Language barriers eroded as humanity speaks loudest

Most of the cabbies we have hailed in Beijing have welcomed us with a warm ni hao on arrival. Until the other day. We had this Didi that was on the other side of the road and my colleague and I were not sure if he was shouting at us to stay where we were or telling us to hurry. Nevertheless, we crossed the street in a jiffy and got in.

Strangely, he didn't waste time in niceties, but we reckoned he was in a hurry to negotiate his way out of the crowding road and went back to what we had been discussing, in Hinglish, a mixture of Hindi and English. Soon after, from my vantage position in the back seat, I saw the driver staring at my colleague in the front seat. My colleague noticed too, stopping mid-sentence to look at him askance. We both sensed a bit of hostility, given the recent skirmishes on the border with India and the boycott of Chinese apps in India.

"Yin du ren (Are you Indians)?"

"Yes," we replied almost in unison, me sotto voce.

He then went on to ask something else in the language we are still familiarizing ourselves with.

My colleague then fished out his phone, which is armed with a translator, and asked the driver to speak into it. After the driver had done so, the colleague checked and, after a long second, laughed and said "Yes", triggering laughter in the driver too. I was relieved too, but not until I got to know what he had said. The driver had remarked that in India people drive on the left hand side.

I recounted this before friends from India who keep expressing their fears about our safety here in these trying times. But some of them still cannot fathom a world devoid of so much jingoism. Many a time in the recent past, total strangers have asked me where I come from and on hearing that I was from India remarked, "beautiful country".

Some days earlier, I was on my way to meet a friend. We were both on the path overlooking the lake outside the Olympic Green subway, but could not place each other. We kept calling each other up and sending photographs of the areas around us to try and figure out where the other was.

An elderly person approached me and spoke, first, in Mandarin, and on realizing I was an expat, switched to English. On knowing I was an Indian, he asked if I was from New Delhi or Mumbai. He had not heard of Kolkata, but asked if New Delhi was larger than Beijing. I excused myself briefly to attend to a call from my friend, whom I had, by then, conveniently forgotten. Call over, he pointed to a man in uniform, posing with a young couple for a photograph."He is a war veteran," the elderly man said, at which point the veteran came over to shake hands with me, and, on getting to know that I was Indian, he wanted to be photographed with me, himself sporting a Chinese flag.

Photograph over, he moved on, leaving me with the elderly man. But my friend called again to say we could locate each other by turning on the positioning systems on our WeChat. The moment I turned it on, I figured we were very close by. I turned around to find my friend waving at me from a distance. It was time to take leave of the elderly gentleman. It looked like he had a lot more to say but he understood that I must be going. Behind him, the veteran was posing with another couple, smiling for the pictures, one hand raised in a V sign now.