How Dileep Learned English : His days of struggle and Growth !!!
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| Dileep D Anand |
Monday, January 19, 2009
As I walked the 100 yards from the public bus terminal to the ferry station in Alleppey, in the southwestern state of Kerala, a horde of vendors and tour operators closed in for their mark. Alleppey is the primary point of entry to Kerala’s famous Backwaters, a 650 square mile area of man-made islands that were built by hand over the past 3,000 years and are now home to over two and half million people, most of whom live on the riverbanks and grow rice in paddies in the interior of the islands. Alleppey is the launching point for the booming Backwaters houseboat industry, which provides a deluxe, all-accommodations overnight boating tour through the rivers and canals.
I had a destination, a home-stay in a rural village, and I was taking a public ferry, so I politely declined all entreaties. Growing impatient at the persistence of the tourism agents, I then adopted my “tourist from New York” stance, in which I lower a shoulder and pretend I’m a burly running back charging across the goal line.
I arrived at the public ferry terminal and tried to get my bearings. Almost immediately, an Indian man in his mid-thirties approached me. I brushed him off without much thought. But he persisted, with a most-unusual question. “What are you reading now?” he asked, in flawless English. I paused for a second, assuming he was curious as to what guidebook got me there. “Are you reading a piece of literature at this moment?” he continued. Before I could answer, before I could even comprehend the question, he said, “I am reading the Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. It was recommended to me by my bookseller. He speaks only Malayalam, but has an excellent knowledge of all English literature.”
The man introduced himself as Dileep Anand, a part-time schoolteacher, part-time “guest relations specialist” in Alleppey. When Dileep has the day off from work, as he did on this particular day, he heads down to the docks and strikes up conversations with English-speaking foreigners. “I have to be very blunt with you,” he said, after I answered his initial question with a note of curiosity. “I thank God I’m on leave today, so that I may have an opportunity to practice English with you and expand my vistas of knowledge.”
Dileep started hanging around the Alleppey docks 15 years ago. In those days, his English was poor. “I would just use the guidebook phrases,” he said. “‘Hello. Name? Country?’” Nobody paid him much mind, and he had little success in promoting tours. He received some English instruction in his youth in Kerala, though he says his teachers were far from fluent themselves and lessons were conducted by rote memorization. (Classes were primarily in Malayalam, the Dravidian language spoken in Kerala.) “I was bad taught. I was ill taught. You could even say I was mal-taught,” he explained.
Then one day he met an Australian at a nearby coffee shop, and the two struck up a conversation that flourished into a prolonged friendship. “He was a world traveler. He knew Indonesian, and had a French beard,” Dileep said, sliding into an Australian accent. Sometime after the Australian left Alleppey, he sent Dileep a Roget’s Thesaurus, which Dileep would study and memorize. “Before, I was always stumbling and fumbling and mumbling with my words. Now, I have pristine, pure, immaculate practice in language.”
I was warming to Dileep. My ferry was delayed, so Dileep invited me for a chai at the coffee house where he first met the Australian. I demurred. Though I liked chatting with him, I still didn’t have a great read on Dileep, and I still retained a bit of my “tourist from New York” distrust and reticence. But Dileep insisted, and ultimately persuaded me to go with him. The coffee shop has a particularly special meaning for Dileep. “The coffee house is my Cambridge,” he explained. “The ferry dock is my Oxford.”
Once we sat down, he produced a pen and jotted on his bare hand some of the English aphorisms I used in the course of our conversation. His hand was already covered with sayings he’d picked up that day from other tourists. “A burr in my saddle,” he said, relaying what expressions he’d recently learned. Dileep then took more notes, in English, when I tried (rather poorly, I fear) to explain where the saying comes from.
Dileep makes his living teaching English to grade-schoolers, and supplements his income by getting short-term jobs as an English-speaking tour guide. He’s frustrated by his career situation. His father was also a schoolteacher, and Dileep was forced into teaching when his father fell ill and the family required immediate income. (Dileep’s only brother is a ticket collector on a Kerala state-run bus.) “I never wanted to teach languages in grade schools,” Dileep said. “You could say it was not by choice, but by chance.”
What Dileep really wants to do is to go to a Western school for an advanced degree in English literature so that he can teach higher education. He wants to leave India for good, in part because of his frustrations with Indian society. “In India, for example, people simply sneak into the queues. There [English-speaking countries], people follow the rules of the road. For example, no one in India is bothered by the pollution. And here there is too much corruption, bureaucracy, and hierarchy.” He cited T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” to explain what he saw as the spiritual bankruptcy in India’s increasing material wealth. The only thing that would keep him in India, he said, is if he decided to get married.
When I asked Dileep to describe his favorite piece of English literature, he recited a passage from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken:” “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both…” he said.
“What does the poem mean for you,” I asked.
“It’s about the choices you make,” he said. “‘To be or not to be, that is the question—’”
“Whether ’tis nobler…” I picked up, then trailed off, not knowing any more of the passage.
“Yes, exactly,” Dileep responded, merrily. “Whether to marry. Whether to learn English. Whether to go to the coffee house. Whether to live materially or spiritually.”
“Is this why you like it? Because it’s about the ability to make choices?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dileep said. “And also because it’s beautiful, melodious, and sonorous.”
Posted by Matt Schwarzfeld, Freelance writer.
Labels: education, Kerala, middle-class, tourism
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