It was as if the entirety of Atlanta’s Indian community had descended upon the grand halls of Infinite Energy Center on that balmy August morning. Located in the northeastern suburbs of Gwinnett, the pulsing heart of Georgia’s Asian immigrant community, the hall was indeed a logical location for such an event to be held. The floor was filled by representatives for vendors of every type: insurance agents, biryani houses, jewelry shops, tutoring services. I was a member of this collage of businesses, as I sat alone at the stand for the Indian-American affairs magazine that my father worked at. I was supposed to be peddling advertising space to ambitious business owners at the festival, but I spent far more of my time nibbling out of the candy stockpile intended for passersby. As Bollywood music boomed over the loudspeakers, accompanying an amateur dance performance down the hall, I heard only smatterings of conversations made by groups of people shuffling by the stand. Reflecting their home country of great linguistic diversity, visitors spoke a large array of languages. A few sounded familiar to me, like the jagged edges of Punjabi or the bowed contours of Telugu, while others sounded markedly foreign. Most chattered amongst themselves in one of these native languages, but all quickly switched to English as they approached me to ask about the magazine. Occasionally, customers would insert Hindi interjections like “accha!” that are recognized by most Indians, but the social implication held English as the sole lingua franca. This was good news for me, the spoiled second-generation immigrant who only spoke English. When customers drifted back into the company of their friends and family, they returned to speaking their native languages.
Later in the afternoon, as the crowd thinned out, I began dozing off. I was quickly awoken when an elderly man with a smooth, egg-shaped head and a salt and pepper beard approached my stand. He seemed a little lost, and I immediately doubted whether he had any reason to purchase magazine ad space. He paused for a second, studying my face, before unleashing a barrage of gibberish. This gibberish sounded vaguely like Hindi and, slightly confused as to why this man would speak Hindi to a stranger, I indignantly responded “English only.” While he appeared to understand me, he was clearly unsatisfied with my declaration of monolingualism. So, he studied my face once more, before spewing another round of gibberish. But to my horror, I fully understood what the old man said this time. “Tamil pecula?” he asked. He was speaking Tamil: my mother tongue that I never learned.
I stood frozen by the old man’s simple question. Did I speak Tamil? The answer was surely no, but this man also appeared not to speak English, and it would be unethical to wilfully part from my limited understanding of a language that this man did speak. So, I crossed the Rubicon and responded, “amma”. It was one of the few Tamil words I knew off the top of my head. My false affirmation of bilingualism unleashed a barrage of joy from the old man. He spoke in rapid-fire Tamil, seemingly animated by an instantaneous bond he felt with me, based on the fact that we both came from the Tamil-speaking regions of India. As the man spoke, he seemed to care little about the magazine services I was supposed to be selling. Instead, he wanted to discuss the array of topics typical to the manifold conversations I have shared with friendly Indian uncles: How old was I? What was I studying in school? What did my parents do? I responded to his curiosity with extreme difficulty and broken Tamil, harsh English words piercing through the grace of Tamil like shards of broken glass. But the man did not seem to mind, nor did he seem confused. Instead, he continued chattering with me as if I was a schoolboy on the streets of Madurai. He eventually drifted to a monologue about his own life. He was from Chennai and visiting a relative in Atlanta. Somewhat randomly, he inserted that he had a niece who worked as a school teacher in an Indian town called Hosur. Hosur. That name rang a bell. For a moment, I considered if I had any familial connections to the town, but then I remembered an evening at my home just a few nights earlier, when my mother and I were enjoying a delicious package of soan papdi she had purchased from the Indian grocer. The treat was manufactured by an unfamiliar brand called GRB Sweets, so my mother asked me to do some research and find out more about the company. “Where is it based?” she asked. A cursory look at their website would reveal the answer was a small city in the far west of Tamil Nadu called Hosur.
As soon as I realized that the old man was talking about the same city I had researched just a few nights earlier, I interjected into the monologue about his niece and cried: “Hosur? GRB Sweets!” He paused to think for a second. Then, his face lit up with the unmistakable light of recognition. He excitedly asked me how I knew about GRB, and I frustratingly attempted to recount the story of the soan papdi from a few nights before. Held back by the chains of my limited Tamil vocabulary, I was boiling over with enthusiasm, stunned that I was bonding with a random man over a niche sweets company based in a small city on the other side of the world. But that is when the realization hit me: I understood what the old man was saying. His Tamil was not falling on deaf ears. I certainly did not understand each Tamil word in isolation, but when he spoke in a lengthy manner, I comprehended many of his questions about my personal life and his diatribes about visiting America. For all my life, I had considered myself to be thoroughly incompetent in Tamil, and that my understanding of the language was as broken as my speech. I had only ever heard it spoken at home, where my family has rightfully treated me as a monolingual. Even though my parents spoke English to each other, I was still surrounded for years by the constant Tamil conversations between my mother and grandmother. I’ve listened to them speak Tamil as I’ve eaten dinner, played video games, completed homework, and done a whole host of other mundane activities. This caused me to internalize the language in a way that I had not considered up until this point. I generally understood what my mother and grandmother were saying to each other, but failed to realize it because I couldn’t articulate anything back to them. Nonetheless, I’ve always held an incredibly intimate relationship with this language that I could not speak. When I heard the old man speak Tamil to me, my brain did not require active translation of the words into English as is the case with the Spanish I learn at school; in fact, I would probably be a horrible Tamil-to-English translator. Instead, I simply heard him speak Tamil and instinctively understood what he said, conditioned by years of passive listening at home. As I learned that day at the India Festival, I absolutely do not speak my mother tongue, but I certainly know my mother tongue.
