Faking an accent in the elevator

You know those people who go abroad for a month on some training program to New York, are made to stay in an apartment in Jersey City that's being shared by 3 other Indians, find an Indian store to buy groceries from, go partying with their Indian friends except for the one night when their local co-workers took them out (pictures of which are instantly put up on facebook), stay back an extra week to vacation with their aunt in NJ who takes them to Niagara Falls (the American side) and an outlet mall from where they buy a GAP sweatshirt which will be their uniform for the next 12 months, and then come back to India with an American accent?

I used to scoff at such people. "Bah!" I would say, secure and proud in my natural tongue, "I scoff at such people!"

Today, I'm not scoffing.

In fact, I'm the opposite of scoffing. That is, if the opposite of scoffing is cringing. With embarrassment. And a feeling of "Et Me Brutus?" (Or is it "Me Tu Brutus"? Damn you Google's language tools. You're about as useful as a bail-out plan that gets rejected.)

Anyway! Let's just tackle one language at a time. And that language is English. One that I thought i was fluent in, had spoken and written in long enough for it to be part of my identity. My strong, proud Indian identity which I love to flaunt whenever i can. And that identity comes with an accent. A nice urban Indian English accent with it's own rules for pronouncing a fairly decent sized vocabulary. And most importantly, an accent that I believed could be understood by all.

Not true.

It all began at Starbucks. As I rattled off a rather lengthy order to a cashier one day I found that instead of hurrying the process along, my regular speed of talking had doubled the time it took for him to figure just what the hell it was I wanted.
Evidently I'llgetacafemochatallandastrawberrycoffeecakeplease is as good as me placing my order in Hindi. Lesson 1: Speak sloooooowly.

The problem with speaking slowly then was that it made me lose my entire rhythm. You know, how everyone speaks in a certain rhythm? In any given sentence, you tend to go high on some words, low on others, elongate some, skip lightly over others and pause when you want to create an effect?

Like right now?

Well, with my normal speaking speed being cut by 60%, I'd totally lost my rhythm. I was coming across as ET trying to order a mocha and a strawberry coffee cake. I. Simply. Could. Not. Go. On. Speaking. Like. This.

Losing your rhythm when you're nearly 30 is not an easy blow to deal with it. Fortunately, this impediment only arose when I spoke to Americans. Unfortunately when you live in America you tend to speak to a lot of Americans and therefore the problem would rear its ugly head quite often.

Like a lumberjack without his saw, a musician without her instrument, a sitcom without canned laughter, I felt helpless and handicapped. I simply had no way left of communicating. And thus the unthinkable happened. Without even realising it (at first), I started to speak with an American accent.

It began small. Words like "like" and "mmm-hmmm" entered my vernacular. I found myself using "yeaaah" quite unnecessarily. Then the lilt of the words started to change. Soon a whole new rhythm was born, an ugly bastard of a child that was neither Indian nor American.
It horrifies me and grates on my ears. But for some reason, my brain has no control over my mouth! While I'm perfectly normal when I speak to my own countrymen, place me in front of the other 5/6th of the world and just hear me go!

There's more.

Lately, it's not just the way I speak, even the words are coming out all wrong. My car runs on "gas", I get my food "to-go", I travel in an "elevator" and horrors! I actually asked another Asian how much a "gallon" of milk in her country was.

Everyone's heard of ABCDs - American Born Confused Desis. I wonder - just what do you call an Indian-born super-confused recent-entrant-to-America desi?