Oh dear! For Brits, Aiyo may be a Sinhalese word

By -Geeta Doctor
“Aiyo!“ said the Little Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro. “We are in the news for the same reasons -Nation's pride, neighbor's envy -as they say.“
“Speak for yourself,“ replied Aiyo. “I am just a modest little word, maybe not even a word, a mere exclamation! I don't need to flaunt myself in that brazen manner of yours.“
“Nevertheless you're in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a recognised sound bite, if not actually a word.Aiyo aunty you may as well enjoy your fifteen seconds of fame. As for me, I've been around -as long as 4,500 years now. Some of the credit is due to the Indus Valley civilization on whose riverbed, at the Mohenjo Daro excavation site, a gentleman called Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni discovered me in 1926. Some experts claim that the way I was molded in bronze with the help of the lost wax process, it is possible that I am not that old maybe just 2,500-years-old.“
“Don't give yourself airs,“ replied Aiyo. “You can't be more than 15. Sir Mortimer Wheeler who was in charge of the digs at Mohenjo Daro said it all when he examined you. I quote his exact words: `There is her little Baluchi-style face with pouting lips and insolent look in the eye. She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on.A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world.' “Aiyo! Do you really think I am Baluchi?“ asked the Little Dancing Girl, a little anxiously.
“Words can't speak for themselves,“ replied Aiyo. “We leave it to experts such as the OED to tell us what we are and where we come from. We never argue. I am a part of a thousand or more new words that have made it into the 20th volume of the OED, that itself is 150 years old. Do you think I am going to dispute their findings?“ “If the pundits have decided that Aiyo is a legitimate word in English, then who am I to argue?“ said Aiyo.
The Dancing Girl slipped her ivory and bone bangles up and down her long bronze arm and discretely clamped her luscious lips into a pout to stifle a yawn. She had heard just about everything in those 2,500 years. But, there was something that was troubling her -rumours that a lawyer in Lahore was brandishing a writ. He was demanding that she be relocated from New Delhi's National Museum to the Lahore Museum in Pakistan, where she had first been placed after her recovery. She was part of the national herit age of Pakistan, he claimed.
“They've also explained how I am used -`In southern India and Sri Lanka for expressing distress, regret, or grief; oh no! Oh dear!' -before going on to provide further proof of my Sri Lankan usage,“ Aiyo said breaking the Little Dancing Girl's reverie. “The OED cited my first appearance in the Chambers journal of popular literature of the late 19th century.“ “Not just that,“ explained Aiyo, “they say besides South India and Sri Lanka, I'm a common exclamatory term in Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa too.“
“That's where it gets complicated,“ said Aiyo with a slight frown. “Where do I belong? Am I a Sinhala, a Tamil or an offshoot of the Vedda dialect spoken by the original inhabitants of Sri Lanka?“ she asked.
“We may be closer to each other than we could ever imagine,“ said the Little Dancing Girl. We may be of the same Dravidian stock, or equally part of an earlier migration of peoples from Central India, who speak the Munda language. There is a theory that the Munda language, a sub-group of the Austroasiatic language, may have been one of the original languages spoken at Mohenjo Daro.“
“And look at me! Would I ever be allowed to flaunt my body at the museum in Lahore. They would cover me up with a burkha. They would chop my tiny head. I am only four inches high. They would place it on a nuclear warhead.“
“Ai-Aiyo! My little Dancing Girl,“ exclaimed Aunty Aiyo. “Come to Tamil country where the OED and Dravidians rule the word.“
(The author writes on art, architecture and food)