Engglishhh©
ABOUT THE STORY One of the 20th century’s biggest questions, both before and after Independence, was what the English had done to India. It appears now that one of the 21st century’s great questions—as seen, in this month’s story, through the acute satirical eye of the novelist Altaf Tyrewala—will be what Indians are doing to English. In proposing, on time-tested numerological principles, “the foundational rearrangement of the entire framework of the English language as written and understood by billions of people around the world”, Tyrewala’s protagonist Roohann Shahha turns out to be that most subversive of fictional anti-heroes, a toppler of the very conventions of language.
HISTORY HAS BEEN REWRITTEN.
It is now hsstroy.
Nothing will be the same again. (Not even ‘nothing’, which is now noohing.)
Welcome to Engglishhh©, an antidote to the world’s most inauspiciously spelled language.
Compiled by a team of seventeen numerologists after years of fevered calculations, Engglishhh© contains more than 200,000 English words re-spelled in accordance with ancient Indo-Puranic principles. Engglishhh© cures the ill-effects of English, bestowing its users with positive vibrations and fruitful karmic results.
The compilation has been alphabetized for easy referencing. From nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and articles, to names of continents, countries, states, Presidents—even Brangelina’s children!—no facet of the English-speaker’s world-experience has been left unmodified by our resident mahagurus. And so, democracy is now dmoocrcy, colonialism is still colonialism, globalization is gloobliation, and so on.
These are no arbitrary alterations. It has taken our panel of erudite numerologists, headed by the Bannaruss-based Sri Pandat Raj Mishra, hours of intricate computations and scholarly cross-referencing to amend the unfavorable spelling of each English word.
For a detailed word-by-word numerological analysis, please refer to the 5-volume ‘Guuidee Too Engglishhh©’.
Here are some dazzling illustrations:
The English word Car (3+1+8=12), is represented by number Twelve, depicted by the image of a one-winged eagle soaring over a city of gold. Good for a kitchen appliance, suicidal for a personal mode of transport.
The Engglishhh© version, Caar (3+1+1+8=13), is a number Thirteen word, ruled by the unseen and as-yet-unnamed planet between Saturn and Pluto. By thinking of your car as your caar, you will observe your social life wither and your moods darken, until you no longer have the will to leave home, protecting you from fierce road accidents and sky-rocketting petrol prices.
In another example, the English word Sex (7+4+1=12), is represented by number Twelve, depicted by (see above).
Whereas Sssx (7+7+7+8=29), the Engglishhh© version, belongs to number Twenty-nine, the harbinger of bloodshed, disease and painful death, which is how it should be for promiscuous heathens who’ve failed to rise above their beastly natures.
The above instances illustrate the arcane and often audacious reasoning that has dictated the alphabetical readjustment of English words. The result is Engglishhh©—the most fortune-fetching and life-altering language in the history of the world!
Here is what Asswin Loopezz (previously Ashwin Lopez), a 1st year BCom student from Kolkotta (previously Madras), has to say: ‘All I want to say is thank you, or rather, thnkk ou to the Engglishhh© dictionary for filling my life with light and wisdom. I am certain the promised results will follow once I have mastered the new spellings.’
Rrrbha Apt (previously Prabha Apte), an aspiring novelist from Atlanta, wrote in saying: ‘Engglishhh© hass rejuveenated mmm writtingg. Wiithh Engglishhh© I finaaly hav mmm oon uniquuee sstylee. Eeddittrs caan goo too heel. I ammm nott seekkinnng aadvvnceees oor awwards, buutt meerly the chancee too xpreess. I ammm nverr gooing too stoop writtingg inn Engglishhh©.’
As this last testimony demonstrates, there is the temptation to pass off misspelled words as Engglishhh©, but doing so only results in incoherence and sudden occurrences of severe bad luck. Users of Engglishhh© are advised to invoke this talismanic language with immense reverence and care.
Now, to answer some FAQs with regards to the usage of Engglishhh©:
1) Must I also speak in Engglishhh©?
Not unless the people you are speaking to also know Engglishhh©. Thousands of Engglishhh© words, such as bcase, knwleedge, gst, mxtstast, etc, are unpronounceable. The psychic benefits of Engglishhh© are most acute in the written form.
