Just to be clear, I don’t know who these women are. Although I’m sure if I threw a dart into a herd of girls here, my chances of impaling someone named Lydia or Olivia are fairly decent — and I’m pretty sure I suck at darts.
But too often now, I have been mistaken for someone with the above nomenclature. I can hear myself say “Divya” with almost aggressive clarity and enunciation, but somehow my name comes out of my mouth, goes into an invisible white-people translator and comes out minus two consonants plus one unnecessary vowel. I guess it balances out — I look foreign to their eyes, and the words they call me are certainly very foreign to my ears.
Why now, though, you ask? Surely people have butchered my name before without me screaming about it on the Internet? Why have I taken sudden #offence? I’ll tell you, curious reader. In the last three years, my tongue has fallen prey to a changing accent. The first year at college was particularly vulnerable — when I talked, more often than not, my peers at college would tilt their heads to the side and put A+ effort into a spectacular mispronunciation. This exercise of repeat-after-me would have continued tirelessly if I weren’t smart and quick to adapt, like a cheetah. I figured out all I needed to do was roll a couple of r‘s and exhale more rigorously and they would suddenly understand that I was speaking the same language as they were. (This is quite unlike a cheetah.)
On the flip side, every time I Skyped with my family, friends and dear friends, at least one word would inadvertently come out sounding American and the conversation would immediately involve heavily raised eyebrows, knowing smiles and “Oho! Ohoho! I like that accent!” So then I put reasonable effort into sounding like my actual self — pretty straightforward considering I had 18 years of practice and 18 megatons of pride.
Having two varying ways of speaking does give me some indigestion though— I often feel like I live a lie or like I live two lives, a situation I can accurately describe as being rather yucky. I barely have the stamina and upper body strength for one life, so an extra accent seems like an unnecessary accessory. I now concentrate all my brainpower and tongue into having one consistent accent. But this kind of hard work always gets thwarted by women named Livia, Lydia or Vivien, none of whom are me. And incidents like the following. Wait till you hear this — it’s going to rock your world.
For three years now, once a week, I have purchased a burrito bowl from Chipotle. If I feel ambitious, I’ll buy it twice a week, and if I feel really sorry for myself, thri still only twice. This means once a week, I recite the same words and ingredients to the person who makes one of my favorite meals. Yesterday, I went along the line reciting ingredients when I said corn and the lady heard guac.
I stopped salivating at the corn for a second and looked up at her, agony in my eyes, confusion in my brain and hunger in my stomach. I did some quick calculations and decided that the movement of a human mouth forming the word corn in any accent differs vastly from the movement required for forming the word guac. I know, because I performed this mouth exercise in all accents at home and I reached the same conclusion— corn could not possibly be mistaken for guac. But get this: the second I tried pronouncing it as kohrn (fake news) as opposed to pronouncing it as con (real news), the clouds parted and she understood I wanted the North American cereal plant and not Instagram’s favorite way to spend money on green paste. This was surely not a common mispronunciation.
I rarely, if ever, use the term “idiot” frivolously. But this lady without a doubt possessed oozing amounts of idiocy between her left and right ear. I obviously didn’t tell her that because I didn’t want her dumping guac or worse, sour cream, in my rice bowl. But as I tread home clutching my bowl like a baby, I pondered. I contemplated. I silently but visibly mouthed corn and guac as I walked on the street, immediately raising the public’s opinion of me to tremendous heights. This was a petty trap to be in — I made it easier for people to understand what I was saying by giving my tongue some occasional exercise, but now they wouldn’t understand me otherwise! What if my tongue required a rest day? Rest is good for the body. Every social media fitness star says so, so it must be true.
It also stopped being amusing when I realized that switching back is about as easy as getting my spelling right on a coffee cup (not easy). It takes conscious effort now to speak the way I used to for 18 years. That number is accurate, since a baby’s crying, however disgusting, is also a polished language that’s fairly easy to understand. But I persist, much like a cheetah. I stopped playing games with my tongue. I sound uniform now, mostly. There are still a few intelligent people who think I don’t “sound Indian” even when I speak the way I do with friends and family. This is strange. Nobody I know sounds like Big Bang Theory‘s Raj, if that’s what the expected standard was. But I know when a few problems are not mine to solve — I cannot singlehandedly cure an IQ, for instance. Such is life.
Here’s a true thing that happened in real life: when someone asks me to spell my name, sometimes they also have trouble understanding (or hearing? I’m not sure at this point) just the English alphabet that’s coming out of my mouth. Incredible, but true. So I solved that by spelling my name in painstaking detail: “D for Dog, I for India, V for Vermont, Y for Yacht, A for Apple.” I know nobody needs to recite for the alphabet “A” but good kids go the extra mile. Some of those other alphabets could have been easier also, but you see, a lot of things would have been easier if people just took the time and patience to understand, with their full two human ears, that I wanted corn and not guac.
The Fourth PowerPuff Girl 