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Monday, December 19, 2005 backdated post

When will I ever have a decent conversation with my MIL? I realized that I have not talked to her since the time we were back from Pak. Not that I don’t get along well with her or she hates me, in fact she likes me a lot but the only problem is our language barrier. But now that DH is over there, I will call home and sometimes ammi answers the phone. The day when he left for pak, with the few words I know, I called home to ask if DH has reached. Ammi answered and she replied to me saying that the flight was delayed but he was on his way home from the airport. I understood that much in urdu. I told her ‘ok ammi, thanks’, but she was expecting me to say few words more which I know not and my SIL came on the phone and explain to me everything again in English, geesh . It was different when I was there. I can understand what she was telling me mostly because I ‘watched’ her body language and the topic we were discussing. I will nod my head or have my DH beside me as my interpreter. Somehow I always feel embarrass or helpless when I am on the phone with her. DH as usual pushes the phone to me and say ‘here talk to ammi’ without giving me time to prepare my speech :-) all that I can talk is to ask her how is she in urdu and reply ‘mey theek hoon ammi’. She continues to ask me more questions but I will be lost somehow because I usually try to pick up words that I understand from her questions and assume that is what she is asking. Sometimes I take a longer time to understand her questions. Even if I understand her questions, I can’t reply her back because I can’t seem to find the right words and that’s because I have not been practicing my urdu words at all. I feel like a loser. I was so enthusiastic in learning urdu and that was how I came up with my own materials plus the translation with the help of DH. I studied the materials couple of times and that’s it. It is lying inside my drawer now. I even promised everyone back home that I will learn urdu before my next trip and I will converse with them in urdu and not in English. At the rate I am learning, I will have to continue using the universal language. Yesterday I talked with ammi and at first I was confident in talking to her those few sentences in urdu and I even told her DZ was sleeping in urdu. Until that point I felt I was doing ok. When she asked me more questions, I stumbled for the replies and DH had to come to my rescue as ammi gave him the phone. After yesterday, I have decided to learn few words each day.

12:58 AM |3 comments