn’t ask what was being done to help the husband in the long run; he never questioned the chap’s interest in the case – or his wife.
He did not know it then, but thus began a 33-year-long process of dismantling …
Or was it dis-mentalling?
He was not sure. He would never be sure.
