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Mastering the Colonizer’s Mother Tongue
And reclaiming it for ourselves
My thathi and thatha used to speak English. The memories of my own first language resting on their tongues feels so ancient, sometimes I forget it ever came to pass.
But I remember my thathi coaxing my little sister’s stubborn hands to give birth to straight, neat rows of English alphabet letters. I remember my understanding of a few Tamil words being enough to carry a conversation with my grandparents.
I remember.
My thathi and thatha gleefully forgot their English, casting it aside like a heavy coat rendered obsolete in tropical climates. They let the unsavory amalgam of letters and sounds slip between their fingers, not trying any harder to retain a memory of it than one might try to hold onto sand.
At home, the blandness of “Madras,” “Bombay,” and “Bangalore” were smothered in the spices of our thousand mother tongues until everyone forgot that Chennai, Mumbai, and Bengaluru had once been called by other names.
How beautiful it is to forget…when we are able.
As a child, I was proud to tell everyone that my father was multilingual because in the US, it was and still is a rarity. My dad was some kind of natural wonder of the world. Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi all danced…
