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“Why doesn’t she speak Tamil to us,”
my aunties would ask, teasing me for stumbling over the heavy words in my mouth.

“Do you speak Indian,” curious classmates would ask.

“Why does she eat some of my curries, but not others?”
“Wow, I didn’t expect you to be that good at English.”

“She should wear more saris and salwars, a young girl like her.”

Comments like these were a normal part of my upbringing. Two lives I lived that I purposely kept separate from each other, and yet my Tamil culture and English learning seemed to clash with each other at the most inopportune moments.

Amma and Appa prioritized my English skills as soon as I was brought home from the hospital. My earliest memories are walking to the library, grasping my Amma’s hand tightly as I would stack book after book into the open Philadelphia Eagles backpack for us to take home. I would stay up under the covers reading with a flashlight in hand. Amma said that’s why I had to wear my kannadi (glasses), constantly chastising me for the habit: “It’s bad for your eyes, makal (daughter)!”

My Amma attempted to teach me Tamil, hanging up a giant poster with each letter illustrated. ந for நத்தை (snail), எ for எலி (rat), and so on. Yet, these efforts were soon replaced with perfecting my English for my kindergarten interview. Even then, I still ended up going to speech classes in fourth grade, my th’s and l’s still sounds I struggled to form in my mouth. Tamil language became an identity I only wore at home, shedding it when I walked through the doors of my elementary school. Both were important, but like oil and water, they simply could not mix. I could not read nor write in Tamil, and peppered in English words when I blanked on the correct phrase to convey my thoughts. This extended towards other parts of me deemed too “ethnic”; spraying down my clothes with Victoria’s Secret perfume to hide the smell of curry when I left home, referring to myself as Indian when others didn’t know where Sri Lanka was, and omitting my last name to avoid people butchering it for the umpteenth time. Not many I knew could relate; I had very few brown friends in the first place to confide in, speak to, be with. My Tamilness was something I wore out of convenience for people, a part of myself that people only asked about when filling out college applications and census surveys.

With my love of reading came an infatuation with the English language, entering poetry contests and scribbling down wild adventure stories between homework scraps. My room continued to be a haven for the sci-fi volumes and fantasy novels I delved into, right alongside the Shakespeare plays and classic books I was assigned to read for school. Yet, it was only in my senior year of high school that I was introduced to South Asian literature, a topic I chose for a research paper.

Immediately, I found that I couldn’t put down Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, seeing too much of myself in Gogol’s life. It was as if I was looking at a biography of how my life may go; the implications were dizzying, leaving me calling a friend at 11 p.m. in tears, pondering my existence as a brown girl in America. Seventeen years of splitting my identity in two, and in one fluid motion I saw the two parts of me woven into a symphony of words. I needed more.

Is this how it felt to be heard? Is this the mirror image my friends had already been seeing in the books they read? It was as if I was back in second grade again, being given a pair of kannadi and seeing things more clearly. Soon after I checked out more of Lahiri’s works, along with books by Arundhati Roy and Aravind Adiga, marking up their words with my thoughts etched into the corners. Dog-eared, tear-stained, highlighted books they became, a place where I could connect my thoughts. Within each story I could see a part of myself, easily imagine seeing through the eyes of these characters. And yet, there’s even more South Asian literature for me to discover and read for myself.

There are thousands of us who are part of the diaspora, people who wrap their Tamilness around them like a shawl and people who had been encouraged to take off that shawl in favor of assimilation. We all have a connection with multiple languages, the words we read at school and work, and words we speak to our co-workers, our friends, families. Who is to say that these parts of ourselves aren’t stitched together, much like the seams of the books I have read? I have started to relearn Tamil again, much like how my Appa continues to master his English after decades of learning the language. For lunch, I eat my Amma’s meen kulambu (fish curry) and rice with potato chips on the side. I never thought I would find myself represented in the language I had spoken since birth, and yet I sit here today, with Lahiri’s work still marked up on my desk.

Identity is a fickle thing, an idea that is continuously influenced by the environment around us as much as it is shaped by our own hands. With the kannadi I have, I view it differently now, a collaboration of the languages I speak and the traits I have, rather than two entities meant to be separate. Am I still learning to wear my Tamil-Americanness proudly, to be okay with my own mix of the two languages? Yes.

The difference now is that I know there are others out there like me, more Tamils who are learning to weave the fragments of themselves into one.

About Naomi B.

Naomi B. is a Tamil-American first-year university student who has a passion for all things science and literature. She always has a never-ending stack of books to read on her desk, and loves to write narratives and poems. When she has spare time in-between her classes, she likes to bake, travel, and spend time with her family.