Rhea Ravi Kumar

The day I stopped rolling my ‘r’s,
I was finally granted release
from the shackles of Mrs Whitaker’s 3rd grade ELL class.
Ecstatic that, at last, my claims of being a native speaker worthy of a place in “normal people English” were heard
after months of pleading the fact with vocabulary 2 years above my grade level.

The day I stopped rolling my ‘r’s,
Hannah laughed at the same joke
that, when I had told it just a week before,
elicited nothing but an awkward half-smile and a look of confusion on her face, tinged with a touch of sympathy for the poor, unsuccessful Indian comic who sounded like the whir of a motor when she said the word “wheelbarrow.”

The day I stopped rolling my ‘r’s,
my grandmother no longer understood my butchered Tamil.
Every anecdote I excitedly spilt to her over the phone was rendered meaningless.
But my stubborn tongue, hell-bent on fulfilling my linguistic transformation, refused to contort in the familiar ways in which it was taught to,
so I stood by, as I let it unlearn traditional vernacular.

I had come a long way since I learned to talk like I had a mouth full of marbles,
but I still felt a piece of me wither away after every introduction
because my name no longer sounded like it did on my mother’s lips.

I realized that the better I got at mimicking the American drawl,
the better I got at forgetting who I had been before I learned to pronounce the word “iron”.
Because it hurt too much to remember
that I had forgotten how to write my name in Hindi, the memories of meticulously crafting each line of each letter growing hazier by the minute.
That the words to the Indian national anthem had completely escaped me,
that I had severed communication with my grandmother altogether out of sheer embarrassment of my readiness to betray the language in which she told me she loved me.

I would rather live in blissful ignorance than admit the fact that
I will waste my life chasing morsels of respect,
respect which I can only gain by proving
how unlike them I am,
that I can use cutlery when I eat,
that I can be an artist without being excommunicated from my country,
that I can pronounce the word “refrigerator” in a way that will compensate for the fact that I have skin the colour of coffee grounds.

But truth stains harsher than coffee,
and I must face it: I will never be compensated for the fact
that when I have a daughter,
she will never know the love and wisdom of her great-grandmother,
because I will no longer have the words to impart them to her,
that she will never learn how to write her name in Hindi because I won’t be able to teach her,
that apple-cheeked and pigtailed,
she too would rather reach and reach and reach for the hand of a country that doesn’t want her
than run into the outstretched arms of her motherland,
the land ready to embrace her regardless of how she pronounces the ‘r’ at the end of the word “mother”.
She will never be compensated
for all the colour, the love, the comfort I deprived her of
the day I stopped rolling my ‘r’s.

–

Rhea is an Indian student in the Netherlands with a passion for storytelling. When she isn’t writing, she can be found behind a microphone singing or playing guitar. Creative and determined, Rhea has a strong sense of identity and is always looking for ways to express it.