Dear Reader,
The room was dimly lit, a conference hall of sorts lined in near perfect symmetry with chairs that come with an inbuilt writing desk. I was seated in a corner at the back, alone, with a serious case of dry mouth and shaky knees in front of a sparkling laptop screen. I have loathed interviews on video call for as long as they have subsisted. I am so much better, so much more self-assured in flesh and blood when I don’t have to worry about angles and lighting and innocent laundry in the background and unearthing the ever-changing, irregular metronome of a virtual conversation. I have so much more to offer when I am not a mere two dimensional object suspended somewhere beyond the realm of truth and personhood. This time was no different save for the fact that I could be me, I was told. After all, I was being tested on a language I have spoken all my life – the language of my thoughts, my anger, my sincerity… It was meant to be easy. Other people around me (French, all of them) had been poring over notes and highlighted passages in big books. I had sat in their midst, the pit in my stomach unsure whether to take on the guise of confidence or arrogance, as I flipped through a well-thumbed novel. How much of a whole life can one run through in thirty minutes?
The interviewer was a woman ostensibly in her late 60s, with a wrinkly face, kind, bespectacled eyes and a mop of grey hair arranged haphazardly around her pink face. Her soft voice lilted to the ups and downs of an accent brimming with the history of her land and mine and everything in between; the history of colonisation, the history of subservience. The questions were basic, almost childlike. And I found my mouth moving, words and phrases rolling off my tongue all while the woman watched me with her bird like eyes, intently, perhaps noting down every pause she’d have paused differently, every word she’d have enunciated differently… With every frown that was born between her scanty brows, my breath quickened. I found myself striving to sound better, more poised, determined so as to not let the colour of my skin (or the colour of my passport, for this is the lone basis for all these tests) dictate her perception of my relationship with her language. I found myself shamelessly vying to prove my worth to this pale stranger, whitewashing my words and scrubbing the brownness off my tongue, to showcase to her like a silly circus animal that I was in fact worthy of her language… Well, the results prove that I had succeeded in this cheap endeavour but somewhere deep down, questions are unending.
Almost every brown person I know who lives in white lands has two accents: one for when we are breathing and our tummies are relaxed and out, and the other for when we are with “foreigners”. Sometimes the distinction is barely there, especially among the self-introspecting breed, yet it is prominent enough to be caught by anyone looking for it. Maybe it is just our way of trying to fit in; our way of ensuring that our differences are negligible and unseeable, who knows.
It was just this morning that an old friend shared excerpts from a study which found that job applicants with “English sounding” names are more likely to be interviewed for leadership positions than applicants with “non-English sounding” names. This is how Padmarajan Nair ends up being Paddy Nair, he pronounced. I laughed out loud at that but where exactly lies the joke? I am not so sure anymore. I am positive that we all know of Indian men and women who migrated to other lands and ended up with names half the size of the ones they were given at birth. We were inexplicably given the weighty yoke of having to make white lives just a little easier, because god forbid that they take two fleeting seconds out of their lives to pronounce a two or three syllable name. Recently I heard an Indian friend with a simple two syllable name call up a restaurant here in Paris to make a reservation. When asked for her name she said: Diana. I looked up from my book. She responded to my quizzical look with: You know that’s more convenient. Sadly, I do.
One sunny Spring afternoon on my terrace, as I sat having lunch with a friend, a white woman much older than me (I’ll call her P), she said: Oh you speak English really well, not like Mr. K (another brown brother from the mother land) and I laughed, chuffed at the sincere compliment. P smiled along but it was evident that she was hoping for a longer explanation; she was genuinely curious. I explained to her that my earliest school years were in the company of friends and teachers belonging to the Anglo-Indian community – a term that probably means little to anyone outside the seaside village of Thangassery where people who looked like me, spoke, ate, danced, sang and strummed the guitar like white men and women. A land of the in between… like the spot of milk in a cup of black tea, a moment of vulnerability. P nodded along like she understood. Ah that makes sense! But what I kept away from her was that I no longer know how I speak anymore. That my words, my tongue has long been trained to fit every white mould that has crossed my path; that my tongue has only craved for acceptance, validation and inclusion into a community I have only been taught to worship, to venerate, to defer to by my people subconsciously. That we have been taught all our lives to read, to study, to imbibe western culture and literature to the best of our abilities. That it didn’t matter in the least if you hadn’t read Gitanjali or Aithihyamala – those don’t take you too far in my world where Dickens and Hemmingway and Austen and Orwell reign supreme. They are the names who take you far, these names come with a far superior price tag. I wanted to tell her that somewhere along these footfalls of time and memory, and perhaps naturally so, our colonial history and the English language are threads that run through the fabric of each of our existences. And we try, day in and day out, to prove ourselves worthy of this colonial magnanimity. It does not make us any better than village dwellers who run after white tourists demanding selfies. In fact, if anything, maybe it proves that we are all cut from the same cloth. Some of us have just learnt to perform the same act under a prettier, more sophisticated camouflage. I wanted to tell her that somewhere along the way, English magically stopped being just another language for us. It became our currency – costlier than gold, dearer than diamonds. I wanted to say this and more but I ate my lunch instead.
Love from Paris,
Anjali