Language in India is a rocky terrain whose slope has been steepened by the trills of a borrowed tongue. I am not a native English speaker, yet here I am, furiously spewing my privileged speech against and in the language of my colonisers.
In 1947, my first-generation immigrant grandparents arrived in India from present-day Bangladesh with nothing. Nothing except empty stomachs and mouthful of words delicately embroidered with the Dhaka dialect. Eventually, the hot, oily sizzles of their lisping ‘S’s were doused on their children’s lips. Parents whose undisguised identities rolled out in every spoken sentence bore children who clothed the nakedness of their speech out of shame: an effacement that they believed would grant them permit into the affluence of a metropolis.
The generation that followed, that is mine, learnt English at school. I, like the child of every middle-class household, slathered English upon myself before self-immolating to a convent institution. Here, they tried their best to polish, like black ballerina shoes, the rough edges of my overstressed syllables; iron out the inconsistencies of grammar with my pleated skirts.
But the more we’d want my “Englishness” to smell of blue, chlorinated pools of country clubs, it’s sterility got contaminated by the fishy yellow of curried fingers. I was desperate to cover them. Hide them between storybooks where children feasted on tinned sardines and jam tarts: exotic tastes that were unbeknownst to my native palette.
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