Why do I write in English?

Why do I write in English? The answer requires a little bit of biography, perhaps. I was born in Mangalore, to a mother who grew up in Kasaragod. Her mother belongs to the Beary community of coastal Karnataka, a people whose language is a delightful mosaic of Malayalam and Tulu and Kannada. Naturally, my earliest sonic influences were from Kasaragod Malayalam and Beary.

It was after three years of schooling outside of Kerala that I found myself in Kozhikode—my NRI father’s childhood home. Only then did I begin learning Malayalam formally. And while I took to it rather well, I did not hear myself or my family in the Malayalam of my textbooks. Its cadences, registers, lexicon, nothing seemed to have a place for my “funny” Malayalam; it did not cross my mind that I could make that place for myself (Basheer arrived a bit late in my reading life).

As for English, I had to wrestle with the language far, far less. It was easier to play around with a language that had nothing to do with my home, a language that came to me through dictionaries and a pocket thesaurus. As a schoolgirl, it seemed to me a language strangely unburdened by history or guilt (oh, that sweet summer child). As such, it was easier to be honest in it.

So, the answer to “Why do you write in English?” is quite straightforward: the ‘do’ implies a choice, and I am not sure it was ever a choice. The historical forces that drive migration and shape complex linguistic legacies are not in the hands of a sixth-standard kid. She tried writing poetry in English and found the exercise intriguing enough to keep writing. She wrote. And wrote. And wrote. And now here we are.
 

WRITINGS
 

POEMS

1. Prophecy

Passengers, your kind attention, please… I intone, matching the announcer, her placid voice marching out of tin cans, drumming into our ears. Mine goes just far enough to needle my father, master of that brand of cruelty that adults wield, the kind they dole out without malice. Back then, I thought maybe it was the baby yowling on the other side of the waiting room, maybe it was the vendors chanting chaayachaayachaaya in an endless breathless call for tea, maybe it was my mother’s thirty-sixth sigh in the span of three-quarters of an hour: in the slow-simmering cacophony, father snaps

into two my dream of becoming that woman whose trains of thought were seldom derailed. “You know it’s recorded, right?” he asks, the amused note in his voice a butcher’s knife cleaving my heart, metal through the corded muscle. Its edge plies through blood. At the core of it all, the knife finds the putty figure of a put-together lady, hair neatly tucked into a bun, not a single pleat of saree out of place. Disembowelled, her voice warbles an apology that recedes into the distance like the slow chugging of an engine on its way out. Maybe seven-year-olds have the wisdom to wait for the next recording, but at eight, my fears whisper that I’m too early, that the next set of announcements will have no use for tin cans and eardrums—they will steal their way into our brains, details strumming our neurons.
 

            2.    MATRYOSHKA

So full with the ice-cold flesh and fibre skeins
of midsummer mangoes, beyya's mouth
has no place for teeth—only the shock
of a gummy smile gnawing away 
at the last of the ripeness

So full a life sits in her thickset throat
that mummy suffers no fools; none
get past an archmage who savours
a riot of fruit sunning in custard

So full and round, umma's tummy
gurgles with the ghee-drip 
cashew-crunch of carrot halwa

so full of sugar, that's 
me: so full of herself

I couldn't really chew on more
visions of a foremother
feasting on the tang of herself

The paper-spread on my tongue
breathing your mothers can prattle
only of food and little else, what
does she know of the glut of herself

Yes, beyya eats mummy eats
umma eats me: we are nestled 
in each other, each of us birthed 
as a clod of red and wet mud veined 
with flowers, each one a vessel of herself
 

3.    LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Poppy seed, peppercorn, sweet pea
budding in my friend’s body:
you will be vaava, kuzhanthai, bidda, baby.
Your mother frets you will crawl into
a confusion of tongues. I shouldn’t add
one more—my Malayalam, boisterous
and peculiar, the antipode of hers

maangaakk thanni beethiya?
beethi!

You swell in puffs of sonogram grey—now grape,
soon plum, lemon, apple of my eyes—and I dream
in lullaby and nonsense verse and playground rhyme

thengaakk thanni beethiya?
beethi!

My sister makes a swing of her legs, bobbing
our youngest cousin in the air. Fluent in English
and a quaintly polite Malayalam, the big-city toddler—
led by a shrieking quartet of teens—picks up a wilder chant

attathoru kottathenga
mooleloru mooshamukri
cheppumcheri ninakk
thengathanni enkk

And I see you bolt off your mom’s lap, leaping towards me,
your tongue juggling four words for eggplant; you still
seat yourself on my feet, your plea heard before it’s spoken
kunjamma do thengathanni kunjamma do thengathanni

so thengathanni it is: the two of us
knitted together in giggles, limbs
bent in arcs of letters you’ll squiggle
on a slate of rice someday,
and we holler

kottamkori!

in unison as you fly skyward
and land in my waiting arms, you:

my baby coconut, my little cantaloupe,
my sweet, sweet pumpkin.