It takes me not even twenty seconds to recognize that the cab driver is from North Karnataka. He is talking on the phone to a friend who, as far as I can tell, is also a cab driver. The two of them are exchanging notes on their day so far: the routes they have covered, the money they have made or not made. Humdrum stuff but I listen to the conversation with a keenness usually reserved for free investment advice and the divine word. There was a time when I used to text my wife about this, even if she was there in the car next to me. THIS CABBIE IS FROM THE SAME PART OF THE COUNTRY AS ME, I would type. These days, all I need to do is turn my head. She can tell from my smile what is on my mind.
“You should tell them you’re from North Karnataka as well,” she said to me once. “Have a conversation with them.” I balked at this suggestion, at the prospect of inviting the attention of a stranger. I told her, and myself, that I was content with recognizing where the driver was from; I was content with hearing a slice of home.
Karnataka, in the southern part of the country, is one of twenty-eight Indian states. Its capital, Bangalore, was once an idyllic summer destination for British colonial officers. Now it is a dense, cosmopolitan city of about fourteen million better known for its tech industry. It has a landscape dotted with lakes and parks, narrow roads and stifling traffic, craft breweries and chic dessert parlors, shiny offices made of glass and concrete, and old houses that have been around for decades.
My childhood was spent far away from all of this, in the dusty, impoverished region of northernmost Karnataka. There is a cognitive dissonance that comes with living in the far north of South India, one that rears its head whenever you claim to be a South Indian only to discover that you have several things in common with the North. Some similarities are tangible, such as the wheat and millets we eat as staple foods, not rice like the rest of the South. Others are less so; the underfunded schools and the low life expectancies of North Karnataka’s districts would not be out of place in a North Indian state such as Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.
I spent most of my childhood in North Karnataka, though I did not spend it all in one place. My family was always on the move back in those days. We would live in a town for a year, two years, before upping sticks and moving elsewhere, only for the same thing to repeat itself down the line. I never studied in the same school for an extended period, never stayed in any one place long enough to make lasting friendships. It was a nomadic childhood in a limited sense, the same way a street dog in a city has plenty of places where it goes to sleep all of which lie within a short radius of each other.
I moved to Bangalore as a teenager, in the middle of eighth grade. The city dazzled me at first with all the things that I had grown up without: malls and multiplexes, Domino’s and Pizza Hut, more channels on cable TV than I knew what to do with. It was everything that a child born and bred in a city takes for granted but which, for me, was the high watermark of an unbelievably luxurious lifestyle. Other aspects of the city contrived to disorient me, however. There was the scale of the place, the sheer distance between one locality and another—and the sheer number of people who lived in these localities.
Time passed, more than fifteen years of it, which is more than half my lifetime on this earth. I finished my schooling, attended university, worked at a few different places, but no matter how far I go or how many people I meet, there are parts of the city that will forever remain beyond my understanding.
Though it may sound strange, the hardest thing has been the local language. I grew up speaking a different Kannada at home. In Bangalore, I have had to relearn the language all over again.
The local language makes it sound like there is one version, one dialect of Kannada that everyone in the state speaks. But this isn’t the case at all. Take this cab driver, for instance. He is talking to a creditor, asking for an extension on some money that he owes the man. Like the other driver, he is also from North Karnataka and in that accent that I know so well, he pleads, he begs, he offers to make a partial payment now, today, right after he’s done with this trip, my trip. The creditor is on the speakerphone, and I can tell that he is from South Karnataka—Bangalore perhaps, or a place close to it like Mysore or Tumkur. The discordant mishmash of their words and accents makes it seem like they’re conducting the conversation in two different languages. The car feels claustrophobic, even though I have the whole backseat to myself. I crank down the window to let in air and to focus on my breathing as if I’m suffering from a bout of motion sickness.
The conversation is going badly for the driver. The creditor is adamant that there can be no further extension on the loan. Would he have still arrived at this decision if the driver had been from South Karnataka? It’s entirely possible that he’s a hard-nosed businessman unused to being merciful, but I can’t help thinking that he doesn’t feel a pull of kinship with the driver on account of the differences in the way they speak. A part of me wants to lean forward and tap the driver on the shoulder. “Don’t speak like that,” I want to tell him. “If you speak like we do, you might as well be from Lucknow or Kolkata for all he cares.”
In the eighth grade, which I completed in North Karnataka, mere months before the move to Bangalore, there was a boy at school who was from the South, the only one of his ilk in my class. Every time he said he wanted a bit of something—some chalk or chocolate, say—the class would laugh, and, to his utter and abiding bewilderment, some would pretend to scratch him. Churu means a little in the South, chur means to scratch in the North. I laughed with the rest of them.
My parents lived in North Karnataka for longer than I did, spending all their time there before I was born, only shifting to Bangalore in their middle age. And yet, at times they pepper their speech with words and turns of phrase that you would only ever hear in the South. Every time this happens, I want to draw attention to it. “What is this?” I demand of them. “Why are you speaking like that?” I have even mocked the way they say those words or phrases.
When I consider memories like these, sometimes I wonder what my wife makes of these less-than-exemplary traits: my conformity, my arrogance, my bigotry, and my shame at them all. Her father is from the northern state of Bihar, her mother is from Tamil Nadu in the South, and she did most of her schooling in the capital of Delhi. But because she grew up speaking English at home and at school as well, she grew up without the same language confusion. At home, we speak English.
