Those Cute Slumdog Kids

I will wholeheartedly admit that I loved a mainstream movie - a film for the whole family, one even my 12 year-old cousin in Pakistan loved - Slumdog Millionaire. The kids in the movie were adorable - with their wide, sad eyes and grubby faces and their precocious acting. The movie had a real-life dimension, too, as the child actors, who lived in Garib Nagir in Mumbai (which literally means Poor Corner), got to attend the Oscars a few weeks ago. The two youngest kids looked so excited even though they probably had no idea who Kate Winslet or Mickey Rourke were. In one interview with the E! Channel, Ryan Seacrest asked one of the little kids how he liked working on the film. He looked at him in a puzzled manner the way my grandma used to look when a white person spoke to her. Then the other kids piped up excitedly, "He doesn't speak English." Watch the video of crazy Oscar hijinks below:



This moment reminded me of my own childhood because for the first few years of my life I only knew how to speak Urdu. Here I was, a little foreign FOB preschooler despite having been born in the whitest area of America - the Midwest.

When I got to preschool, my parents did not seem to be concerned that they were sending their FOB-ish 4-year old, who did not have a basic grasp of the English language, into the proverbial lion's den of little white kids, who could attack the foreigner in their midst at any time (this was the South after all, with its dark history of the KKK and lynching mobs). However, once I got to preschool, there were only minor kerfuffles with the whole language barrier thing. I remember getting Urdu and English words confused a lot, and I would tell my teacher about "anecks" (eyeglasses in Urdu). She would look at me in confusion and probably thought I was a kid with neologia.

Now, since I lived in the country with no siblings, I also developed a selective FOB accent. Once in kindergarten, I told Mrs. Caldwell about how my dad went to the "e-mur-gen-cy room" for his job, and I ate "veg-e-tables" at home. She looked at me with a casual disdain and said haughtily, "It's ee-mur-gency and -veg-table!" That day I promptly went home and told my parents that they pronounced these words incorrectly. And so, we sat in the car together and worked on our pronunciation chanting, "ee-mur-gency" and "veg-table" over and over as if we had just invested in Rosetta Stone: English edition.

--By Mariam, who has returned from blogging hiatus.