My mother is the type of self-made that other people can only dream of. She taught herself English from books painstakingly collected each week from the British Library in Ranchi; when she couldn’t get those, she read whatever she could find around the house that was in English. All of this culminated in, eventually, an admission to some university in England which she wasn’t allowed to go to anyways and a masters in Zoology which she didn’t use in America anyways.

When she came to Long Island, she taught herself American culture through Cosmopolitan magazines. When she found her knowledge of pop culture lacking, she taught herself new stories, books that could have never made it into the British Library through sheer virtue of being written in the new century. When she had a child, she taught herself how to teach through books. So naturally, as this first child, there’s this sense of obligation I have to be my mother’s daughter.

Call it filial piety. Call it love. Call it duty. Call it whatever you want, in whichever language you want. Some things don’t change.

Because I am my mother’s daughter, though, American suburbs find me insulting anyways, from my voice to my skin to my language. My mother taught me English, the best she knew how. By no means was it broken English, although there’s a growing narrative around Asian-American immigrants that declares their words broken before they even open their mouths. No, my mother had learned from the very best. She’d taught me the British way, the way she had learned from her beloved books.

Even still, I can rarely be understood clearly. I’m not entirely sure how or why I have a thick accent—my little sister doesn’t, and my parents don’t have ones that are as entirely incomprehensible as mine. My mother claims it’s because I didn’t go through speech therapy growing up. My father claims it’s because Hindi is my first language. Everyone has a different origin story for my accent, and no one’s matches up completely.

If my father is right, though, I don’t even have anything to show for it. I’ve forgotten most of the Hindi I knew as a child. I know enough to watch a modern Bollywood movie without subtitles, but I am barely literate, only at a first grade reading level.

—

If I wanted, I could make a cut and dry story about how I learned Hindi to reconnect with my roots and talk to my ailing grandmother. None of it would be true, though, because I didn’t ever make an effort to learn proper Hindi. At sixteen, I can still talk to my nani better than any of my other cousins. I don’t have any issue with my roots either, because the thing is, talking in broken Hinglish is already an act of resistance.

—

When my mother was born, India had just celebrated its 30th year of independence. While the British had left, though,English never did. To speak English was to be educated. To be educated was to be high-class. To be high-class was to show you meant something.

Curiously, even though English was functionally a remnant of India’s colonial past, it became something of a point of pride. We took your language and learned it, look at how good we are at meaning something. I don’t pretend to know the motivations of my mother, but I suspect this may have something to do with it, as it did for countless other Indians.

My motheris fluent in both English and Hindi. She speaks proper Hindi, the type you can find in textbooks and television shows and governments. It’s an impersonal sort of language to me, when faced with the more standard Eastern Indian dialects I’m used to. There’s something beautiful in the fact that I have never used “I” in Hindi, or Hinglish, or whatever I speak. Humko bahut achcha lag ta hai. We like it a lot. I like it a lot. They both mean the same thing.

—

I remember particularly a conversation I had with my mother a few months ago. We were in the kitchen while making dinner and she had just put on a Kishore Kumar Greatest Hits Youtube playlist.

“Why didn’t you teach me more Hindi? I mean, I was already going to learn English anyway and I still got the accent,” I’d said, washing the dishes.

She’d shrugged. Kept chopping her okra without stopping, even after I’d turned the water off. “What, do you have something to prove? How many American kids do you know who can sing 60s Bollywood karaoke anyways, huh?”

She had me there. “None,” I’d replied. “I was just wondering.”

I didn’t have many complaints about my childhood, as far as culture went. My parents had made sure that I knew the music of their childhood, back when their parents were my age. I could rattle off the names of dozens of Bollywood movies and actors. She was right; I didn’t have anything to prove.

—

Identity is a fickle thing at intersections. Indian-Americans tell me I’m not Indian enough, sometimes, when the mood strikes them to rag on me for not being religious enough or not being vegetarian or however many other ways they can find that keep me out. For a long time, I had been devastated by this. I think it’s a phase that most members of the diaspora have.

