Magazine of March - 2010 - Rups.net

The ‘Amchi’ angleSav i tr i Ba b u l k a r, Mu m b a iWhen we first begin to lisp, it is Amchi we speakbecause it is Amchi we are exposed to. We automaticallybegin to connect everything to the limited vocabularyat our disposal.I thought it was an Amchi who had first starteddispensing Homeopathic remedies. Most stomachailments were treated with three doses of ‘Laxumakka’– to be given an hour before-or-after a meal. It wasonly years later that I heard of Hahnemann and of‘Nux Vomica’….The ladies sat in the open verandah of Grandpa’ssprawling shapeless house in Manjeshwar, cheerfullyrolling out papads. We girls were determined to helpand refused to be dissuaded. Ultimately, each one ofus was given a board, a rolling pin, and a tiny portionof the dough – Grandma’s fool-proof trick to keepus out of their hair. Our male cousins sneered at ourattempts.“Tch-tch-tch-tch… Papads should look like papads,not like badly drawn outline maps of Australia.” Weglared at them and raised our rolling pins. They madea mock escape.Dinkermaam soon came on the scene and beganhumming the tune of a popular film hit - “Ek kalisomething-me chali, rahti thee sadaa something-s--omes-ome-thing”Then, he added his own lyrics: “Ekitchalli laattu basshili…” Years later, my cousin Guruduttcalled out to his maternal great–grandmother to listento ‘her’ song on the radio. Gurudutt’s ingeniousversion of it was: “Indire ke pantchee re-e-e-e tera dard najaane koi”. Our knowledge of Hindi being negligible,we would never have guessed it was ‘pinjre ke panchi’the singer was addressing!As teenagers in Bombay, most of the extendedfamily landed in Lonavla during the summervacations. Amulpachi lived there with her Railway-Engineer husband, Gopalbappa. There were giantjamun trees, quaint brick bungalows with prettyglass windows, and garden plots spilling over withcolourful blossoms. The Railway Colony looked likea picture postcard come alive.Gopalbappa’s mother, Subhadrakka, played3-0-4 and Panch-Teen-Do with us while the radio saton the side-table entertaining us with film songs.Subhadrakka loved music, but she once protestedagainst the lyricist’s choice of words.“Chup-chup-khade-ho-zaroor-koi-baat-hai – that I canunderstand. But what does he mean by ‘paili-mulakhaat-hai-re-paili-mula-khaat-hai’?Whoever heard of amother eating her first-born?” Her mix-up is easilyexplained - she spoke both Hindi and Marathi. OfUrdu, she knew nothing. Nor did we, of course. Weonly knew that ‘mulaquaat’ was pronounced with aguttural sound….My brothers-in-law Sunil and Sharad who grew upin Delhi speak their own brand of Amchi. Sunil neversays ‘whai’- it is always ‘hoi’. Sharad, who was oncevisiting his ‘maavlo’ Balmaam in Dharwad, told afellow-passenger that he was going to his “maanvaangelghaara”!Dimple (Shobhna), my niece raised in Jamshedpur,spoke a queer Hindi-Amchi at the age of six. When wearrived in Jamshedpur on a holiday she hugged mymother-in-law and eagerly said, “Ammama, aaji haanvtugel saatha sawthaa”. If you think she was planningto search an umbrella, you’d be way off the mark.Her statement was a loose translation of “Aaj maiaap ke saath soungi”. If she saw a ‘cchipkali ‘ anywhere‘deevaraari’, she quickly moved to a safe distance fromthe lizard….I once overheard Leelakka of Delhi telling Mrs.Kapur in her inimitable Amchi-Hindi that her “sirrme sannnn hota hai” because she had been walking in“rann-rani dhoop” that noon. My own cousin Chitratold me that our niece in America was engaged toa boy called Philip Kearney (pronounced ‘Carney’).For convenience, she’d given him an Amchi name –Dilip Karnik.What revived all these memories was the latestAmchi jingle in a TV ad for a toilet soap. Playfullychasing his wife just out of her beauty bath, thehusband says, of all things, “Hooni-hooni saar-upkarikelli magal Priyaan-aaji”. Try and figure that out! I giveyou one guess!36Vol. 91, No.3, March 2010Kanara Saraswat