Nam Nam Nam Nam - A Viet Namese Primer

The disembarkation card the pretty airhostess of Tiger Airways handed us over when the aircraft was preparing to land at Ho Chi Minh City Airport was bilingual. In such situations, for want of anything better to do, I do two things: the first is to look for typos; the other, to compare the English words and the corresponding words in the 'other' language, to find similarities between the two.

This time I was not lucky on either count. No typos, no similar words. They I decided I could try learning some Viet Namese words. 'Nam', I found, was Year - as in Date of birth (Date/Month/Year).

Soon, it was touchdown time. Presently, we were in the terminal building. After the immigration and customs formalitis which took an unduly long tme, as we waited for the carousel to bring our registed baggage, I thought I could go to the loo. Proceeding in the general direction, I saw two doors adjacent to each other bearing the words NU (with the picture of a woman) on one and NAM (with the picture of a man) on the other. Pretty obvious.

Then it struck me: the two words - the words for year and man in Viet Namese - are the same! I know there are a few words in most languages which have two or more meanings (Without them, life would be hard for the punsters!) but usually they would be used in only one very commonly understood sense. Like in Sanskrit, Raatri (or nisha, rajani or nisheetHini etc) means night, but all of them mean turmeric too. It must be tough, I thought.

But surprise was yet to come. A couple of days later, I accompanied my son Hari to the vegetable market in Buon Ma Thuot, the capital of Dak Lak Province in Central Highlands. (He causes a flutter wherever he goes in Viet Nam, as he stands a jaw-dropping six foot three inches tall in a land where the average adut male height is 5' 3". I often see that by the time the jaws are hoisted back to their normal position, they drop again when he opens his mouth: he likes to show off the more than usual proficiency he has acquired in Viet Namese language in less than nine months of stay here!) He asked for a kilogram of broccoli. The piece that the vendor picked weighed a kilo and a half. Hari said, 'Don't cut it, I'll take it, though it is 500 grams heavier.' I thought I heard the word 'nam' there. When I asked him, Hari told me, Nam means 'five'. And he added, 'Nam' can mean South, too.

I wondered: If someone wanted to say in Viet Namese that a man had lived in the South for five years, what would he say?

That was not the end. We were in an upmarket cafe in Da Lat that serves coffee in different forms - espresso, mocha, cappucino, cold coffee, chocolate coffee, cafe au lait, etc. I opted for coffee with milk and a lot of ice and Bhawani for hot coffee. Hari translated our choice for the benefit of the attendant: 'Ca phe sua da for him and ca phe nam for her.'

It is a testimony to the strength of my mind that I did not faint when I realised that 'Nam' also means hot!

David and Goliath

Of course I had heard about Cu Chi, only 30 kms away from Ho Chi Minh City and knew it was a network of tunnels used by the Viet Cong guerrillas. Today I know better: it is an icon that signifies the grit and tenacity of a people. Armed but with just the primitive of weapons and oodles of native wisdom, the Viet Congs took on the global policeman and brought them to their knees. The improvised response of a poorly equipped peasant army to its enemy's hi-tech ordnance, artillery, helicopters, bombers and chemical weapons, the tunnel today is a place of pilgrimage.

It would look like any forest in the rainforest region - swampy soil, huge trees, thick undergrowth and a carpet of grey leaves covering the earth. Till the guide removes the leaves from about four squarefoot of ground to reveal two small hooks at a distance of about 16". He slips his index fingers through them and heaves it. Off comes an 18" x 12" x 4" block of earth exposing a pit. The volunteer in dungarees explains that this is the entrance - one of the many hundred, in fact - through which the Viet Congs entered and exited the tunnel. As we gape at it incredulously, he slides into it, puts back the 'lid' and with a few leaves strewn on top, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding vast expanse of decaying leaves.

As we walk ahead, the guide explains that at one time, it covered the entire South Viet Nam. The network in Cu Chi district alone was 250 kms long. There were storage facilities, living areas, hospitals, war rooms and kitchens - all underground. Parts of it were several storeys deep. Some exits were into the river Mekong. There were several trap doors and concealed entries like the one shown earlier. An enemy soldier plucky enough to try to enter the tunnel and lucky enough not to be killed by the guerillas after he somehow got in, would die of hunger, as he would not be able to get out.

