Why do I write in English?

I write in English because I grew up with English within the Malayali diaspora in the Gulf. I studied in an English medium school filled with Malayalis. At home, we spoke and watched TV in Malayalam and outside I socialized and got about with English. And in no way was this a binary of English vs Malayalam, because I talked to my Malayali friends in English and spoke Manglish at home to my parents who thought fluent English signified learned. My church conducted services in Malayalam but our Sunday school textbooks were in English. Along every step, I associated an interiority and closeness to Malayalam—a language for eating, praying and sleeping that never translated into a literary fruition within my English-speaking upbringing. As much as I’ve tried to think in Malayalam I don’t think the self or culture has permitted me that luxury owing to the rigid system of thought that I was born into, where a said option to choose between the both was not allotted. I had to learn Malayalam myself. I read the Bible in English. The first book of poetry that attracted me very ironically was Micheal Ontaadje’s The Cinnamon Peeler. It was only in the 11th grade that I came across my first Malayali poet (who wrote poetry in English) from my prescribed syllabus: My Mother At Sixty-Six by Kamala Das. As she wrote in An Introduction

‘I speak three languages, write in 
Two, dream in one.’

This is the similar story of most young expatriates who grew up Malayali outside Kerala. When you live within an opposing structure of the other’s language, most attempts at living within your mother tongue feel performative or at best, futile. I belonged to a population that was expected to learn English over Malayalam. We didn’t choose to write in English. We were expected to survive and adapt to it—therefore it became our bread and burden.
 

WRITINGS
 

1.  A Hunter Watches His Prey From A Great Great Distance

1

My boyfriend has trouble sleeping. Especially when he wakes up terrified, and begins to talk about his dreams—he’d say how his mother pulled his legs out of the bed because she couldn’t work the television or wanted to move the furniture around, again, then he becomes inconsolable. And it is not like I have ever slept well, alone, in his clothes when he stays up to watch the horses crossing the boulder at sunrise, and writing in great detail, inside his leather notebook full of leaflets and receipts from every season we spent in Venice, a short story about the sleepless horses that could not stop running because they were so afraid of the hunter. When he is nearly done talking I constantly hope I played rescue in some part of the dream. Of late, we have been sleeping with the gospel radio playing all night, nobody rings the hotline at those hours, this way making up time is not so difficult, and we discovered if we managed to talk or touch at all. I love the boy he becomes when he is asleep, a handsome boy who wanted in, inside his family picture, every summer, he remembers the photograph differently, they may have all never been together—what a terrible way to picture distance.

2

We are small game hunting inside a dark prairie, feeling the war between the birch’s gestures, now putting out the eventual after-light. The trees have begun to heave so loudly, their shivers cast a heat so similar to mutiny, it is so to say that the peaches inside our baskets have wilted because we stood so close to each other to have seen anything else, while we knew this much, apart from grief there hasn’t been a major season. We followed the deer sounds to a box trap under the majestic oak, watching little death after little death, as if the deer walked themselves to it, expecting something a little different. It doesn’t help, that we always hesitated to think against running away from the painting or the mirror or the framed childhood portrait across the dining table, when we needed nothing to do with it, as in, mocking a softened marriage argument. You only ever wanted to be touched as the young boy who cried wolf, and I could hardly say your name when I did it—what a terrible way to picture distance.

3

Tomorrow is the first of August and the two husbands will vacate, thinking that in every life there’s a marriage or two, so why shouldn’t you get married at a motel off the highway? After all, they were men in love, they were never afraid of a little sand inside their mouth or feeling up the rough gravel of summer light torch their hollow chests, steering against each one’s own movement—nothing was but a sport these days. Today, the two husbands will ask for a bridal bouquet and a photograph and a special postcard meant for newlywed husbands, the kind that posts only a year into the future, when they’d mostly forget how they once made room in a night that has become so vast and plenty, without having to turn their faces away in their sleep. Today, they’ll say good luck to each other and sleep with their faces touching. The day after tomorrow is the second of August, the two husbands will push their oars over a lake taking turns with a fishing pole, while they are seated so closely underneath the unforgiving summer. The man on the radio will announce that the next song is called Searching for Dogs and it’ll begin to look like all of this was expected in a love story, suddenly one of them will have slightly moved to the wind and clipped his finger across the baiting hook because the other one kept talking out loud and it would seem as if there would have been more water inside the boat than it ever did about the lake. A heron will circle above the swell by their boat, crying loudly and the men will ship the oars out of the water to row back to the trail silently—something will have changed between them and one of them will return the dead fishes back to the lake, because he thinks this is right, it is right to put the dead to rest. After all, the husbands thought to themselves, it is only another love story, this better how it must be—what a terrible way to picture distance.
 

2.    IN MY ACID GARDEN

Boy butterfly pulls
flower light crowns to his teeth
The crow plucks an eye. 
 

3.    LOVELY HANGING FRUIT

The sliver of grace
       airily
hangs  aslant.
        Gallantly.
An avian
conviction—something along
         the high faith
in new wings. Headlight quirts
made
          illuminate the thing. The thing
is an object of devotion.   The thing
itself an immaterial swath:
        a silent shadow is picking bananas on a ladder on fire.
        A tunnel
of light burns the oak skin fallow.
                              Hanging night fruit
“Look, you are the thing of beauty’’..