2) Fr hwww loong mmmst I mainnnntin mmm uusage oof thiiis lanngug?
Eh?
3) I have been using Engglishhh© for a long time but have observed no noticeable changes in my life. When will Engglishhh© change my life?
English, like any form of self-abuse, has a lasting impact on its users’ astral bodies. While change may be slow to come, be assured that inside the deepest recesses of your brain’s inferior frontal gyrus, a veritable Carnatic War is underway, and this time Engglishhh©, unlike the ineffectual French, will deliver a lasting and humiliating defeat to English.
4) Would history be different if it had been in Engglishhh©?
Absolutely. If Swaraj, for example, had been Sswaraaj, India’s self-rule would have been genuine and sustained, not the sham republic that has finally come about after decades of Independence.
5) Is there an English-to-Engglishhh© translating software?
Yes there is, and we are in the process of taking legal action against the makers of this illegal program.
6) When will you compile Engglishhh© in German?
Engglishhh© in any other language will not be Engglishhh©. Please await further notification.
7) If I disagree with the numerological reassignment of a particular entry in Engglishhh©, may I add or delete alphabets to make the word more suitable to my karmic needs?
Idiot has been re-spelled as dioot for a specific reason (refer to the 5-volume ‘Guuidee Too Engglishhh©’). If you believe your understanding of numerological principles surpasses that of our panel of full-time experts, you are free to tinker around and call yourself an idoot, idit, iidiotttt, or whatever else you wish.
***IMPORTANT DON’TS & DO NOTS***
**Do not run Spell Check when typing an Engglishhh© document on MS Word.
**Do not use Engglishhh© on the 2nd, 11th, 20th and 29th of each month, or in the years 2010, 2013, 2080 and 4076.
**Must not be used by people with conjunctivitis, diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis and other English-induced diseases.**
At the recently-held World Social Forum in Tehran, Iran, Engglishhh© was awarded the Trojan Prize (for Infusion of Perceptual Misunderstanding into a Western Hegemonistic Framework). Roohann Shahha, Chief Psychic Advisor of Engglishhh©, accepted the award from Ji Zheng Kha, President of the Trojan Prize Foundation. Mr Shahha’s acceptance speech in Engglishhh© received a standing ovation.
Engglishhh© has featured in the ‘Top 10 Most Stolen Books at the Frankfurt Book Fair’ for seven consecutive years. Evidently, the wise (albeit thieving) Germans consider Engglishhh© beyond price. Besides several print-runs in India, Engglishhh© has enjoyed inexplicable success in Afghanistan, China, Uzbekistan, Latin America and the Middle East.
Perhaps the most poignant news comes from Cuba, where Engglishhh© writing classes have mushroomed throughout the rogue state. In Engglishhh©, unfortunately, Cuba has been re-spelled as Iraq (a number Eleven word, depicted by a bug-eyed ferret on skewers). We apologise to our Cuban readers for this faux pas. Alas, due to numerological compulsions, corrections can only be made in the eleventh edition of Engglishhh©, a good decade away. Sorry again.
Quiz time!
A) Identify the English root for each of the following Engglishhh© words:
bush
kutta
haraami
saalaa
sooar
B) The following words are yet to be included in Engglishhh©. Suggest the most numerologically advantageous amendments to these words, along with your reasoning for the same:
India
Dalit
Muslim
Jehad
America
New Delhi
Bollywood
Pakistan
Send in your answers to PO BOX 201, Ahmedabad 21, only between the 14th and 19th of March 2026. Entries received earlier or later will be burned in a special four-year-long havan commencing from 20th March 2030.
We would now like to introduce, without further ado, the visionary responsible for the phenomenon that is Engglishhh©, our Chief Psychic Adviser and proud recipient of the aforementioned Trojan Prize: Mr. Roohann Shahha!
Born as Rohan Shah in 1977 pre-liberalisation India, Roohann was your run-of-the-mill dyslexic child. He persisted in misspelling words despite insults from his teachers and severe beatings at the hands of his parents. Dyslexics now have their own schools and even their own blockbuster Bollywood films, but in India during the 1980s, dyslexia was thought to be the symptom of nothing other than a devilish and rebellious mind.
