Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [104]
Anjali saw the trembling fingers of the woman at the desk to her left write study gole = hanssment in her notebook. She peered at the lined notebook of the male student to her right. He was sketching her profile, and he was pretty good at it.
A woman's voice from behind Anjali interrupted the instructor. "Ma'am, what is enhancement meaning exactly?"
The instructor was ready for that question. "The U.S. companies that come to us want you to sound acceptably American. That doesn't mean you have to imitate American television accents—it just means they expect you to communicate without any complications. We'll work this morning on softening consonants and crispening vowels."
She had each of her twelve students pronounce the words she had listed on the whiteboard. Please came out as "pliss"; garbage and manage as "garbayje" and "manayje." All twelve had problems with the buried v: "de-well-op," "day-li-wer." Ms. Banerji smiled through the difficulties. "A small problem of muscle memory from your mother tongue," she explained. "Fortunately we have tailor-made solutions for every MTI problem in this room." She must have caught Anjali's blank look, for she quickly added, "Mother-tongue influence problems." She assured her students that after the two-week course, they would be fluent in the language of acronyms. And politics. And sports. And popular culture. Every problem has a solution.
Even problems in personal life? Anjali wondered. Could the teacher include a lesson in optimism enhancement?
Parvati's lesson plan was more formal than Peter's. She dictated which syllable to stress. She instructed the students to press the upper teeth down on the lower lip so that a crisp v didn't dissolve into a whooshy w. She drilled the trainees hard, but not even Anjali got the th in growth, hearth, and thought. So much easier to catch the staked fence of a t and an h approaching and settle on a plump, cozy, softened d.
The next exercise called for each student to recite a poem from a reader that Parvati and the absent Ms. Desai had put together. Twelve trainees, twelve poems. Anjali was assigned "I Heard a Fly Buzz." This lady poet was no Edgar Allan Poe. How could anyone be inspired by flies? Flies deserved swatters, not rhymes. Flies meant that something dead, sweet, or fecal was nearby. Anjali guessed she'd been deliberately selected for Miss Emily's fly poem because f was hard for Bengalis to pronounce. She remembered Peter's admonition: "Foggiest, Angie, not p'oggiest." She owed it to him to get the f sound right in this Bangalore classroom. And she did.
At the lunch break, two students quit. "Shattering. I've lost all my confidence," Ms. Vasudev complained. She intended to ask for her money back. Mr. Shah did not slink away during the break as Ms. Vasudev had. He waited for the instructor to resume classes so he could confront her before storming out. "This is humiliating," he berated Ms. Banerji. "I am a citizen of India. I don't give a damn that Mr. Corporate America doesn't like my accent!" To which Parvati rejoined, "Losing two out of twelve isn't bad. That leaves more attention for everyone else. In fact, two is just the beginning." She had them recite "Quitters never win, and winners never quit," and kept them at it until "vinners" and "k vitters" were wrung from their tongues.
"Let me say one thing to the rest of you," Parvati began, after the first two quitters had left. "Am I disheartened? No. We expect dropouts, and we wish them well. Not everyone is cut out for the things we demand. You'll find that English-language skills are only a part of what we expect, and not even the largest part. Language enhancement is largely mechanical—it's your absorptive capacity, your character, your ability to learn and use new ways of thinking and, of course, new facts, that we're interested in. That's why we interviewed and tested you in the first place."
The two-week prep course actually lasted only twelve days because CCI was closed on Sunday, but three more freshers dropped