When I realized that they had no more authority on this than I did, though, it was like a whole new world had opened up to me. It manifested itself in late-night Wikipedia searches and scribbled notes in the margins of calculus scratch paper. I dove into an entire set of languages that weren’t considered Indian enough to people near me: Caribbean Hindustani and its dialects, like Guyanese Bhojpuri.

Although I did not think I needed validation, I found it here anyway. Like my language, Caribbean Hindustani is based on East Indian dialects rather than standard Hindi. There’s a reason for this: if you go back far enough in my family tree, countless people were captured by the British and taken to the Caribbean to be forced indentured servants.

As I immersed myself deeper and deeper, I found that this language made sense to me in a way that none other did before. If I said the words aloud instead of reading them on the page, I wasable to understand almost 90% of a passage in Caribbean Hindustani without a dictionary. I could breeze through the language armed with only a pretty shady website as a glossary and my own knowledge. It felt nostalgic, almost, even though I had never heard this language before.

It’s curious, the things we discover when we realize that we, too, have power.

—

I still wouldn’t be able to pass a grammar course in Hindi. It takes me 30 minutes to read a paragraph. When I open my mouth, something comes outthat is not English or Hindi or any other language I’ve ever seen written down. I fancy myself a poet and yet, I can’t claim fluency in any language.

I am made of contradictions. A daughter grasping for the memories of a language her self-taught mother taught her, while forgetting the one she is actually fluent in as the years go by. I used to pride myself on winning my elementary school spelling bee. Now, I count myself lucky to be understood in English.

And yet, I am still my mother’s daughter. I still cannot speak proper Hindi, nor do I try to at this point, but this summer, I taught myself to take pride in the English I do know how to speak. It isn’t pure and it isn’t neat, but it also isn’t broken.

Hum tutawah nahi bolte hai. We don’t speak broken.I don’t speak broken. They both mean the same thing.

I used to think I had an obligation to be self-made like my mother—to prove she was right in choosing to have me and teaching me everything she had taught herself. But really, I think the only obligation she wanted me to have is being able to use what shetaught me to thrive.

—

Being self-made doesn't have to mean only one thing. My mother gave me her knowledge as tools, but I am the one who made myself whole.

Unmake me until I am overstuffed like a karela¹, overflowing with amchur² & bleeding crackling seeds on the pavement while you carry my fingers softly in your own, infatuation solidifying like cold ghee³ on gold leaf. Sometimes when you look at me, I feel effervescence bubble up inside me and threaten to burst,like homemade puchka⁴. You don't call it puchka, you don't slurp imli pani⁵ like a tonic, and you don't even speak the same language as me. Because some feelings are universal, you laugh when I tell you this anyways.

You hold my hair back when I sweat silvery beats of silence into dusk & then you skim my skin when I dance with payal⁶ jangling like a fool’s bells in court, gorging on joy like it is oil-soaked sattu⁷ spooned out of burnt litti⁸ in childhood. I tell jokes to your toes when I see them, watching the gold hawkers call out the endearments I call you in languages that are patchwork, tilted like a funhouse mirror.

Jackson Heights is anti-fluent in the summer, tongues dancing bhangra⁹ while pickpockets shuffle through the crowd. Everything is shifted in America. It doesn’t matter if you know how to dance bhangra or not, you’re included all the same. Borders change, food unites, cricket divides, God saves Freddie and Madhubala¹⁰ instead of Victoria and Elizabeth. Languages mix up into a new one until we can’t tell where our English ends and our Urdu begins and where the line is between Farsi and Bangla. We’ve never learned to speak a language whole.

I just gotta get out of this prison cell¹¹, the strange girls from Edison¹² (for surely, there must be some other than us) croon out, swathed in yellow denim because they’re in love with the idea of being the next Freddie¹³ again. They’re wrong, since there will never be another, but it’s nice to know they’re trying to stitch this into a home for us too. Freddie was anti-fluent too, I tell you while you eat chaat¹⁴ one-handed. He spoke our language, wrote our literary canon into his songs, sang about people like us. You can’t be fluent in a language that nobody thinks exists, so we’ll be anti-fluent.

