Gender, word order, and one word for two days

Once the sounds are under control, Hindi asks for something harder: thinking in a different order. None of what follows will stop you being understood, and Hindi speakers are used to hearing their language spoken imperfectly by millions of people for whom it is a second or third. But these are the places your sentences will wobble.

Every noun is masculine or feminine, and the sentence follows. Chai is feminine and pani is masculine, so tea goes cold as chai thandi ho gayi while water is pani thanda hai. Verbs also change with the speaker: a man who is tired says main thak gaya hoon, a woman main thak gayi hoon. Nobody will correct you, but listening for the -a and -i endings is how you start to hear Hindi properly.

The verb waits until the end, and the little words come after the noun. Hindi says main chai peeta hoon, literally I tea drinking am. Where English puts a preposition before a place, Hindi puts a postposition after it: Dilli mein, in Delhi; station se, from the station; Agra tak, as far as Agra. Once you see mein, se, ko and par as endings rather than separate words, spoken directions start to make sense.

Kal means both yesterday and tomorrow. Only the tense of the verb tells you which, so kal milenge is see you tomorrow and kal mile the is we met yesterday. Parson does the same job two days out in either direction. When a plan matters, ask for the day of the week.

Prices use fractions. On top of the irregular numbers from eleven to ninety-nine, Hindi counts money and time in halves and quarters. Dedh sau is one and a half hundred, 150; dhai sau is two and a half hundred, 250; sava adds a quarter and paune takes one away. Half past four is saadhe chaar. A rickshaw driver who says dhai sau means ₹250, not two hundred and anything.

Two t's, two d's, and a puff of air

Almost every sound in Hindi is one an English speaker can already make. The difficulty is how Hindi sorts them. English has one t; Hindi has two, a soft one with the tongue pressed flat against the top teeth, as in teen, three, and a hard one with the tongue curled back, as in tikat, ticket. Each of them then comes with or without a breath of air behind it, and that breath changes the word: pal is a moment and phal a fruit, kana is one-eyed and khana is food. English speakers puff their p, t and k at the start of a word without noticing, so the first habit to unlearn is breathing on pani, water, when it should be clipped and clean.

The script is easier than it looks. Devanagari letters hang from a single line drawn along the top of each word, and every letter says one sound, every time. Learn it in the order the kit teaches and the Delhi Metro becomes a reading lesson, because every station name is printed in Hindi beside the English. For speaking, begin with the words you will use twenty times a day: namaste, shukriya, theek hai for okay, kitne ka hai? for how much is it, and nahin, no, with its vowel hummed through the nose rather than closed off with a hard n.

Six things that catch visitors out

Varanasi's burning ghats are not a view. At Manikarnika and Harishchandra ghats bodies are cremated in the open, day and night, and the families are mourning. Photographing a cremation is deeply unwelcome, and boatmen will tell you to put the camera away. You may also be approached by a man who explains the rites and then asks for money for firewood; a polite nahin-ji and walking on is enough.

The first coach is for women. On the Delhi Metro the front carriage is reserved for women, and men who board it are told, firmly, to leave. Security checks at metro stations, monuments and airports have a separate, curtained line for women, as do many ticket counters. Women travelling alone often find these the most comfortable places in the city.

Personal questions are friendliness. Are you married? How many children? What do you do, and what does it pay? Which country, and do you like India? In the north these are ordinary small talk, often from someone you met two minutes ago on a train. Answer as briefly or as vaguely as you like; turning the question back, aur aap?, and you?, is perfectly normal, and the conversation that follows can last the whole journey.

A wedding gift ends in a one. Visitors are invited to north Indian weddings more often than they expect, sometimes by people they met that week. The usual gift is cash in an envelope, called shagun, and the sum ends in one — ₹101, ₹501, ₹1,100 — because a round number is thought to be a closed one. Hand it to the couple or their parents, not to the caterer.

Some days are dry, and one state is dry all year. Alcohol has been banned outright in Bihar since 2016. Everywhere else, liquor shops close on national holidays such as Gandhi Jayanti on 2 October and on election days, and hotel bars may follow. In the north these shops are often signposted English Wine and Beer Shop or simply theka; the wine is rarely the point.

At Holi you are part of the game. The festival of colours falls in spring, usually in March, and for a day anyone in the street can be smeared with powder or soaked with coloured water. Wear clothes you will throw away and keep your phone in a bag. The cry is bura na mano, Holi hai, don't be offended, it's Holi. In Mathura, Vrindavan and Barsana the celebrations run for days; elsewhere, celebrating with your hotel or a family is the safest and best way in.