Using a combination of persistence and bribery, Roohann’s parents managed to have their son promoted from class to class, year upon year. But nothing could prevent Roohann from failing his board exams. And miserably. With a college education out of the question, Roohann was ordered to start assisting at his uncle’s bookshop. It was hoped that being surrounded by products of the intellect might bring about a magical transformation in Roohann’s laggardly brain.
The bookshop gave Roohann a headache. The very thought of reading was enough to make him numb. He mocked customers who came looking for bestsellers and English masterpieces. The customers, in turn, mocked Roohann’s penchant for mangling up names of authors and book titles. Wraths of Grape. Flies to Lord. George Louis Eliot. Salman Below Saul. Running Rabbit by Up the Dike. And other screw-ups that were symptomatic of a terribly cross-wired brain. Had it not been for a crucial encounter, Roohann might have spent the rest of his life as a two-bit joker working at a cookie-cutter bookshop.
One evening, while taking an order over the phone, Roohann followed protocol by asking the customer to confirm the spelling of his name. The bookshop had already misplaced too many orders thanks to Roohann’s infamous spelling abilities.
The customer said his name was Umesh Prakash. ‘Spelled u-u-m-e-e-s-h p-r-r-a-k-s-h...’
Roohann was livid. He thought the customer was mocking him. He retorted by saying, ‘Sir, I may not know the spelling of Umesh Prakash, but I know it isn’t spelled that way. Now please, tell me the correct spelling so I can process your order.’
‘Watch your tone, friend,’ Umesh Prakash said, ‘it’s a free country, and that’s how I spell my name. If you have a problem, I can order my books from elsewhere...’
Roohann and Uumeesh chatted for twenty minutes. By the end of the phone-call, Roohaan had been granted a new lease of life. He had no idea of the existence of numerology, or that there were people who willfully misspelled the names they’d been given at birth in the hope that an alphabet more or less would alter their unhappy destinies. Uumeesh put Roohann in touch with his numerological adviser, Dyeepa Maaolti, and the rest, as they say, is hsstroy.
Every alphabet in English has a corresponding number frequency. As a special bonus to our readers, we will not, for a change, refer you to the 5-volume ‘Guuidee Too Engglishhh©’. Here it is, for free, the Engglishhh© Alpha-Numerical Easy-Reference Table:
| Alphabets | Corresponding Number | Karmic Significance |
| W U P L | 1 or 9 | Duplicity |
| B R S V | 2 | Unity |
| C E X Z | 3 | Holiness |
| D F I O | 4 | Lion’s Roar |
| G J M T | 5 or 8 | Ill-begotten Wealth |
| H K N Q | 6 | Spilled Milk |
| A Y | 7 | Bee’s Sting |
As an exercise to pass some time, write down your full name on a piece of paper. Now, under each alphabet, jot down its corresponding number. Add up those numbers. If your name, for instance, is Saddam Hussein, you will find that your first name adds up to Twenty-nine and your last name adds up to Twenty-four. Remember Twenty-nine and Ssx—the-harbinger-of-bloodshed-disease-and-painful-death? Malevolence of this magnitude can only be counteracted by a force of overpowering power. What could possibly cancel the ill-effects of Twenty-nine? How about something that is represented by three suns! That’s right, three bright golden suns, blazing away all traces of darkness and evil. And what number fits the bill? It’s Twenty-four, the realm of three suns! Saddam and Hussein, Twenty-nine and Twenty-four, darkness and light canceling each other perfectly. A man with such a name was destined to a bland, ordinary existence; he ought to have been a curio seller in some touristy neighbourhood of Baghdad. How he ended up ruling a country and came to be executed on international television is unfathomable. Sometimes these things just don’t add up.
Faced with such paradoxes, Roohann realised that merely altering the spelling of a person’s name without also altering the words that propped up this name in a sentence, was like cleaning one’s backyard while ignoring the mountain of filth continually landsliding onto one’s property. What Roohann was suggesting was beyond mere cosmetic changes to people’s names, it was beyond the scope of anything that numerologists had ever thought of or attempted. What Roohann was proposing was the foundational rearrangement of the entire framework of the English language as written and understood by billions of people around the world!
