Memoir
Ma . This was the very first word I said. It marked the beginning of my journey where I learned and absorbed languages that connected me to the world outside; that connected me to my family, friends and myself. Every night my mother would hum the familiar tunes of an old Hindi lullaby, calming and soothing our minds as we slipped smoothly and soundly into the depths of our dreams; And it was in Hindi that with booming commands my father would summon us. Ever since, Hindi has been the language of expression for me even though English was the very first language I officially learnt.
My junior years of schooling in Hong Kong orbited around English. Everybody spoke English and everybody understood it, until fourth grade. The culture shift was massive when I first enrolled in boarding school. A new country, a new environment and an absolutely bizarre terminology understood only by those in boarding school. Boarding school “lingo”, as we called it, was a whole new language in itself. It awed me; it encapsulated me with fascination as I wondered and pondered in my head, “How on earth can a pair of socks be called ‘togs’? What does this alien word ‘chippie’ mean? Despite this odd and strange way of substituting normal words with ancestral borrowings, it became a language that molded my personality and expression towards my classmates. It was the language of blood which we all shared; it was our solace in times of despair and our heaven in times of joy. We fought in it, we complained in it and we laughed in it. It is still a part of me. It is a memory, tattooed in my heart and mind, that connects me to all the hardships, triumphs and experiences with my friends and teachers throughout my school life there. In boarding school, where not all the caretaking staff or shop keepers and taxi drivers knew English, learning Tamil, the ethnic language, was a survival skill. In Tamil, I can still recite the three crucial phrases that got me through boarding school...