Tongue tied!

You can survive in any office anywhere, even though you don't know the language of the region. But once you are outside the office, you are sunk if you don't know the lingo of the land.See my plight, here i am ensconced in heart of Hindiland without the power of communication to the natives! It gets even more pathetic when you have to deal with the servant maid, barber, shopkeeper and so forth. The servant maid comes to work like a state visit by the President! Clothes unwashed and vessels uncleaned vie for her attention for God knows how many days. No, maybe even the God doesn't know. Only she, our servant maid almighty, knows. The problem is to convey to her that she is not in a software company to visit us as she pleases and work when she deigns to.It is we who are employed in a software firm, she doesn't comprehend! And my deeply thought and planned "kyon" and "kya" gets hosed down by a barrage of her Hindi which flies past me like a Chennai bus past the waiting people. She comes once in 10 days and works for an hour during her visit. Her salary, I am not about to reveal, for software professionals may queue up our house to earn that kind of money for a 4 hour job per month. Anyway any feeble attempts to reduce her salary for her continous absence fail miserably. My room mate whose Hindi is better than mine tried to do so, this weekend. He sidled up to her and placed by her, whatever amount that we had decided would give her. She snorted at him, gave him an earful (of Hindi, of course) and didn't even touch the money which my roommate very respectfully placed in front of her ( Almost like an offering to a deity, I think). He scampered away. She after finishing her one hour work managed to inform me ( My room mate was no longer in the house) that we were to place whatever amount that was due on the kitchen shelf by the next day! I nodded meekly. Nodding, I can do in any language. A multi lingual nodder, you can say.How I manage to deal with other people like barber and vendors is altogether a different story, nay, novel in the making!