Maskeraid: a new form of communication

Suddenly, he knew this was the moment. It was now or never: his whole future lay in her hands. He turned to her. 

“Wilth youth marith mith?”

“Wath?”

“Wilth youth marith mith?”

“Wath?”

“Oh, never minth.” He collapses.

And so it goes. Love and despair in the time of COVID. Or, why you shouldn’t propose marriage (or anything else) when you’re both wearing masks. 

Understanding what people are trying to say is not always easy in a multi-cultural community like Auroville. While English is the lingua franca, it is spoken with so many different accents and intonations that sometimes it sounds more like lingua obscura. Add to that the difficulty of interpreting what somebody is saying when the lower half of their face is covered with a mask, and you realize that at the moment oral communication in the City of Dawn is somethimth damn dithiculth. 

Luckily, some Aurovilians have risen to the challenge. The Language Lab is now offering classes in what they have provisionally termed ‘maskeraid’, a new mode of interpersonal communication necessitated by the mask culture. Maskeraid sets out to augment and expand the other clues to communication which remain when the lower half of the face is hidden. For example, students are taught to ‘speak’ with their eyes and to accompany this with gestures, ‘body ballet’ and carefully calibrated grunts, howls, sighs, etc.

So a simple eye-roll, depending upon the speed and duration, can mean anything from “You’re joking!” to “I’m experiencing global consciousness”. Similarly, a quick grunt accompanied by a sideways leap can either mean “On the other hand”, or “I’ve just had an idea”.  (Of course, it could also mean “You stepped on my foot”. Context, as they say, is everything.)

Apart from anything else, this makes entertaining viewing, for it gives even the most prosaic conversation (“Do you know when the film starts?” “I think at 7.30”) the appearance of an exotic mating ritual.

Gestural maskeraid is also useful for those moments when a masked apparition waves familiarly at you and you’ve no idea who it is. Generally, of course, you wave back, just to be on the safe side (it could be your partner). But now everybody can register with the Residents’ Assembly Service a gesture or body posture which uniquely identifies them, even when in full Hamzat gear. This database is available online, so once residents have memorized the 3,000 or so gestures and postures which distinguish one Aurovilian from another, nobody need be clueless about the masked identity of others. 

Interestingly, some people have become so attached to their identifying gesture or posture that they have renamed themselves after it. A cursory glance at the new telephone book tells us that “corkscrew”, “starfish” and “one-legged antelope” now reside among us. 

Is there a future for maskeraid in a post-COVID world? Who knows? Perhaps we will have forgotten by then how to form words and maskeraid will become our new, home-grown mode of communication. 

For Mother did say that Auroville would develop its own language...