Being a French colony, and a very French one at that, Pondicherry still carries a lot in French. My first encounter with the French connection came after a farcical delay for half an hour at Rue de Francois Martin, which we'd been circling in the Green Coffin - moniker for Anu's maruti - to find Saumitro's home, but to no success. It turned out that we were to be "on" and not "at" a 'Rue', which is 'street' in French - we had been circling a single address all this time, you see, thinking that out address was inside it, like a Gujrati chawl. After some inelegant guidance over the phone, we grouped in front of Saumitro's home and learnt the aforementioned fact.
My second encounter, one that made me recollect of all the French I knew, was on stroll along the Promenade, as we went past a dinner named 'La Soleil'. I knew, for once, what it meant - the sun, or 'sunshine', as I tied it to, as per my demands. This word had an emotional string tied to my heart, one my heart would find strumming on each day in times gone by. It was my christened nickname, to a girl I once knew, for her sunny disposition and general optimism. That word would one day lead me into learning another French word - 'ritournelle' or 'return'. She never did return.
I tried hard to think of some other French in my reality. Well, I found another, sort of, if one counts dreams as some part of reality reflected in our heads. When a naked, pert-bosomed French chick was piggybacking me in a cafe, suggestively pushing towards sex, going "Oui, oui" and "Non, non" to my unrelated inquiries. Yes, this, in a dream. By the end of it, I had interrogated the psyche of this mongrel Madonna well enough, to link her actions to her spiritually curative aim of destroying herself in the image of Shiva. Needless to say, no act of sex commenced. But even if it had, it would've been pretty sordid, nothing to boast of.
So, with a working knowledge of 4 French words I entered the town of Pondicherry, and left with 2 more - 'Rue', as had been explained, and 'poisson', which I learnt from the fish dishes on resto menus. Needless to say, I carried myself through zero French. Had I trusted a friend's account of Indians (figuratively) being driven away with a baton in Pondicherry, and skipped this location in antagonism, I'd have been lamenting now.
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