For 12 years now I have been learning Thai from my maid, Pi Nong, who has been employed in our building for decades. It’s a much misunderstood relationship. Here the maid is an obligatory fixture, integrated into daily life for foreigners and Thais over the age of 45 and over a fairly modest income level. For foreigners the maid is a linguistic go-between, a bridge between two worlds, a portal into a new language. While she is making me dinner she gaily informs me that farangs cannot eat Thai food even though she is making it for me now and that, even more mysteriously, they cannot speak Thai – even though we are speaking it now. Her explanation is that our mouths are different and that we are malevolent.

For example, she says calmly, I insist on mispronouncing basic words to make them sound like bad words. Case in point: the Thai word for ‘leave’, which is fark. All day long deliveries call me when they arrive at the lobby of our monstrous building, the Glass Kingdom, and when I pick up to answer them I invariably say ‘Fark tii lobby’. Leave it at the lobby. At this Pi Nong frowns if she is in the room. ‘You say like bad word.’

‘No, I say fark just like you.’

‘Not like me. No. You say bad word.’

I ask her how it’s pronounced correctly. Putting down her iron, she opens her mouth wide and uses, it is true, a different tone.

‘Fuk.’

I repeat it a few times and we are reconciled. The matter is settled and I change the pronunciation with the Fedex guys, who say: ‘OK, fuk here boss.’ This ritual between Nong and I, however, has no ultimate resolution because a language is fathomless, bottomless, and in one sense it can never be completely learned. One can only chip away the layers. For as it happens we are not done with fark. When I ask her how Thais say ‘bitter cucumber’ she pulls a knowing face and puts down the iron again.

‘Fark mee,’ I say.

‘No, incorrect. You say like bad word.’ Once again she opens her mouth wide, pulls an exasperated face and uses the correct tone. ‘Fuk maew.’

Now, this process is long and arduous. But it would be worse without Pi Nong. Far worse, as I recall from my first days in Bangkok, when my inability to form simple words in a four-tone language was a daily ordeal. An example would be the word for ‘plug’, which was the first Thai word I had to master in order to be able to take a bath in my new condo on the day that I moved in. The apartments in the Glass Kingdom are spacious but ancient (in Bangkok terms), meaning they date from the 1990s. When I moved into mine in 2012 I found it had been empty for some months and consequently, awkwardly, there was no functioning plug in the bathtub.

I went downstairs and asked the young rural migrants at reception if they knew what a plug was. Mystified gazes in response to my hand gestures. But they understood the bathroom was not working and suggested I go to a hardware store. I rode to Sukhumvit on my new bike and found one. I went in and explained ‘plug’ with a hand gesture and they all nodded calmly. The word was pluk.

‘Pluk?’

‘No, incorrect.’ They repeated more slowly. ‘Pluk.’

‘Well all right. Do you have a pluk?’

Sad head shaking. No pluk.

They suggested I visit the next hardware down. The search for the linguistically evasive plug was on.

In the neighbouring store there was an old Chinese man and his grandson sitting by a steaming kettle peeling apples. I went in more boldly this time.

‘Sir, I want pluk.’

Mystified, they looked up slowly. Growing more irritable, I almost shouted the word. The old store owner, thinking a little, came up with what he thought I meant. ‘Plub?’

We haggled. All right, plub. I must have misheard. I want a plub. Did they have one? ‘No have.’ But, he added, his grandson would go out and get me one if I liked. I could pay him a tip. The next store down had them. So, while the boy went out, we sat together and had tea. He asked why I needed a plub. I said I wanted to have a bath. He nodded, perplexed, and looked away.

So that was it. The foreigner wants to have a bath. I thought: ‘They’re just pretending to not understand.’ We chatted about the weather and the qualities of different saucepans and all the time I yearned to get my hands on my plub, take it home and finally have a bath. He looked eye to eye and he assessed me. Was I an eccentric? Had I come to the right shop?

Soon enough, however, the boy returned, now carrying a lovely little gift box with a silk ribbon tied around it. We all stood, as if being presented with a newborn baby. The owner stepped forth proudly and presented the box.

‘This plub!’

Now pretty exhausted with worry, I untied the ribbons and opened the lid of the cardboard box. Inside, sitting on a delicate fluff of tissue paper, lay a perfect, polished persimmon.

‘This not plub!’ I shouted.

Offended, the owner drew himself up to his full five feet and glared at me. ‘This plub!’ he cried.

There was nothing for it but to whip up my portable electronic Thai-English dictionary and tap in the word ‘persimmon’. I held the phone up so all could hear and bear witness to the feminine voice pronouncing the correct word for that fruit. It came. Plub. From English ‘plum’. The owner showed me the door. But what about a pluk I protested. He waved me off. No, no, go away. And so I took my box and regained my bike, defeated.

As I cycled home I was caught in an afternoon monsoon storm, and as I laboured with the pedals, drenched, I reflected that I had left the house an hour earlier in fair weather, knowing what I wanted and later how to say it, and now I was returning drenched with a persimmon in a cardboard box. Learning this language was not going to be as easy as I had once anticipated. Pi Nong had just started with me in those days and she was home doing the ironing as the storm raged. The boys at the desk had told her everything.

‘Where is pluk?’ she asked.

‘No have. Only plub.’

‘Why you bought plub to have a bath?’

Everyone told her that foreigners were strange – but this strange?

Nevertheless we cut up the persimmon and shared it with a sprinkle of sugar and as I tasted it I said: ‘It’s really good. Wow.’

‘Not correct,’ Pi Nong said, suddenly growing pedantic. ‘Wow is Thai word. We say waaow. High tone.’

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