The language barrier

Source: 3rdculturechildren.files.wordpress.com

Wouldn't it be nice if everybody spoke the same language. I mean, set aside the 'language is the essence of culture' attitude and think for a moment if everybody spoke the same language, how easy would it be to communicate wherever you are. Am not advocating abandoning one's own language but everybody should at least also speak one common language, whichever can be agreed upon. In this context, the following incident that happened to me was a hilarious experience. This narration is not intended to pass any judgements.

So I am in a small town in Saudi Arabia somewhere near Al-Sulaiyl, about a 1000 km south west of Riyadh. It's been a few days since I have been here and I have quite a bit of free time, so I need something to read, something to study. I don't have a copy of Quran with me and I have been using the ones at the mosque after prayers. I want to get one so that I can study at home. A couple of days later I decide to ask someone at the mosque and bring one home from there. After I finish my Isha prayer, I notice that there is only one person left in the mosque other than me and my subordinate. We wait for this man to finish his prayer. As he settled down after prayer for dua and tasbeehat, we approach him and ask him in plain Urdu and he has this expression on his face that means 'What?' and he says something in Arabic that I couldn't understand even in my imagination.

Source: bookhaven.stanford.edu

I look at my colleague and we agree that we need to do better, so we accumulate all the vocabulary of Arabic that we have and mix it up with the Urdu words that we think might be similar in both languages, couple this with gestures which later seemed particularly funny. The response from this Arabic guy is again equally incomprehensible for me and my colleague. As a final attempt, I use more of gestures and less of words to convey what I wanted to say. I gesture towards a copy of the Quran and pull my hands to my chest as if saying that I want to take it, and then gesture with my two fingers as if signalling walking, and at this point I utter the word kamra. I don't know what the hell he understood from it, he sort of angrily exclaimed 'Haraaam, Haraam' a couple of times and we understood that there was no point trying again, we better ask someone else who understands Urdu. 

Now that I think about it, I feel clumsy for not trying to explain it to him in English. I probably thought that Arabic is more similar to Urdu than English, and honestly maybe I also considered unconsciously that why the hell would a Saudi living in a small town far away from any big city know English.