4/26/2005 » Musings

Yesterday, while walking through Williamsburg (official neighborhood motto: ‘We’re Hipper than You’), I ran into a blonde wearing a flowy top, blue jeans and a reflective red teardrop bindi. She had an American accent.

In a rambunctious Meatpacking District bar, I met a woman whose parents were German. She was tall, brown-haired and fair and had grown up in India. She had a Delhi accent.

At a self-storage business, I met a manager who looked black. He had a courtly manner and a delightful accent, and his nametag said Seetram (Sitaram). He was surprised and pleased when I guessed Guyanese.

In college, the hardest partier in the entire coed dorm was a girl from a wealthy Bombay family. We’d always see pot smoke curling out the bottom of her door and hear inflated stories about her extracurriculars. She once told me, ‘English is my native language, yaar. I can hardly speak Hindi.’ She had that aggressive Bombay accent, the hard one used by young men on the make, not the singsong one nor the Marathi tapori.

On Fifth Avenue, an older Spaniard once accosted me for directions. I switched into passable Spanish; she looked at me as if I were a curio under glass. ‘¡Ay, Lupe, vea qué bien habla!’ she told her companion. ‘¡Y es Hindú!’ Hindoo, always Hindoo. In Spanish, my accent is light. I walk up to a bodega, they address me in Spanish, and if the exchange is short enough they’re none the wiser.

In Barcelona, a middle-aged cab driver with a rich baritone guessed I was Latin American, narrowing it down to either México or Costa Rica. He was very good, because I had picked up my Spanish from a costarricense teacher in a California high school. In his mind, the Hindú bit was of least importance.

In New York cabs, if you can pull out authentically-accented Hindi or Punjabi, you’ll not only bond with the driver, some sardarjis will even refuse payment. They’ll say they figured you for whitewashed, but since you speak the mother tongue... You press the fare upon them anyway and walk away happy.

In 1993 I rode my motorcycle from San Francisco to Seattle and back, pausing overnight at a remote motel in Crescent City near the California-Oregon border. The motel owner was happy to hear Hindi. It’s a pity I didn’t have Gujarati in my repertoire for that extra discount.

Congratulations, Mr. Rupinder. You’ve successfully passed just this once. But you’re only as good as your last con.