Short and sweet for you this week.

But we’re returning to one of the aims of this blog – which unlike how it might appear, was not set up to whinge about my maid’s lack of dusting – but instead to champion the charm of Indian English over Standard English.

So the charming word for this week is ‘roam’.

In India it’s used much more frequently than I’m used to at home. Here it means no more than ‘to walk about’. Which technically, is of course, what it means in Standard English. But there it has an element of distance, or itinerancy and general vagueness.

In India, it has none of those shades of meaning and really does mean no more than walk about. So you get lovely formations like ‘I like to roam about the neighbourhood with
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This is part two of a three part post.

One of the best places to buy a saree in Bangalore is the marvellous Mysore Saree.

Two floors crammed with amazing materials – you can buy suiting material, beautiful scarves and dupattas and everything is unfurled and thrown on the floor in colourful arcs for you to inspect.

One of my first memories of being properly abroad at about 12 years old, is sitting in a Zainab Market in Karachi and watching my mother being smothered in hundreds of unfurled table cloths. If you’re not used to it there’s a strong urge to ask them not to, to slow down to let you look.

Apart from anything else, there’s all that folding up to do afterwards. but of course there are people who do that. professional folders at every store in fact.
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