SHANTA
I talk to my family haath hila hila kar
It’s what you least expect to hear in a village in Haryana. A smattering of Malayalam, English and Hindi. But for Shanta this is the only language of communication.
She was married in March to one of the panchayat members in Mundhal, a village in Hissar district, about 150 km from Delhi.
She’s puzzled by our presence here today and even more surprised that someone’s asking for her and not her husband. Her niece Jyoti, a Class IV student, is equally interested in knowing why we want to know about her newly married aunt who is still struggling with Hindi.
In the eight months that she has been in Mundhal, Shanta, 27, who belongs to Kannur district in north Kerala, has ever since been trying to learn ways of surviving in this alien environment. She’s confident she shall master the language soon and get used to eating rotis instead of rice, like a few of her other friends from back home are now doing in different parts of Hissar.
So, how does she manage to get her point across to her new family? ‘‘Haath hila hila kar…’’ she laughs.
Back home there was no one to teach her the language or words she would need to know to express herself in a new environment. So she convinced her brother to buy her a Malayalam-Hindi dictionary. It’s coming handy now. In the middle of conversations, she turns to it frequently.
‘‘I can understand basic stuff but if people speak fast I cannot understand anything. So I actually only speak to amma (mother-in-law) and my husband,’’ she says.
Her husband Devinder has little communication with her and maintains that it her duty to learn the ways of his world rather than him trying to devise a way of communicating with her.
The mother-in-law Komal Devi, on the other hand, is a petite woman who lost her husband years ago and is more than happy to have some company and help around the house. As the mother and daughter-in-law spend more time with each other Komal Devi has even learnt a few words of Malayalam. ‘‘They call milk pal in her land,’’ she smiles.
But there’s a lot that Shanta misses about home. She misses having meals three times a day with three different side dishes instead of the two meals and only one side dish that she eats here.
The weather is the other thing that bothers her. ‘‘The temperatures are very extreme here, at home it never gets so cold or so hot.’’
Since her husband is a Jat, the food is strictly vegetarian. The only times she gets to eat meat is when she goes home.
She is one the few Malayali woman here who lives with her husband’s family. The rest have all set up their nuclear families. But Shanta is happy to have her mother-in-law around. ‘‘She is the one who has helped me the most in understanding the ways of this land.’’
Her life up north may involve some adjustments but getting used to purdah sure took its time.
‘‘I fell down so many times even in the toilet before I understood how to carry myself with all that cloth around my head and face,’’ she says.

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