The language that carries across the north

Delhi speaks Hindi, but not the Hindi of the textbook. The city's everyday speech was reshaped after Partition in 1947, when hundreds of thousands of Punjabi refugees settled there, and it is laced with English as well: time nahin hai, there's no time; adjust kar lo, just adjust. This mix is usually called Hinglish, and it is how a great many educated north Indians actually talk. If a word fails you, the English one dropped into a Hindi sentence will almost always be understood.

Across the plains to the east and south — Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan — Hindi is the language of school, newspapers and officialdom, but many people speak something else at home: Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Marwari, Bundeli and others. Hindi is also the link language far beyond its home, the one a Bihari labourer and a Gujarati shopkeeper in Mumbai will use with each other. It has much less reach in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where English is the safer bridge. It is the official language of the Union government alongside English; India has no single national language.

English is fine in hotels, airports, offices and among Delhi's young. With a cycle-rickshaw driver in Old Delhi, at a roadside dhaba, or anywhere in a small town, it thins out fast. Hindi and Urdu are, in everyday speech, very nearly one language written in two scripts; you will see Urdu's flowing Perso-Arabic letters on signs in Old Delhi and Lucknow. Where they part is in formal vocabulary, which is why you may be thanked with shukriya, from Persian, or with dhanyavaad, from Sanskrit.

Three yous, and a ji for everyone

Start at aap and let others move first. Aap takes a plural verb even for one person, which is why the polite question is aap kahan se hain?, where are you from?, with hain rather than hai. Requests get the matching ending: baithiye, please sit, boliye, please go on, where a friend would say baitho and bolo. North Indians often slide to tum with you quickly as a sign of warmth. You can follow them, but there is no need to lead, and tu is best left to the film villains and brothers who use it.

Ji makes anything polite. Add it to a surname and you have the respectful address for a teacher, a landlord or a shopkeeper: Sharma-ji, Gupta-ji. Add it to yes and no and you get haan-ji and nahin-ji, which soften both. A questioning ji? means sorry, could you say that again, and many people answer the phone with ji, boliye, yes, go ahead.

Strangers are addressed as family. The man driving your auto or selling you fruit is bhaiya, brother; a woman of about your age is didi or behen-ji, sister. Older people are uncle-ji and aunty-ji, in English, without irony. They in turn may call you beta, child, whether you are a man or a woman and whether you are twenty or fifty; it is affectionate, not condescending.

Thanks are lighter than you expect, and refusals take repeating. Between friends a formal thank-you can feel distancing, and a smile or a nod does the work; for a real favour, bahut meharbani, that's very kind, goes further than shukriya. At a table a host will offer more two or three times, and a first no is heard as politeness. Say bas, enough, then bas, pet bhar gaya, enough, my stomach is full. To a street seller, nahin chahiye, I don't want it, said once and without stopping, is complete.

From Old Delhi to the Ganges plain

Delhi is two cities at least. Old Delhi, around the Jama Masjid and the lanes off Chandni Chowk, is Mughal in plan and crowded beyond belief; its Paranthe Wali Gali has been frying stuffed flatbreads for generations, and the kebab houses near the mosque are where the city goes for meat. New Delhi, laid out by the British in the 1920s, is broad avenues and roundabouts. Between and around them, the food is heavily Punjabi: chole bhature for breakfast, butter chicken in the evening, and chaat, sharp and sweet and crunchy, at any hour.

Uttar Pradesh, to the east, is the most populous state in India and the heart of the Hindi belt. Agra has the Taj Mahal. Lucknow is the old capital of Awadh, famous for slow-cooked Awadhi kebabs and biryani and for a courtliness summed up in the phrase pehle aap, after you. Varanasi, on the Ganges, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, a place of stepped ghats, evening aarti by the river, silk saris and paan. Prayagraj, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna, hosts the Kumbh Mela.

Rajasthan, to the west, speaks Hindi to visitors and its own languages at home; the Rajasthani greeting khamma ghani will win a smile in Jaipur, Jodhpur or Udaipur. Its food was built for the desert: dal baati churma, hard-baked wheat balls with lentils and sweet crumbs, and curries that keep without refrigeration. Madhya Pradesh, in the middle, has the temples of Khajuraho and Indore's breakfast of poha and jalebi.

Bihar, downriver, is where the Buddha reached enlightenment, at Bodh Gaya, and where Bhojpuri and Maithili are the voices of home. Its roadside staple is litti chokha, roasted wheat balls with mashed, smoky aubergine. This plain is also where modern Hindi literature grew up: Premchand, its great writer of short stories about village life, was born near Varanasi.

India, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• The Kumbh Mela pilgrimage rotates among four river sites across India, drawing crowds who bathe at a precise astrologically determined moment believed to make the water especially sacred.
• Curry leaves are dropped into hot oil at the very start of cooking, a step called tempering, or tadka (तड़का, TUD-kah), to release their aroma into the rest of the dish.
• Kaziranga National Park in Assam holds the largest population of the one-horned rhinoceros of any single park on Earth.
• Rangoli (रंगोली, RUN-goh-lee) patterns, made from coloured powder, rice flour, or flower petals, are drawn fresh on doorsteps most mornings and swept away by evening.
• Juggernaut entered English from Jagannath (जगन्नाथ, juh-GUN-naath), a deity whose festival chariot in the city of Puri is famously massive.
• Kerala's backwaters are a network of lagoons and canals running parallel to the coast, where houseboats built from wood and coir rope drift past rice paddies below sea level.
• The Western Ghats, a mountain range running down the west coast, are older than the Himalaya and hold such a dense range of species that they are recognized as a biodiversity hotspot.
• A thali (थाली, THAA-lee) is a single platter carrying many small dishes — dal, vegetables, rice, bread, and pickle — meant to be eaten together rather than course by course.
• Counting in most Indian languages skips from thousand straight to lakh (100,000) and crore (10,000,000), grouping digits in pairs rather than threes.
• Nalanda, founded in the 5th century, drew students from as far as China and Central Asia and is considered one of the world's earliest residential universities.
• Kabaddi (कबड्डी, kuh-BUD-dee) is played by two teams who send a single raider into the opposing half to tag players and sprint back, all while chanting the game's name on one held breath.
• Vindaloo began as the Portuguese dish carne de vinha d'alhos, meat marinated in wine and garlic, which cooks in Goa reworked with chilies and vinegar after Portuguese traders settled the coast.
• Kalaripayattu, practiced in Kerala, is among the oldest fighting systems still taught today, blending strikes, weapons, and healing knowledge in one tradition.
• A sari (साड़ी, SAA-ree) is a single length of unstitched cloth, typically five to nine metres long, and the way it is draped changes by region, from pleats at the front to a fan of folds tucked at the waist.
• The board game Moksha Patam, built around ladders of virtue and snakes of vice, was later exported and simplified into what is now known as Snakes and Ladders.
• Diamonds were mined from the Golconda region for centuries before deposits were found anywhere else, supplying famous stones that later travelled into European crowns.
• Chaat (चाट, CHAAT), a catch-all name for savoury street snacks like pani puri and bhel puri, mixes crunchy, tangy, sweet, and spicy flavors in a single bite.
• A bindi (बिंदी, BIN-dee), a coloured dot worn on the forehead, traditionally marked the point between the eyebrows linked to concentration, though today it is worn as often for style as tradition.
• South Indian filter coffee, or kaapi, is brewed through a two-chamber metal filter and poured back and forth between cup and tumbler to build a froth.
• The word monsoon comes from the Arabic mawsim, meaning season, picked up by sailors trading along India's coast to describe the wind that reverses direction twice a year.
• Dhokla, a spongy steamed snack from Gujarat, is made by fermenting a gram-flour batter overnight, then steaming it into soft cakes and topping them with mustard seeds.
• The Rann of Kutch turns into a vast white salt desert in the dry season, so flat and pale that the horizon seems to dissolve under a full moon.
• Namaste (नमस्ते, nah-mas-TAY) literally translates as I bow to you, said with palms pressed together at chest or forehead height.
• A side-to-side head wobble can mean yes, maybe, or I hear you depending on its speed and the conversation, and visitors often need months to read it correctly.
• The Alphonso mango, grown mainly along the west coast, ripens for only a few weeks a year and is prized for its smooth, almost fibreless flesh.
• Paan (पान, PAAN) is a betel leaf folded around areca nut, lime paste, and spices, chewed after a meal and sold from small roadside stalls set up just for the purpose.
• Bungalow comes from the Hindi baṅglā (बंगला, BUNG-lah), meaning of Bengal, a single-storey house style British settlers adapted from Bengali homes.
• The English slang word loot comes directly from the Hindi lūṭ (लूट, LOOT), meaning stolen goods or plunder.
• Guru (गुरु, GOO-roo) originally described something weighty or heavy, meaning a teacher whose knowledge carries real authority, before English borrowed it for any expert.
• In Mumbai, dabbawalas (डब्बावाला, DUB-bah-VAA-lah) collect home-cooked lunches each morning and deliver them by bicycle, cart, and train to office workers, then carry the empty tins home.
