Banana (बनाना, नही केला)

We hired our first female supervisor this week (Mala, माला), and besides the fact that it's great to start having female field staff, she's been an additional blessing for an unexpected reason: she doesn't speak English. Plenty of our supervisors and surveyors don't speak English, but she is on a mission to teach me Hindi, so I'm learning fast.

I actually think it's a big conspiracy between Radhika (another RA) and our new Field Manager, Sabahat. Radhika very seriously sat Mala down and explained that it was very important that she learn some English and that she get me to learn some Hindi.* And even though Mala and I try to rope Sabahat into translating for us, he usually holds firm.

Since Radhika's pronouncement, Mala has been taking basically every opportunity to point to things and drill me on what they are in Hindi ( हिंदी मे). And she has plenty of chances because she, Sabahat and Rakesh (another new supervisor) have been staying at my apartment this week. After all the trouble Jeff and I went to when we first moved here to find a tutor, I should have just hired Mala in July!

The first two months we lived here, I studied Hindi pretty regularly, but Lalu threw a major wrench in my plans for my free time, and work is so incessant that it's difficult to set time aside for much of anything. So I'm in this ridiculous situation where I really need to speak Hindi, but don't have the time or mental capacity to devote to learning it. But these short, intense conversations with Mala are great - she's very patient, and since we're at nearly the same language level in each other's language, it's a very fair trade.

Tonight, Mala and I made मटर पुलाव ("maTar pulao," or "pea casserole") - I asked her to show me something simple. It turned out really well! And in the process I finally learned what "banana" (बनाना) means - it's something people use all the time. It has twenty different meanings in Google Translate, but the most fundamental is "make"; in the context of dinner, it meant to prepare dinner. So we all had a good laugh over our मटर पुलाव about "making bananas" (the title of this post means "make, not banana").

*For the record, I'm not a complete nincompoop when it comes to speaking Hindi - I do know some basic words and phrases, and as long as the person I'm talking to speaks slowly (धीरा धीरा), I can mostly follow along.