I spent a fair share of yesterday reading a short story by Guy de Maupassant: Miss Harriet. I spent many moments and many minutes that ticked away on the clock, seeing letters strung together, reading them together, my mouth moving involuntarily as my mind processed words and spaces of the French language that were born as a result of their magical unison. I read on about an old woman and her idiosyncrasies, I read on about the world that was painted, knowing fully well that I was missing many a detail, leaving behind many a thought that remained unsaid, but was said nonetheless. I stumbled on unfamiliar words, faltered at unknown usages. I trudged on, unsure at every step, hesitant at every dimly lit corner.
When I turned over the last page of the story, I knew I had left unexploited a great deal of what was written by a man, the English translations of whose stories have kept me company on nights without number, while I lay shrouded in darkness, loneliness and teenage reveries. I instantly knew that although my level of French afforded me an entrance wide enough to access all that the characters had expressly said, it had not granted me a doorway wide enough to access the courtyard that lay just a little further away on the same page; a courtyard full of roses in full bloom, the courtyard of emotion and feeling and understanding of all the things that words don’t speak.
I knew that I had missed out on the one thing that made the man’s writing feature high up on my list of favourite things to read. The story left me feeling victorious, for I had come a long, tedious way up this alien language’s ladder. There is no denying that. But the story left me empty; somewhat hollow like my insides had been scooped out, for I felt drained and not replenished. I had given much more than I could take; a one way bridge speckled with tired footprints across the Seine. Guy de Maupassant’s Miss Harriet did not permit me to access the unsayable emotion that fills up the space in between the lines; Miss Harriet did not give me full consent into a new language, but she reminded me of the two I have always had. She reminded me of the power I wield within, the undimmable light that glows within, of knowing that no matter how many Miss Harriets may turn me away, or remind me that I will forever remain an outsider, I will always have the words, the phrases, the love, the emotion that can be spoken, written and sung in the two languages that brought me up; the two mothers that rocked me to sleep through all the nights I have seen. For them, I am and will forever be, an insider. Yesterday, as the big red ball set into Maupassant’s ocean, Miss Harriet reminded me of all the ways the forked tongue of this bilingual child could move, in Malayalam and in English, if she was to behold the same red sun descending into the ocean that kisses the shores of her home town far away.
While living a life on foreign soil, and trying sincerely to get habituated with life and living in a place so incredibly rife with nuances of culture and language and philosophy so unlike our own, it sometimes so happens that little parts of us, vital parts of us, get pushed onto the back burner. Some parts of us remain so unused for such a long time that it feels as though they fade into the background of a future dream. Just like the forest, the hungry moss and the intense shrubbery that usurp unsuspecting corners that guard secrets and memories of many a forgotten species, it requires little effort to lose certain marks of character that we carry on our skin. However, it requires a great deal of struggle to keep them alive. To keep them breathing. To keep them close as a mark of who we are, where we come from; a living testament to all the storms that we have weathered, when no one, not even the Internet was watching.
As a child, I was exceedingly proud of my Malayalam handwriting. I could pack page after page in my neat, legible and pretty scrawl without ever making an error on the page that would cause me to cut out or tarnish the beauty of all the pages I meticulously filled. This ended up being a big chunk of my identity in school, especially because my then Malayalam teacher, Miss Dhanam, sang generous praises of my answer sheets publicly and in private. She was the teacher I dragged my mother to meet first during every parent teacher meeting; I knew she’d have nice things to say and I knew she’d say them anyway. Coming to think of it, Miss Dhanam was perhaps the primary reason why I fell in love with my mother tongue and the way its curves and edges traversed across empty sheets of paper. It is no mean feat, for in a society like mine, where local languages play second fiddle to the Coloniser’s tongue, it must have indeed demanded a great deal of passion and hard work from a young school teacher for her voice to be heard above the ruckus and cacophony of praises sung for the English language.
