How did Salim first begin learning English?

Salim had driven an auto-rickshaw in the city for eleven years before he decided to learn English, and he learnt it from the signboards.

He started with the ones he passed every day. NO PARKING. KEEP LEFT. SCHOOL AHEAD, DRIVE SLOWLY. He did not know the words, but he knew what they meant, because he had watched what people did when they saw them. So he worked backwards, from the meaning to the letters.

At red lights he copied words into a notebook he kept in the glove box. In the evenings his daughter, who was in the eighth standard, checked them and taught him how to say them. She was a strict teacher. She made him repeat "pharmacy" twelve times, because he kept wanting to say it with a P.

By the second year he could read the headlines of the newspaper his passengers left behind. By the third, he could talk to the foreign tourists who waved him down near the museum, and they tipped better when he could tell them the way.

One evening a passenger in a suit, hurrying to the airport, asked if he could help with a word on a form. Salim read it, explained it, and waited while the man wrote.

"Where did you study?" the man asked.

Salim looked out at the lit-up signs of the city streaming past the window.

"Here," he said.