Time has borne testimony to the greatness of Roohann’s intuitive vision. But for several initial years, Engglishhh© was little more than the private obsession of a man whose increasingly misspelled letters and emails convinced people that dyslexia had gnarled his brain beyond repair. Little did they know that this “deranged dyslexic” was framing the ultimate revenge on a language that had caused him immeasurable humiliation throughout his life.
Thanks to the kind contribution of the Library of Engglishhh© Department at I-bin-Had University in Khirgaztun, we are able to reproduce the first document ever written in Engglishhh©. Circa 1996, it is a poem Roohann composed in honour of a young woman in his building:
My derr Punaita, ths peem isss foor ou:
When I saaat too wriit a peem
Th woords wooulldn’t cme
When the didd the wooulldn’t rhhym
When the rhhymeed the maad n seensee
Lik aaa red rose ii aaa blaak annd whit fiilmmm
Lik aaa rinbow ii aaa scccorchin sk
Lik msc frm soomewh ii th ded off niiigt
Gorges mirraclees impssble too expln
When I saaat too wriit a peem I kew
Ll I haad too doo waas dscrb ou
In an interview to New Age Find magazine in 2004, Mrs Punaita Roohann Shahha describes her first reaction on coming face-to-face with Engglishhh©: ‘I got Roohann’s poem via a friend in the building. When I read it, I was like, what is this nonsense. I couldn’t understand a thing. The guy had changed my name from Puneeta to Punaita, he wrote poem as peem. I thought he was retarded. I put the page away. But ... I couldn’t get that poem or peem or whatever it was out of my head. I would come back from college and pull it out from under my mattress and just let my eyes wander over the mangled words. Something felt right, it appealed to something beyond my intellect. I felt a light shine through the words, as if their illegibility somehow emphasised their true meaning. Later on Roohann told me the English version and I was floored. But the Engglishhh© peem had a mystical power that English just couldn’t match ...’
That “mystical power” that Mrs Shahha alludes to is the ability of auspiciously-spelled words to affect readers at a supra-cognitive level. What is the point of being legible and precise when Engglishhh© can help you circumvent lower-level brain functions and target your reader’s untapped cognitive mind. All of this is backed by thousands of years of sound Vedic, Indo-Gangetic, and Hindu-brahmano numerological principles. Compare Roohann’s above-quoted love poem with its paltry English avatar:
My dear Puneeta,
When I sat to write a poem
The words wouldn’t come
When they did they wouldn’t rhyme
When they rhymed they made no sense
Like a red rose in a black and white film
Like a rainbow in a scorching sky
Like music from somewhere in the dead of night
Gorgeous miracles impossible to explain
When I sat to write a poem I knew
All I had to do was describe you
‘Engglishhh© is perfectly suited for our post-Western, post-textual, recessionary world-order,’ says Mick Urwent, professor of post-modern post-linguistics at the University of Walsingham. ‘Since everyone agrees that words have lost their meaning, here is Engglishhh© to formalise a process that began with Bill Clinton’s famous query: define is.’
Engglishhh© is the correction of hundreds of years of inauspicious spelling conventions that have flourished due to the ignorance of English-speaking people. It is not the subversion of a language, as some critics of Engglishhh© have claimed. And it is definitely not a “conspiracy by neo-communist forces to overthrow the communicative vehicle of Western capitalism”.
Ignore the critics, back-biters and dissenters, and order your copy of Engglishhh© today.
Here is Roohann Shahha having the final word-say: ‘Engglishhh© maarks t een o Worsteen doomnatnn oof t worllld. I ha beeen ploootn and wtiing foor t daaay too cm foor many yrss. Oonee dy t whool worllld wiil bea spkng Engglishhh© aannddd we ppl of possst-colinal browwn-skned natiiion wiil ha t laast laaugh. Maark yy woords, whit dvl, maark yy woords!’
Truer words have never been uttered.