• The Hindi word for tomorrow, kal (कल, KUL), is the same word used for yesterday — only the surrounding verb tense shows which one is meant.
• Chess developed from a game called chaturanga (चतुरंग, chuh-too-RUNG), played on an eight-by-eight board with pieces representing infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots.
• Cricket is played on any open patch of ground, from village lanes to city rooftops, often with a taped tennis ball standing in for a proper cricket ball.
• Jaggery, or gur (गुड़, GOOR), is unrefined cane or palm sugar boiled down into solid blocks, and it sweetens countless traditional desserts.
• The Rigveda, composed in early Sanskrit more than three thousand years ago, is still chanted today by Vedic priests trained from childhood to preserve its exact original pronunciation.
• During Holi, people throw handfuls of coloured powder called gulal (गुलाल, goo-LAAL) at friends and strangers alike, a festival that marks the arrival of spring.
• Mawsynram and nearby Cherrapunji, both perched in the hills of Meghalaya, rank among the wettest places on Earth, catching the first wall of the monsoon off the Bay of Bengal.
• Biryani (बिरयानी, bir-YAA-nee) recipes change by city: Hyderabad layers raw marinated meat with rice before sealing the pot, while Lucknow cooks meat and rice separately first.
• The concept of zero as a number with its own value, not just a placeholder, was formalized with rules for arithmetic by the mathematician Brahmagupta in the 7th century.
• Jantar Mantar in Jaipur is a collection of stone astronomical instruments built in the 1700s, including a sundial accurate to within a few seconds.
• Ayurveda, a system of medicine built around diet, herbs, and the balance of bodily elements, has been practiced continuously for well over two thousand years.
• The English word jungle comes from the Hindi and Sanskrit jangal (जंगल, JUN-gul), which originally meant dry wasteland or uncultivated scrub rather than the thick forest the word now conjures.
• The English word shampoo comes from the Hindi chāmpo (चाँपो, CHAAM-poh), meaning to press or knead, rooted in the practice of a head massage.
• Lakshadweep, a cluster of coral atolls off India's southwest coast, sits in water so clear and calm that the seabed is often visible several metres down.
• Auto-rickshaws and long-haul trucks are often hand-painted with slogans, deities, peacocks, and the request Horn OK Please, turning ordinary vehicles into rolling folk art.
• Wedding season runs heaviest in the cooler winter months, when astrologically favourable dates cluster and a single week can host thousands of ceremonies across a city.
• Standardized weights carved from stone, precise enough to match across cities hundreds of kilometres apart, have been recovered from Indus Valley sites dating back over four thousand years.
• In Meghalaya, the Khasi people guide the roots of rubber fig trees across rivers over decades, training them into living bridges that grow stronger with every monsoon.
• The tandoor (तंदूर, tun-DOOR), a clay oven fired with charcoal at its base, gives naan its blistered surface and tandoori dishes their smoky char.
• Touching the feet of an elder is a common gesture of respect at festivals, weddings, and family visits, often answered by the elder resting a hand on the visitor's head.
• The English word pundit comes from the Hindi/Sanskrit paṇḍit (पंडित, PUN-dit), meaning a learned scholar.
• Idli (इडली, ID-lee) and dosa (दोसा, DOH-sah) batter is made by fermenting rice and lentils overnight, turning the grains tangy and light before steaming or frying.
• Uttarakhand's Valley of Flowers is a high Himalayan meadow that bursts into hundreds of species of alpine blooms for a few weeks each monsoon, then lies buried under snow the rest of the year.
• Masala chai (मसाला चाय, muh-SAA-lah chai) is brewed by simmering black tea with milk, sugar, and spices such as cardamom, ginger, and cloves, rather than steeped from a bag.
• The Ganges begins as meltwater from the Gangotri Glacier high in the Himalaya before running more than 2,500 kilometres to the Bay of Bengal.
• Pyjama comes from the Hindi/Urdu pāy-jāma (पायजामा, PAAY-jaa-mah), meaning leg-garment, a loose drawstring trouser worn long before it became sleepwear abroad.
• The physician Sushruta described techniques for reconstructing noses using skin grafted from the cheek or forehead over two thousand years ago, a method still referenced in modern rhinoplasty.
• The grammarian Pāṇini wrote roughly four thousand rules describing Sanskrit's structure in exhaustive detail, a work linguists still study for its precision.
• The Thar Desert stretches across the northwest, yet it is one of the most densely populated deserts in the world, dotted with villages, wells, and fortified towns.
• The Sundarbans, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers meet the sea, form the world's largest mangrove forest and one of the only places where tigers regularly swim between islands.