Not that getting in was easy. The guide showed us a barricaded lawn - about 10' x 6' in area. He poked it with a bamboo-pole. A block of 8' x 5 ' moved and spun around freely about a central axis a couple of times - like a see-saw installed atop a well would. Any enemy who walked on it would fall into the pit. And on the side-walls of the pit were sharp spears. Your joy that you were lucky to escape them would be momentary, for there were more on the floor to skewer you! The guide explained that the guerrillas were kind to the enemies. In order that they did not suffer too long as they lay impaled by the spears, snake poison used to be applied on the spears.

This was only one type of booby trap. There were several such contraptions - cylindrical ones, those with a thin lid which gave way activating two blades - one two feet below the other - which cut the victim into three pieces. I will not go into more gory details of the horrendous death that awaited the GIs trapped and went for a free fall into the pit.

The 'tunnel rats' deputed by the US commanders under General Westmoreland suffered major casualties while, immune from the land and air operations of the US Army, the Viet Congs moved about freely below their very bases, often mounting surprise attacks wherever the tunnels went and retracting as mysteriously as they had appeared. Flummoxed, but unable to locate the trap doors used by the Viet Congs, they trained German Shepherd dogs, known for their keen olfactory sense, to sniff out the guerrillas. They began washing themselves with American soap which the canines identified as friendly. The uniforms of captured GIs were put out, which confused the dogs further.

Life in the tunnels was not a party, though. They lived in extremely hostile conditions. Light, air, food, everything was in short supply. The only source of light and air was the cavities made in the trunks of trees.If food was found, cooking it was difficult because the smoke emitted would give them away. They devised smoke exhausts with vents located meters away from the kitchen. Americans pumped poisonous gas through these, resulting in casualties in scores of hundreds. In addition to the pressures of living underground for months on end, the guerrillas had to cope with the death of countless civilians among whom were friends and relatives. Only 40% of the 16,000 guerrillas in the tunnels survived the war.

There are mines and shells lying about in the area and it is believed that some of them may be live. The guide warns you against straying from the group, lest you should step on one of them!

PS: I forgot to add that for the benefit of tourists and visitors, one of the entries at the Ben Duoc end of the tunnel has been enlarged so that even the portly and the arthritic can see what it was like to be a Viet Cong in the tunnel. We can step in and 'walk' around through the 'expanded' tunnel. These are about 4' high and 2' across and one has to crawl to proceed. Being unlit, the tunnel was too claustrophobic for me. Exits have been provided at 20 meter gaps so that when you feel you can't take it any more, you can give up your sub-terranean avatar and breathe easy!

Haircut by Menaka

Saturday afternoon. Hari came back from office and announced that he would go for a haircut in the evening.

Bhawani said, ‘You too can accompany him and get your hair cut.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s not due yet.’

She tried to reason out, 'Your last haircut was in India. You mean you’ll wait till end-October for the next?'

‘Bhawani, you know that once I am happy with a tailor or a brand of toiletry, I don’t like to try out a new one. Ditto with hairdressers. My haircut will be done by none other than our friendly neighborhood barber Babu in Trivandrum.’

‘You can’t speak Viet Namese. If you feel you need a haircut a month later, you’ll have to seek Hari’s help to take you to the saloon. Better go now,’ Bhawani again tried to persuade me.

I did a quick mental math: my last haircut was about a month before we left India. We had been in Vietnam for a fortnight and would not be back in India until after two months. Three months and a half would be too long a gap between two haircuts, I reckoned. I was not too sure I’d be able to last that long. Yet, I stuck to my guns and said, ‘No haircut for me in Viet Nam.’

Bhawani left it at that.

When Hari got ready in the evening for the visit to the hairdressers, I too jumped into the car. Let me see how the place looks like, I thought.
The car took us through broad streets, past the sports complex to Ngoc (pronounced ngop), a saloon. Hari parked the car and in we went.

There were over a dozen reclining chairs, all with soft upholstery. A third of them were unoccupied. Hari sat on one of them.

