Courtesy - The Funny Malayalee Again

I am sure most Malayalees have heard of this one, but I am recounting it here just in case someone has not.
A prospective father in law was interviewing a prospective groom for his daughter in a sleepy old village in Kerala.
"Do you smoke?", was the elderly man's first question.
"No, I don't sir", replied the young man. And added in a low voice,"Except when I drink!"
"So you drink too, is it?", asked the old man sharply.
"Yeah, I do that, but not too often, except When we sit gambling cards below the coconut trees at night!"
The old man was agitated."So you gamble too, is it?", he pursued.
"Well, not often", replied the young man. "Except the nights when we plan a raid on the rich man's house to steal some gold!"

Babel Fish

I am going to start this post with a joke.
A man and wife with a small kid walked into a store and started talking to each other. To everybody around it sounded worse than gobbledygook.
One person in the crowd was a bit intrigued and asked the man, "I never heard that language anywhere. What language do you speak?"
The man pointed to himself and said, "I am Chinese. So I talk to my kid here in Chinese!" And then pointing to his lady companion, he went on,"This is my wife. She is Czech and she talks to our kid in Czech! And we both, husband and wife, talk to each other in English, coz that's the only language both of us understand!"
"Thats really strange!", exclaimed the third person. "Communication in your family must be a riddle!"
To this the Chinese gentleman smiled and said, "Yes, we call it Chinese Checkers(pardon the pun)!!"
Well reality is not always far behind fiction.
Coz we speak 3 different languages in our home. All the time!
It all started when our father was posted to a remote public school in the sugar belt of Western Maharahstra, when we were still small kids.
The local children knew only Marathi(yes, not even Hindi!) and our only way of communicating with them was through that language, which was even on our curriculum.
We picked up the language and were soon able to speak the language fluently.
Later as we grew up, we moved to Eastern Maharashtra, were the locals speak a kind of pidgin Hindi. We picked up that as well and adapted it as our mode of communication between us brothers. Our parents communicated with us in English, we answered back in Hindi and they themselves spoke to each other in our native Malayalam, which we understood very well, but did not speak or write.
Even when we grew up things did not change.
We brothers still speak to each other and our parents in hybrid Hindi with English words thrown in for good measure. Our parents speak to us in English with lots of Hindi words, while they still talk to each other in Malayalam, which we can grasp as well!
Wondering how all that silent interpretation and translation goes on in our heads?