Perhaps I have always taken my mother tongue for granted. It was something that I was sort of born with, with barely any efforts to nourish or nurture. Malayalam was the little weed that grew in the pot firmly reserved for the royal rose bush – English. Malayalam was like the hard work my own mother did under the roof of our house, day and night, tirelessly, which no one paid attention to as long as things were immaculate. Like my own mother’s hard work, my mother tongue gave no reason to be noticed. Malayalam was the paper that I would strategically place first on a pile of answer sheets marked in red, with the faint hope that a high score and a pretty scrawl would distract my parents from the catastrophe that lay underneath. It wasn’t enough, because it really didn’t matter. What was one to do with Malayalam anyway? It was a world where great orators waxed eloquent in thundering English, in halls crammed with Malayalis, the speeches pockmarked with words and sentence structures that almost none of the listeners comprehended. And yet, when they finished, deafening applause rang through the halls, people stood up and clapped at the sheer brilliance of words, most of which had failed the lone task they had to fulfil – to communicate. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered. As long as English words flitted off our brown tongues as they would a white man’s, we had all won. Yet the weed grew, with barely any water sprinkled specifically for its growth, with barely any attention or devotion set aside for its existence. Today, call it lack of practice or unqualified neglect, a pen in my hand doesn’t move the same paths to form the same pretty letters anymore no matter how much I try. Beautiful letters that filled hundreds of pages will now remain a thing of my past, a distant memory, a part of me consumed by the green moss of neglect.
Maybe it has never been purely about the language. Granted, a large chunk of parents and caregivers back home, for want of a trustworthy statistic, have prodded and still continue to prod their young to sharpen their English language tools and anglicisms as a means to a better life; to better opportunities. It is the truth in fact, they are not wrong, it is arguably a sure shot way to navigate this complicated and competitive world. Only that it is one thing to sharpen one prong of a forked tongue and it is a whole other matter to actively blunt the other.
A few weeks ago, on a WhatsApp group formed by old friends born and raised on Malayali soil, there happened to be a joke or a meme posted in Malayalam. Something silly. Trivial. The text was in Malayalam script. A bunch of us laughed and just as all groups on the internet function, a bunch of us stayed silent. But one person typed back: “Can someone translate this for me?” I smirked behind my phone screen, I won’t deny it. Condescension is a vice I am trying to curb. I smirked because this wasn’t the first time that they had asked for translations; it wasn’t the second time or the third. I smirked because this was someone who shared a Malayalam class with me for many years all the way up to 10th grade where we dissected meticulously the Mahabharat served to us in Kuttikrishna Marar’s dense and impenetrable language. So, what happened in the meantime that they had misplaced the simplest skill of reading an artless text in a language that we learned to cry in? So, what happened in the meantime that one prong of the split tongue was blunted so fervently that their tongue wasn’t forked anymore? What is it about this world that urges us to bleach the brownness off the skin of our backs with the fervour of someone who feels the need to dissociate completely with their mother tongue?
Maybe it has never been purely about the language.
It was a sunny Saturday in Paris. It was as Sriram and I sat sipping on tall mugs of cold Spanish beer, working our way through a plate of perfectly salted, perfectly fresh fried fish in a tiny tapas bar that we heard it. We heard it despite the loud, vibrant flamenco music that wafted out of the dusty speakers in the corners. We heard it despite the hubbub of people bantering in fast paced Spanish as beer mugs clanked and laughter escaped happy, smiling faces. We heard it despite the happy noises of summer, the wind still warm and dusty and smelling of the city and her inhabitants. We heard it over the sound of cars and the whirring exhaust fans in the restaurant. We heard it, for it was familiarity. It was the cool breath of a life that we knew in a not so distant past, a life that we let go of before it let go of us. It was Hindi. A young couple at the next table, a guy and a girl, sat conversing in Hindi. Tourists, I engraved into the stone of my mind, without base or foundation. When the coolness of familiarity swooshes past us, giving respite to little drops of perspiration on our foreheads on a balmy day, it is challenging to not pay attention. When you hear your adoptive mother tongue being spoken in close proximity in a land far away from home and roots, you look up. You look up, you smile, for it is there that you find an ephemeral pocket of home within the undying commotion that keeps this massive city alive.