I surveyed the premises. One of the attendants was a young man, all the others being pretty young things (PYTs). They were all smartly attired in black trousers and lemon-yellow shirts with ruffles and frills instead of collars. The white aprons the PYTs sported while on the job bore the legend ‘Ngoc – The Professional Hairdressing Artists’. That surprised me because though the Viet Namese use the Roman script, hardly any of them speak, forget reading and writing, English.

Some of the clients were in near-horizontal position. Two of them were lying with their eyes closed, being subjected to facial. Three were being attended to by PYTs with tiny headlights beaming from their forehead. Curious, I looked closer, to find the 'artists' peering into the ears of their clients, long slender stainless steel instruments in their hand. They were cleaning the ears of the clients. (Later Hari told me that pedicure, manicure, shampooing, dyeing and massage are all provided in such outfits.)

I looked for a visitor’s chair or the area where clients would wait, but found none. Hari said, ‘You can sit on one of the vacant chairs. You need get up only if a customer comes and finds he has no free slot.’ I complied.

A little while later, one of the PYTs came to me and asked me something. Realising that what I said in reply would not matter (for, she would not understand me), I nodded. She switched on the trimmer and went about her job. In less than ten minutes, I was done. I looked at Hari's chair. Though he had started early, it was still in the work-in-progress stage.

My attendant returned, with the headlight and other gears and motioned me to another chair. I had no intentions of yielding to further ministrations by her and conveyed the idea to her by putting on my footwear and stepping out.

When we returned home, Bhawani was surprised that despite all my protestations, I really had had a haircut, after all. Before I could say anything in defence, Hari said, ‘When the PYT at the saloon proposed, Daja could not say ‘No’ to her!’

‘That is an old technique even the gods used to employ. Remember Devendra assigning the celestial dancer Menaka the duty of disrupting the penance of Vishwamitra?’

I am not sure if it was Radhika or Bhawani who said that. All I know is that the joke was at my expense.

Open Sesame, Viet Nam

In our bid to cut costs, we had booked ourselves by Tiger Airways from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). We had been warned about the inconveniences that we would have to put up with in this sector. Right from having to report at a lousy terminal to limited baggage allowance to hefty penalty if the limit is exceeded to having to pay even for the water served on board.

We were, however, in for a very big surprise. The ‘Budget Terminal’ was better than most terminals in India. Tiger had certainly cut corners where possible (like the boarding passes which were on continuous stationery unlike the thick cards you get in the ‘full-service’ airlines, but it hardly mattered).

The seats were as comfortable as any Airbus 320 aircraft. In fact, compared to the cramped seats in the ‘full-service’ provided by Jet from Chennai to Singapore, these were really good.

We were surprised to see that all flight crew and the ground duty staff – barring a few doing low-end jobs and pilots – were women. They were smartly attired and went about their duties with clinical efficiency.

It was a different story in HCMC though the aircraft touched down a few minutes before schedule. We were to be given the visa on landing. On handing over the relevant documents, the cop on duty motioned us to a row of chairs.

As we waited, a woman of a different nationality who had obviously been waiting for long and had lost her patience, got up from her seat, walked up to the counter and enquired about the status of her visa. The cop spoke no word, gave her a dirty look and rudely gestured her back to her seat. As I did not want such ignominy to be heaped on me, I waited patiently. The formality, which, according to me, should not have taken more than five minutes, took a good one hour.

The next port of call was the immigration counter. When we reached the spot, there was a long queue because ‘the system was down’. What surprised me was not that nobody seemed to be doing anything about it (We are so used to that in India), but that people seemed to be resigned to the fact and waited … and waited. The personnel manning the counters just sat there doing nothing, waiting for the system to come alive. It took over an hour for the snag to be resolved.

Passengers waiting for the computer system at Tan Son Nhat air terminal,

HCMC to come alive to complete the immigration formalities,

There was no way we could pass on the message that we were held up to Hari and Radhika who were waiting for us in the terminal. (Later we realised that there was no need for that: such delays were usual.)

By the time we were cleared by the immigration, the registered baggage, after a few free rides on the carousel, had been removed by the security personnel and given to the ‘Lost and Found’ section. We collected it and joined Hari and Radhika who had been waiting for us for two hours.