Most of the time, my mother tongue feels like a foreign country. On certain afternoons, in a certain light, I convince myself I’m home – but then I forget the Tamil word for ‘orange’, or ‘clap’, or ‘further’, and I’m reminded of the great chasm that lies between me and known territory. I think about losing jokes, a lot. They’re often untranslatable, especially if they’re any good.
I think about the time I spent in front of French flashcards, learning a new language’s conjugations, learning the subjunctive. I found it so beautiful that a whole tense could be dedicated to the hypothetical. It gave requisite weight to the life of the mind, to worries, to suppositions, to how things should be, to obligation and necessity and desire. Il faut que. It should be that.
It should be that I kept my first language alive and wriggling in my throat, but instead, I took French in high school,