This cab driver is trying to coax his friend into gambling. A new season of Indian Premier League is on the horizon and, according to him, it’s an opportunity to mint money. He talks about spreads and odds. Judging by how hard he’s pushing his agenda, his friend is reluctant to part with his hard-earned money. You won’t lose anything, he reassures the man over and over, this is all upside and no downside, you put in the money like I’m telling you to, and you’ll always make it back, usually with a healthy profit on top.
Hearing him con and lie, I feel ill at ease. I’m almost at the end of my journey when I realize that the nature of this uneasiness, this discomfort, is identical to what you experience when a cousin or an uncle makes an off-color joke at a public gathering. It’s that same impulse that makes you want to declare you don’t know this person, that people shouldn’t judge you because you’re related to him. That the person on the other end of the phone call may also be from North Karnataka doesn’t mitigate the feeling at all.
There are plenty of stereotypes out there about the way people from North Karnataka speak and, by extension, the kind of people we are. Our diction is gruff and crude, they say, a far cry from the melodious and erudite way in which people from the South speak. We don’t enunciate properly. We hack words into small bits that sit like jagged pieces of broken glass in our own mouths and in the ears of our listeners. On top of all this, our speech is impure, borrowing words and phrases from neighboring states, studded here and there with Marathi and Urdu like bitter seeds in a sweet dish.
In the defiant North, however, all these aspects of our speech became things to be proud of. Our diction is gruff and crude, yes, but that’s because we’re straight-talking folk. Unlike other people from the state, we don’t drip venom in dulcet tones. What you hear is what you get. Sure, we chop up and mangle words, but we save so much time when we speak. We don’t need long speeches to get our points across; we don’t waffle on like politicians at an election rally; we don’t test the patience of the people listening to us. And yes, the language we speak has traces of other tongues, but don’t most of these Indian languages have common ancestors? And who decides what is pure anyway? This is our defiance, my defiance.
When I was a child, there was a Kannada soap opera that aired on TV. I don’t remember its name, nor do I remember anything about its plot. I watched a few episodes of it with my parents, and the only reason we did so was because the show was ostensibly set in North Karnataka. The actors did a bad job of pretending to be from the region. Yes, they wore ilkal saris and slathered vibhuthi on their foreheads and ate curries made of stuffed brinjal, but the accent with which they spoke was so jarring that any person from North Karnataka would have winced upon hearing it.
At its worst the show was othering us, but it never felt mean-spirited. The execution may have been clumsy and flawed, but the intent behind it was to showcase a community that isn’t always seen on screen. At its best, the show was seeing my people—the way we spoke, dressed, and ate—in an idealized and romanticized light. A defiant attitude is not without its benefits but tempering it with a nuanced understanding of this difference will stop you from becoming a chest-beating stereotype.
This driver is talking to his wife or his girlfriend, I’m not sure which. His phone, attached to a holder on the dashboard, displays the name “My Sweetheart” followed by three red hearts. He has wireless earphones plugged in and is speaking with such gentleness that I feel like an eavesdropper who snuck into the car.
Not that the one-sided conversation I’m privy to is risqué or scandalous. He asks her if she had lunch and when she says yes—or at least, I assume that she says yes—he asks her what she ate. He intones every food item out loud, as if he is savoring it from afar. Rotis made of sorghum. Karbele, a soupy pigeon pea recipe with some leafy vegetables thrown in at times. A chutney made of roasted groundnuts, lots of garlic, and red chilies.
Hearing this exchange between the man and his sweetheart makes me hungry. Ever since I got married, I only eat this kind of food when I visit the home of my parents. I can’t complain, not when my parents live in Bangalore as well, but the distance to home sometimes feels like it’s more than a simple forty-minute cab ride within the city.
I thought about this a few months ago when I was visiting one of my wife’s relatives. Her uncle, a man from Bihar, remarked over the course of the evening that he considers himself a Bangalorean. He and his wife have been working in the city for over a decade now. They own a flat here and their children go to school in the city. By all accounts, it is a reasonable assertion to make.
And yet, hearing it made me feel uneasy. Even after all these years, I still hesitate to call myself a Bangalorean. This, when the parts of North Karnataka I spent so much of my childhood in are only about three or four hundred miles from the city.
It all came back to the language. This uncle of my wife’s didn’t know any Kannada, neither the dialect spoken in Bangalore nor the one from North Karnataka. In fact, it was possible that he didn’t even know that variations of the language exist within the state. He never had to hide his origin, he never had to pretend that the language belonged as much to him as it did to the locals.
I was at an unenviable halfway point, neither a full-blown local nor a stranger from far away. I hesitate to say that I belong to this city because the city, and its people, seem reluctant to claim me as one of their own. Every time a local recognizes my accent and my dialect and then asks where I am from, I feel like an outsider.
Sometimes it happens: the listener becomes the listened. I reach the end of my cab ride, and the driver asks me, point-blank and without any preamble, where I’m from. Perhaps he heard me talking on the phone with my parents, or perhaps he noticed my accent when I read out the code to start the ride after I got into the car. If it’s the latter, it means that he has been sitting on this question for the whole journey.
Where am I from? The question sounds so different coming from him than it would from a Bangalorean. And chances are, the cab driver already knows where I’m from, like I usually know where he is from. And yet he asks, a cautiousness to the question that is at odds with the bluntness of its broaching. This caution disappears when he hears my answer. Me too, he exclaims as a sudden smile erupts on his face. He then proceeds to tell me all about his hometown without any prodding.
This sudden attention, this barrage of information without any reciprocity from my end, used to unnerve me. When it happens these days, I marvel at the connection the driver feels with me. I am grateful that our shared language makes it possible. Maybe one day I’ll heed my wife’s advice after all and talk about myself too.
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Illustrations by Allison Saeng
