Several years ago, while I was a third grader attending a geography class on countries of the world and the languages they spoke, our teacher reminded us about India’s vast diversity of languages. Of course, the myriad States and their distinct languages account for the many tongues.
As the lesson ended, there was a hustle in the class to find who spoke which language at home and where did they actually come from. As the city of Dehradun is a hub of internal immigrants, many were recognised and fawned on as they proudly translated sample English phrases into Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi and Tamil.
When my turn came, I said we spoke Hindi at home, though my parents spoke Malayalam to each other as they were from Kerala. With this, I described my incapability to offer any translation. It puzzled everyone, even me.
So was I a Malayali or a Doonite? At dinner, I posed the question to my parents and I was told that my sibling and I are as much Malayalis from Kerala as they were. When I asked why my brother and I did not speak Malayalam, my father retorted that South Indians did not make good Hindi speakers and Hindi was essential to pass school. Grades at school were important. No further questions were asked and none raised at school.
It was not until I went to Lucknow for an undergraduate programme and had many Malayalis in my batch did I realise two things. First, non-Hindi speakers are often ridiculed for their broken Hindi ― something my father had realised early on and had tried to protect us from. Second, due to the aural exposure to Malayalam, I had unknowingly developed a knack for surmising the gist of a conversation in Malayalam. It paid off incredibly to negotiate between the Hindi group and the non-Hindi group in our college anytime the two bifurcated. At this point, I would always say that I am from Doon whenever I was asked where am I from.
Things got harder to explain when our family moved to Kerala after my father's death, and I started my postgraduate course at the Central University there. I grew to abhor the question because while everyone had to name a city, I had to list the entire trajectory of my life to explain how I am a Malayali who did not speak Malayalam.
In a batch of around 98% Malayalis, many conveniently forgot my lack of native proficiency in the language. While my prior, miniscule aural vocabulary did help navigate the class circles, any and all attempts at my oral practices were met with jeers. The lack of the Malayali culture that I could have been a natural recipient of further deepened my crisis of rootlessness. While I did grow up with a strong North Indian culture, it felt surrogate. From a beneficiary of two worlds, I found myself at odds in a familiar yet very unfamiliar world. While humans became islands in the pandemic and found solace in balcony communities, I became doubly isolated. While real human communication was cut down to just with my mother and grandmother, everything else was just letters and voices on the black mirrors.
And now that I am off to Gujarat for my further studies where the dreaded question still awaits to which I have an ice-breaker statement for an answer: “It’s complicated. Wanna hear my story?”
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