Small talks

When we are small it is natural to confuse or mispronounce certain words. We all would have definitely experienced such moments in our lives.

I remember, when I was small I used to call lorry, ‘roliya’. No matter how much I tried, sometime the word always flipped the other way round. This week’s memory lane is going to be on such kind of small talks, the stuff we all have experienced.

Some time back, I was working for another organisation, where the music was always played in the milieu. During that time, the song ‘mal pan podak’ was a hit. I remember, it was one of my favourite as well, so most of the time I used to hum or sing along when the song was being played. Sometimes, I go wrong while picking the words. Anyhow, this is what I ended up singing....

‘Mal pan podak
Ginigath hadhin
Isinna wagei
Mata obey adare’

A close friend and a senior colleague came over to me. “Anuki, you sang well Nanga, but there is a small hitch. It should be ‘kinitthak agin, not ginigath hadhin’, she said with a smirk.

Trust me, I just couldn’t control my laughter at finding how stupidly I have switched the words. When I related Samadhi about this experience she just couldn’t control her laughter, where I had to issue some kind of an order to stop her laughing loud, yet sweet laugh.

Yah, I do have a wicked laugh and my boyfriend makes me laugh all the time with his silly innocent mistakes. When he was young - but mind you, not very young - he used to refer to every other tarred road as ‘Galle Road’ and to elephant droppings as ‘elephant cow dung’!

He is an ecologist and a tree hugger by birth I think. One day we were on the bus after a hard day’s work, returning home, when all of a sudden he picked up his mobile saying he had to make a call, call to his brother on an urgent matter, I was told. Something was wrong with the land line at the other end and so he had to literally yell into the phone so that his brother could hear.

“Malli, a hungolla (slug) may come to eat my cabbage sapling on the shelf.” But there was static and his brother couldn’t hear. The bus was somewhat crowded and I was afraid that someone might hear his conversation about his cabbage plant and the slug. And me being my ever eruptible self, was already trying in vain to smother my laughter with both hands over my mouth.

My boyfriend saw me laughing and before he could repeat the sentence, burst out laughing himself, at the obvious silliness of what he was saying in a bus full of people. He hung up not able to suppress his laughter and as a way of explanation said, “The slug has got used to eating my cabbages.”

This particular type of experience was faced by Samadhi as well and thanks to her I had a good laugh. Well, she is always good at cheering me up when I am down. She and her father were together on a threewheeler and were on their way to buy something. Her father has got down.

There was this one guy who has been watching her throughout while she was seated inside the threewheeler. After a short while, he had come closer and preferred his number written on a piece of paper. She had refused to take it and had said so in plain English.

And this was his retort “why? why? why? why? why?....” Samadhi had indeed felt sorry for him but at the same time she told me if he was not fluent in English, he should have tried to speak to her in our mother tongue to which I certainly agreed. When they try to be what they’re not, they end up being the laughing stock of the society.