The ten numerals
| Sign | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| ० | 0 | A circle. Ours came from this one. |
| १ | 1 | Reads like a 9 with a bar across the top. |
| २ | 2 | Recognisably a 2. |
| ३ | 3 | Recognisably a 3. |
| ४ | 4 | The trap: it looks like an 8. |
| ५ | 5 | Like a 4 with a loop underneath. |
| ६ | 6 | A curl that reads more or less as a 6. Fair enough. |
| ७ | 7 | An open hook. The one to confuse with ९. |
| ८ | 8 | A plain “c”. The one to confuse with ६. |
| ९ | 9 | Closed loop, tail to the right — near enough to a 9. |
Note where these do and don’t appear. Number plates and highway signs are required by law to use Latin letters and the numerals we use, so a milestone, a kilometre stone or a truck’s registration needs no decoding at all. Devanagari digits survive on the hand-painted things: shop boards, price tags, room and house numbers, temple donation lists, the page numbers of a Hindi newspaper. Prices are often written both ways on the same board, which is the easiest way to check you have read a new numeral correctly.
How the script works
Devanagari is not an alphabet but something in between an alphabet and a syllabary: each consonant letter already carries a short “a” inside it, so क is not k but ka. Vowels other than that one are written as marks hung on the consonant — above, below, before or after it — which is why कि, की, कु and को are all one letter wearing different hats. The horizontal line along the top of every word is not decoration: the letters hang from it, and a break in the line is a word break. There are no capitals, spelling matches pronunciation far better than English does, and the same script serves Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit and the Rajasthani spoken around you — so the writing stays constant even where the speech does not.
Twenty words you will actually see
| Sign | Sounds like | Means | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| चाय | chai | tea | Every stall, every station platform, every second painted board. |
| ढाबा | dhaba | roadside kitchen | Highway boards, usually next to the word Punjabi. This is where the driver stops. |
| होटल | hotal | hotel | On a small-town shopfront it usually means a place to eat, not to sleep. |
| रेस्टोरेंट | restorent | restaurant | The English word in Hindi letters — a useful first thing to sound out. |
| शुद्ध शाकाहारी | shuddh shakahari | pure vegetarian | Restaurant boards everywhere, and the whole of Pushkar. |
| मिठाई | mithai | sweets | Sweet shops, which in Diwali week are the busiest premises in any town. |
| पानी | paani | water | Bottles, tanks, water booths, RO filter shops. |
| दूध | doodh | milk | Dairy booths, milk sweets, the sign on a buffalo shed. |
| मंदिर | mandir | temple | Signposts everywhere; usually preceded by the god’s name. |
| बैंक | baink | bank | Another English word in Hindi letters. ATM is written एटीएम. |
| पुलिस | pulis | police | Station boards, jeeps, checkposts. |
| अस्पताल | aspataal | hospital | Blue signs with a distance on them. Worth knowing on sight. |
| शौचालय | shauchalay | public toilet | The formal word, so it is the one on the sign. |
| महिला / पुरुष | mahila / purush | women / men | Toilet doors, queues, the first metro carriage in Delhi. |
| प्रवेश / निकास | pravesh / nikaas | entry / exit | Monument gates, car parks, station subways. |
| खुला / बंद | khula / band | open / closed | Shop shutters, and roads during a festival. |
| स्वागत | swagat | welcome | Arches over the road at every town boundary. |
| धीरे | dheere | slowly | Painted on the road before a village or a school. |
| आगे | aage | ahead | “Work ahead”, “diversion ahead” — always bad news. |
| पेट्रोल पंप | petrol pump | petrol station | What everyone calls it in English too. |
The place names
| Sign | Place |
|---|---|
| दिल्ली | Delhi |
| उदयपुर | Udaipur |
| कुम्भलगढ़ | Kumbhalgarh |
| जोधपुर | Jodhpur |
| अजमेर | Ajmer |
| पुष्कर | Pushkar |
| जयपुर | Jaipur |
| आगरा | Agra |
Two endings do a lot of work here. -pur (पुर) means town, and the front half is usually the founder: Jaipur is Jai Singh’s town, Jodhpur is Rao Jodha’s, Udaipur is Udai Singh’s. -garh (गढ़) means fort, which is why Kumbhalgarh is Kumbha’s fort. Once you can pick those two out of the script, half the road signs in Rajasthan tell you what kind of place they point at.
Number plates, for the car
Every plate reads left to right in four parts: two letters for the state, two digits for the district office that issued it, one to three letters for the series, then up to four digits. RJ 19 CA 4321 is a Jodhpur vehicle (photos). The state codes on this trip are RJ for Rajasthan, DL for Delhi, UP for Uttar Pradesh (which you cross into before Agra) and HR for Haryana, whose trucks are everywhere. The district numbers reward a little collecting: RJ 14 is Jaipur, RJ 19 Jodhpur, RJ 27 Udaipur, UP 80 Agra, UP 85 Mathura. Delhi slips an extra letter in after the district number for the class of vehicle — C for a car, so DL 1C is a private car from north Delhi.
The background colour says what the vehicle is for. White with black letters is private. Yellow with black letters is commercial — every truck, every taxi, and quite possibly the car you are sitting in. Green with white letters is electric, and there are more of them each year. Black with yellow letters is a self-drive rental, blue is a diplomatic mission in Delhi, and red is a brand-new vehicle running on a temporary registration. A plate beginning with a year and the letters BH belongs to someone whose job moves them between states — a new series that lets them skip re-registering.