“Hey guys, where in India are you from?” We initiated the conversation with the mandatory and everlasting first question among my people and it wasn’t long before the chairs were adjusted to face the group of four and conversation flowed faster than beer drained in our mugs. One from the east, another from the north and the two of us from the far south. It was also laid down rather firmly that none of us was a tourist in Paris. The couple at the other table had been in the city for three years, they said. Two years for us, we said, with a twinge of unfounded immodesty. “Ha! That’s during the pandemic!” The girl smirked aloud. “That counts for less than a year. You are still visiting.” Ouch, but we all laughed as we do. Sometimes I wonder why the word ‘tourist’ is so unloved. Even in corners of the world where we are in fact tourists, we take great offence when we are thought of as one. We’d much rather be perceived a local; staying far away from the madness of all the silly, sweaty tourists, far away from the pandemonium of excitement that seem to spill out of humans as they spend their own money to behold the sights and sounds of a new place. I have lost count of the number of YouTube videos titled ‘how to speak French like a local’ I have consumed. When logic takes over, I know I will never be a local. In fact, I don’t even want to be one. I want to speak this language like a foreigner who has spent hours and hundreds of euros in an attempt to make her own life easier in this country that bigheartedly hosts her; to access one more pocket of literature of this world. I am not a local here. I am a local only in the city where incandescent lights gleam bright in ramshackle roadside eateries that serve soft parottas and spicy beef curry as soon as the sun goes down. “Ugh these tourists.” Sometimes I feel, despite learning a considerable amount of this language and the etiquette, despite the little card that I carry in my wallet, I will remain a tourist in every other part of the world but the small green patch that I call my home. I want to remain so. But yet, I do not say it aloud. “Ugh I live in Paris. I am not a tourist.”
Coming back to the two tables in the Spanish tapas bar. After many sips of beer conversation eased into family and background and childhood. It translated into literature and favourite books and musicians and all the fine things of “Indian culture” that live beyond the stereotypes plastered on European-Indian restaurant walls. But every sentence seemed to be heavily punctuated with nuances of French culture and what each one of us knew of it, our interpretations, our contributions. “All my best friends are French.” Big, round eyes on the girls face shone like stars as she said those words. Smiles were exchanged. Conversation further moved into food – real good homemade food. It travelled into the territory of family and fish curry all in the matter of a few dozen minutes. All four participants shared little snippets of life and living generously like confetti, “but all my best friends are French.” I wanted to tell her that I had heard her the first time, but I bit back the urge. She continued. “In fact, they think I am more French than they are.” Well fucking done, you have done us all proud, you have done our country proud, for those friends are probably right. Is that what you wanted to hear?
Dialogue flowed. And before we knew it, it seemed that we had grown oblivious to the flamenco music that continued to stream out of the speakers and it felt as though we had all been enveloped in vivid memories of home and childhood blended gracelessly with our individual scores of French integration. The day dusked outside the dusty windows of the restaurant and Sriram and I decided it was time to go home. We said goodbyes to our newly found acquaintances and I politely offered my contact, in case they felt the need to get in touch sometime. Perhaps a Freudian slip, but the guy, who hadn’t been much of a talker until then, said with a small laugh: “She’s not going to get in touch. She has only French friends and is very proud of it.” I laughed, everyone laughed and the two of us went on our way.
The encounter at the tapas bar served little in terms of new friendships or relationships, but it opened a whole new repertoire of questions inside my head. Questions I have no answers for, not yet, questions I want to turn away from; but indeed questions I know I will need to explore in order to understand parts of me, parts of my existence and my history that I have masked for a long time now without my knowing, just like the smells from my kitchen who beg to waft into our shared courtyard. Perhaps it is the ease in which complex concepts like ‘identity’ get questioned and the feeble answers that we have get dissipated in the crowd and the noise and the newness of living in another country. Perhaps it is the gratitude that we feel from within, to a place that takes us in, fulfilling many of our dreams; our parents’ dreams; our ancestor’s dreams. Perhaps it is because we come with an unsaid promise to integrate, to make a whole new life from scratch, to leave behind all that we have known back home, to constantly carry the guilt of having left behind those people who paved our way into this bright white world.
