Learning English Cost Me My Accent
I gained a language and misplaced the sound of home.
My grandmother stopped understanding me on a Tuesday.
I remember because Tuesdays were her temple days, and she had called me from the front step of the house in Thrissur, slightly out of breath, to tell me the jasmine had flowered early. I answered in what I believed was Malayalam. There was a pause on the line, long enough for the crows on her roof to fill it, and then she said, gently, in the voice she kept for foreigners and door-to-door salesmen, “Mole, slowly. Say it again slowly.”
I said it again slowly... It did not help. My sentence was Malayalam the way a costume is a person. The words were all present, but the sound had gone somewhere else. The edges were flattened, the r in every word sanded down to something polite and Canadian.
She laughed it off. I laughed it off. Then I sat down on the floor of my Toronto apartment with the phone still warm in my hand and understood that I had misplaced something I did not remember putting down.
The trade
It started at St. Agnes Convent, in a classroom that smelled of chalk dust and shoe polish. Mrs. D'Souza ran elocution on Thursday afternoons, and she had a wooden ruler she never hit anyone with. She only pointed. “Rain,” she would say, tapping the blackboard. “Not rrrain. You are not a motorcycle.”
We paid a one rupee fine for every sentence of Malayalam spoken on school grounds. I paid often in the first year and never again after that.
I was good at it. That was the trap. At eleven I won the interschool elocution prize reciting Wordsworth's daffodils, a flower I had never seen, in an accent borrowed from a country I had never visited. My father told his brothers I sounded like the BBC. He said it the way other fathers said their sons had made the cricket team.
I want to be fair to everyone here, including myself. English was arithmetic in our house. It added up to jobs, to visas, to the kind of respect that arrives before you do. Nobody lied to me about this. The English medium school cost my father two months of overtime every year, and he paid it the way you pay for medicine, without complaint and without being asked twice.
So there is no villain.
That is the part nobody warns you about. You do it to yourself, slowly, with everyone you love standing around you and cheering.
University in Toronto finished the job. In my first week a classmate asked me to repeat the word water and grinned at his friend while I did it. I never said it the same way again. I moved my t's forward in my mouth like furniture. I called it clarity.
A boy at a party told me, as a compliment, “You don't even sound Indian,” and I said thank you. I want to write that I flinched... I did not flinch. It felt like a medal.
The leak was slow after that. By twenty-four I dreamed in English. One evening in a Scarborough grocery store I stood holding a block of tamarind and could not find its name, my own head suddenly a drawer someone else had organized. Puli. The word came back two days later, in the shower... useless.
My calls with Ammamma shrank into formula. Have you eaten... Is your health fine... Is it raining there. A language does not die in a family with any drama. It dies as a checklist.
And then came the Tuesday, and the jasmine, and “Mole, slowly,” and the crows filling the silence between us.
The notebook
She fell sick the next winter, her kidneys, and I flew home for three weeks. The house smelled exactly as it always had, of camphor and old newspapers, and this felt like an accusation.
I sat by her bed and tried to give her my news in Malayalam, and it came out like a child's drawing of a house. Recognizable. Wrong in every proportion.
She patted my hand. Then she took a breath, arranged her mouth carefully, and said, in slow phonetic English, “How. Are. You. My. Dear.”
The whole room stopped.
Her sister started laughing and went to the steel cupboard and brought out a notebook, ninety-six pages, ruled, the kind schoolchildren use. Inside, in my grandmother's careful hand, were English words spelled out in Malayalam script. HOW ARE YOU. GOOD MORNING. DON'T WORRY. Page after page. She had started it four years earlier, around the time my Malayalam first began to limp, practicing with the television after her bath, before anyone else woke up.
She was eighty-one years old, waking early to learn English so that her granddaughter would not have to be embarrassed on the phone.
I had spent fifteen years learning to be understood by strangers, and the only person who never needed me to be impressive was studying in secret to meet me halfway.
We met in the middle for eight months. She corrected my Malayalam the way she cleaned rice, picking the stones out without ceremony, and I corrected her English almost never, because I loved her mistakes too much to fix them. “I am fine and how is your weather my dear kutty,” she would say, all one breath, and I would hold the phone and close my eyes.
She died in June, with the first monsoon rain on the roof.
At the funeral I gave the remembrance in Malayalam. It was broken. I mispronounced the word for blessing and had to stop twice. Nobody corrected me. Afterwards an old woman I did not recognize held my face in both hands and said, “You sound like you did when you were seven.” It was the first compliment in years that I did not have to translate before feeling.
I write about her now, which surprises nobody who knew her. I started a poem that runs half in each language, her phonetic English on one side, my limping Malayalam on the other, and when it refused to finish itself politely I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, because a deadline is the only thing that forces me into honesty. It took me a long time to write about the remembering instead of around it, and longer still to see that the whole story was never about language at all. It was about family, and who pays what, and who studies in secret for whom.
The accent has not come back... I have tried. My mouth holds English the way a rented flat holds furniture, comfortably and without history, and when I speak Malayalam now people hear the foreigner in it before they hear me.
But some nights it rains hard in Toronto, real rain, warm and sudden, and I stand at the kitchen window and say mazha out loud to nobody. I say it again slowly. The sound is not perfect.
My mouth still remembers where it used to live.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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