In my department, post-operative ward rounds are done the conventional way – residents see the patients early morning, and consultants, registrars and residents together see the patients again, in between or after the surgical list is done for the day. Among us, we speak quite a few Indian languages, and also manage to communicate reasonably well in a few more languages. In addition, we have in-house hospital translators, especially for international languages. If they are not available, Google Translate is quite handy.

On this day, however, we were unable to get through to our patient. She, a woman in her mid-thirties, along with her husband, stared at us blankly, when we were explaining the post-discharge instructions that she would need to follow. The translator was not available right then, and the rarity of their language was beyond Google Translate. “Did you understand? Please tell us what we just said.” we tried in multiple languages.  Blank stare. The couple’s older son, till then engrossed in his mobile phone, started watching. After 5 minutes, he went out and brought his younger brother, who had been sitting in the corridor outside, also glued to his phone.

This boy, about 10 or 11 years old, assessed the situation. In broken, but very confident Hindi, he said “Humko batao, hum bataoonga” –  “Tell me what you want to say, and I’ll tell my parents.” We proceeded to do just that. Back and forth went our communication via the little boy. His parents, now nodding and smiling, conveyed via sign language that they now understood what we were saying. When we were sure that they had clearly understood our instructions, we took our leave, after a lot of thumbs ups on all sides.

I stopped to speak to the hero of the day. “Where did you learn to speak Hindi?” I asked. “Shah Rukh Khan” he replied and pointed at his phone “I watch fifty Shahrukh movies in a day!”

While the young boy’s math probably needed a little work, his language skills certainly had made his parents proud.