When I met Indu at the post office, he looked particularly glum. As we exchanged greetings I noticed the lilting cadences in his voice that betray his East Indian ancestry sounded flat and colourless. He clutched a slightly scrunched envelope in his hand.
"Indu," I ventured, "You look a little down today."
"Not you," he responded, the colour returning to his voice. "Must you too make fun of an immigrant who battles to use the right words in a new language." With that he shot out the door and stomped down the street.
"Wait," I called after him, "I didn't mean to offend. Wait for me." I caught him in front of the nearby coffee shop and convinced him to go in for a cup of tea. He likes ordinary orange pekoe if it's made properly.
As the waitress put the cup down in front of him I said, "Indu, I don't know what offended you, but I wasn't trying to put you down."
"There you go again," he snapped back at me. "All I hear is down, down, down. I know what it means to put something like a cup down. You set it on the table. But you said I looked a little down. And now you say you were not trying to put me down. How could you put me down if I was already down? And what can the word possibly mean if I was standing up the first time you said it and sitting up the second time?"
I finally cut in on him: "Indu, I think I can explain.."
But he charged right on, "Explain! explain!, no one can explain this confusing English language. I speak four dialects in India and non turn me around, twist me up, or get me in trouble as much as English."
Ah, now I suspected what had happened. Indu had experienced some kind of embarrassing cultural or linguistic affair. I asked, "What's up D I mean, what has really gone wrong?"
"I made a fool of myself," he answered in a low voice, looking around to make sure no one listened in. "Or should I more rightly say, the word down made a fool of me. A neighbour asked me to take his dog to the animal clinic to have it, in his words, 'put down'. I had never heard this strange expression before, so I asked what it meant. He explained that the dog was ill and would soon die so he wanted the animal doctor to humanly kill it. He did not want to take the dog there himself, so he asked me to do it."
After pausing to pour his tea, Indu continued: "I agreed, took the dog in my car to the animal clinic attached to the side of the doctor's house. When I got there a sign said, 'out on call D go to house.' I knocked on the door and a young woman holding a baby let me in. That is when the trouble started."
Indu paused for a long moment before going on, "She said to me, 'Please wait here for a few minutes. I will get right back to you. You caught me at a bad time; I am preparing to put the baby down.' With that she headed for the back of the house and I went wild with horror. I love children and followed and grabbed the baby from her arms. There followed much shouting and noise and the police came. And I now know the difference between putting a dog down and putting a baby down."
I managed to control the strange mixture of emotions and waited for Indu to swallow a mouthful of tea.
Indu went on, "And then this arrived in the mail. A friend wants my son to work part time for him. My friend owns a bedding factory. He says he wants my son to put down in the pillows. Now tell me what would my son do? Surely he would not kill pillows. Would he prepare them for sleep?"
I did my best to explain. Indu eventually recovered from the semantic horror story, but I haven't; I still shudder every time I hear a mother say she intends to put her baby down.
Author unknown.
