Essential Punjabi and Hindi phrases

The Punjabi greeting, said with palms together. Universal here across communities and the single most useful phrase you can learn in the tricity.

How are you? in Punjabi. Administration runs in English and Hindi is universal, but Punjabi is what the city actually speaks to itself in.

The unit of the city. Chandigarh is built as numbered sectors of roughly 800 by 1,200 metres, each self-contained with its own market, school and green belt. Every address, direction and conversation is organised around them.

Does not exist. The numbering runs 1 to 56 and skips 13 — usually explained by Le Corbusier's superstition. Locals enjoy watching newcomers look for it.

A detached house on its own plot, the original Chandigarh housing type. Most rentals in the older sectors are a floor of one, let by the owner living on another.

Chandigarh plus Mohali in Punjab and Panchkula in Haryana. It reads as one city and is three jurisdictions — three stamp duty rates, three property regulators and two payroll positions.

A village. Chandigarh absorbed several and they survive as denser, cheaper, older pockets inside the grid — Burail, Attawa, Badheri — where the sector logic breaks down entirely.

Local shorthand for a sector's market — the commercial strip at the heart of each sector, numbered with it. 'Sector 22 market' is a place everyone knows without a street name.

Chickpeas with deep-fried bread — the region's defining breakfast, eaten before noon and best from a sector market counter rather than a restaurant.

Stuffed flatbread with butter, curd and pickle. The winter breakfast of the whole region, and the thing to eat before a drive into the Shivaliks.

Nek Chand's forty-acre sculpture park, built illegally and in secret from construction and household waste over eighteen years before officials found it in 1975 and decided to keep it.

112 is the single national emergency number. 108 is the free ambulance service and works across all three tricity jurisdictions.