It is not once or twice that I have been privy to conversation at mostly white dinner tables where people have passed “honest” opinions “without the slightest bad intention” about people like me – Indian people. I am embarrassed to say that for until recently, I used to laugh along politely because I rarely found the right words to confront twinges of rude generalisations I wasn’t sure was intended in the first place. Sometimes I wondered if I was making it all up. I wasn’t. When people have told me at those dinner tables, over multiple glasses of wine that “you are not like the other Indians we have met” and buried it as an honest question to understand the layers of a country that is home to 1.4 billion people ranging between billionaires and families who go to sleep hungry, all in a single evening, I am utterly ashamed to say that I may have felt a swell of pride. Isn’t that the dream? To be unlike the rest of us. To be unlike me. I am utterly humiliated to think that I felt a sense of achievement to have been considered ‘an insider’ during those painful exchanges of drunken words. For those of us far away from home and familiarity, for those of us who spend our days and our nights looking longingly into brightly lit windows, still searching, still yearning for that “better life” that we came for, we will ourselves to take every scrap of kindness with folded hands; with gratitude. It is hard to ask questions at those junctures, for the weight of a masked identity is heavier than the earth. But I can’t be that person anymore. I am tired.
When Aziz Ansari joked about white people and the imaginary game of candy crush some of them play, collecting points for all the wonderful things that they do, long moving paragraphs on the Internet, making friends with people of colour etc, all branded as an effort to bring up minorities from low-lying terrain, we all laughed hard. It was indeed hilarious. But little did we realise then, that in a parallel universe there are some of us are gathering points fastidiously for every non-brown, non-Indian friend amassed; for every layer of Indianness shed. Sometimes innocuously, like the girl in the tapas bar… What is it about our Indianness that makes our reflections in the mirror so repulsive? What is it about our Indianness that makes us want to hide away? When we laughed at Ansari’s joke, little did we realise all the instances where we sat in shame about the brownness of our skins, of our languages and our accents, of our curry smells, of coconut oil… It has been many years of expat living, but to this day I worry an inordinate amount if I am troubling my neighbours with the smell of my food. Perhaps it is all in my head, for no one has, to this date, had anything but wonderful things to say about my food and the mouth-watering aromas that they leave into the blue skies. Perhaps it is indeed all in my head, but ever since the day I walked back home from the Spanish tapas bar, I can’t help but wonder why these questions, these doubts, live in my head in the first place. Perhaps at the tapas bar, I saw in the girl a tiny glimpse of me, a tiny glance at all the things I didn’t need to be; all the things I refuse to be.
We whitened our accents all in the pretext of being understood a little better. I am tired. We scratched out the sounds and dialects and vocabularies of migration and history, mixed accents haunting the flow of our speech to the best of our abilities, when all they did was add a pinch of colour and spice to an otherwise bland meal. We worked hard every day on a truly subconscious level to bleach our facades and our tongues so white that we can leave behind our homes and slide into the fantasy world, according to our dreams and our fantasies, is where happiness lives. I am tired. I truly am. And I know I have to traverse backwards a long way till I find once again, the parts that I hid, the layers that I peeled away. I know I have a long way to go back but I also know this journey will be worth it. For this beautifully forked tongue of this bilingual child is brown. For her teardrops will fall, only in Malayalam and then in English, when she beholds for one last time, Maupassant’s big red ball sinking into the ocean that kisses tirelessly, the soil that raised her.
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Much love, xx
Love the honesty in this Anj! Needless to say beautifully written! <3
Thanks for this incredibly thought provoking read, Anjali.