Later, while the sun is dancing down the horizon, we walk hand-in-hand down the street, streamlined as our legs make nests on the welcoming pavement & your fingers smell like the illicit clementines you peeled for me at Mithaas¹⁵ alongside squishy dhokla¹⁶ that felt softer than your cheeks. Your laugh stops the sky cold —

In its medical
beauty, flash-frozen: saanjh
kopyar ho gaya ha¹⁷.

—

^title 74th Street is often considered the center of the Little India in Jackson Heights, also known as Kalpana Chawla Way
¹ Indian bittermelon
² dried mango powder
³ clarified butter
⁴ te East Indian term for the food known as golgappa or pani puri in the rest of India
⁵ tamarind water found in East Indian puchkas that are absent from the rest of South Asia, which generally uses mint water instead
⁶ anklets that often have little bells hangign off of them
⁷ a type of flour used in Bihari cuisine
⁸ a Bihari food that consists of a spicy sattu filling encased in dough, cooked over a fire, then broken open and eaten with ghee or oil
⁹ a type of Punjabi folk dance that has become popular throughout India and the Desi diaspora as a result of globalization and Bollywood movies
¹⁰ a Bollywood actress in the late 40s to early 60s, she's consdiered one of the most beautiful actresses in the history of Bollywood and one of the greatest and most memorable
¹¹ lyrics from "Somebody to Love" by Queen
¹² a town in New Jersey with a large Desi-American population, mostly around Oak Tree Raod (a Little India)
¹³ Freddie Mercury, the British frontman of the band Queen. He was of Parsi-Indian origin
¹⁴ a type of quick street food in the greater South Asia region
¹⁵ a chain restaurant in New Jersey specializing in fast food
¹⁶ a traditionally Gujarati street food made of chickpea flour that has spread across the greater South Asia region
¹⁷ the evening has fallen in love (Hindi)

My mother used to put me to sleep when I was a baby by singing
songs I couldn’t understand. I still only pretend to understand them, even now.
I cannot speak a single word of Magahi, and I do not learn any as the years
go by. Instead, I fill my pores with bits and knobs of dozens of other languages, hoping
that maybe spliced together, they could form one whole. Maybe, spliced together,
I will be interesting enough to be noticed wherever I go. I think most of all,
I’d like to be beloved when I grow up.

I learn German to impress a friendly boy in seventh grade. It’s
a little bit of a rebellion: everyone expects me to start speaking Spanish
as soon as I show my teeth, so I pivot. I forget every usted¹ I’ve ever
learned & I replace them with Sie². I trade mañana³ for Morgen⁴.
Every twelve-year-old wants to be a little unknowable, as long as they
can go home before sundown & hug their mother goodnight. Four years later,
I spend a week talking in only German to impress Heiko from camp.
I am sixteen & nothing has changed. I still want people to notice me.
Ich denke, dass ich für jetzt und immerdar sechzehn bin. Es ist ein seltsame Gefühl.⁵

I start learning Korean to impress an older girl. We sit together on the school bus &
she pulls up NCT videos & offers me an earbud. Hum log Urdu aur Hindi meh baat
kar te hai, kyun ki hum log dono ek jaise ban gaye hai.⁶I am not in love with her, but I want
her to think I am worthy of being beside her. 친구⁷, दोस्त⁸, ⁹دوست, friend. We sit in silence,
mostly, even though we share so many languages. Silence can be misunderstood too,
but not at the same level. I call her by her name, instead of didi or jie or unni. Perhaps this
was my first step to dishonor. Three years later, I show off my Mandarin to her and wait eagerly
for her approval. 對不起, 我不知道,¹⁰I have to tell her once she starts talking so fast.
That’s okay, she says. Meh bhi utna nahi bol sakti hai.¹¹At least we’re equal in our inadequacy.

I am not fluent in any language. Sometimes, when the months get too long, I start to
fancy myself as a translator, even though I’m rubbishat it, but my mother cannot recognize
my words anymore. She chalks it up to poetry being beyond her, but I think she’s just
wary of the way I bend myself into fractals to please everyone. Abhi bhi, humko nahi pata
hai, kaise hum yeh sab bhasha ko hamara bana diye hai.¹² The tragedy is not that I’ve grown
up into something my mother doesn’t know. Everyone wants to be a little unknowable. No,
the tragedy is that I don’t feel guilty about it.

—