mother tongue.

[let me start by saying that the following is my story, but it also touches on someone else's story. as the prophet tracy lauren meadow once said, people have to learn how to tell stories without implicating those who may not want their stories told. so i am leaving large parts of this out on purpose. they're not my parts to tell. anyway, with that said.]

yesterday i sat on my front porch with a beer and a book, because it was a sunny spring afternoon and we all deserve some time like that. the book was world travel, which is a travel guide that was supposed to be written by anthony bourdain, but he left before he could do it. he gave the outline to his editor and gave her an overview of what he was looking to do. when he left, she finished it in collaboration with some of the other folks who worked with him. it really is a travel guide, a bit of a clip show of the places bourdain went and some updates on how to go to those places.

it's a fraught time to think about travel, with the things this government is doing to people it doesn't like. it's also a fraught time to think about global identity. there's a beautiful essay in the book from bourdain's longtime production manager about being a first-generation american, and how traveling back to her homeland with bourdain reset her entire relationship with her identity, erasing the shame of being othered and giving her the pride of having something special to call her own.

my sweet beloved husband, who has also been my best friend since we were teenagers, occupies a weird space in this calculus: half poor white alabamian country folk going back generations on the same scrap of timberland, half first-generation indian-american raised in a time and part of the world where assimilation was survival.

the beloved is blessed with the supernatural talent of being able to feel his emotions without ruminating on them. he is a gregarious, friendly guy who is a ton of fun to be around and has strong opinions about sports and music and cars. but he is a man of effectively no words on big emotional issues. he is not the strong silent type, but talking does not make him feel better.

i digress with a small story. we met in march of 1996. in august of that year, his parents were dragging him to a potluck celebration of indian independence day at the university in town. his mother, who was at the time making it her sworn mission to fix us up, demanded in front of me that he ask me to accompany him. [it took her 15 years or so to get her wish, and she reminds me of that sometimes.] so we went. my now-MIL and i were the only two people in the room who weren't indian. it was kinda cool: it was my first exposure to indian food, spoken hindi, traditional dance, and bindis not being worn by a blonde woman from orange county. one of the girls in my class was one of the dancers, and when she saw the beloved after the performance she came running over to him and said hey, so good to see you! you should come to some of the youth functions! he visibly cringed and muttered something. we sat by ourselves in the very corner of the room eating our food. i had my first taste of lamb vindaloo, long before i lived in louisiana and developed a proper appreciation for spicy food. it startled me. the elderly auntie sitting nearest to us saw that, chortled to herself and said oh, white girl can't handle the spice. the beloved's face indicated that he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole. i, having been raised with a deeply old-school southern great-grandmother who was fond of saying things like she has birthing hips about teenagers, shrugged it off as just how old ladies are. that was literally the last time in our entire relationship, up to this very day, i saw him interacting with his non-american culture beyond eating at indian restaurants.

now, back to bourdain's book. i've been lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time over the last decade in india, considering i'm a white girl from alabama. i have been to india more times than the beloved has. my colleagues there got me into cricket [what's up, CSK]. i have some clothing items and some really nice jewelry. i am fond of chennai, it's a place i love to visit and would revisit at any time in a heartbeat (18-hour plane ride and all).

it cannot have been easy to be a brownish kid in the deep south in the 1980s and 1990s. he will occasionally drop little hints about the weirdness he experienced. i saw people routinely butcher his incredibly common indian last name - including my own freaking mother in front of a crowd once, it's been 29 years and i still cringe when i hear that in my head. and since 2001, it's been a mine field. he has gotten "where are you REALLY from" in front of me more times than i can count, mostly in misguided but trying-to-be-friendly curiosity, but sometimes with an edge. there's one airport we won't use anymore because i filed a complaint with TSA over how they treated him.

but i just keep wondering how things would have been if he'd been taught his mother tongue. he doesn't speak a word of either hindi or gujarati. his father does, flowing like a river across three languages when he's on the phone with his cousins. the beloved doesn't have connection to his family's faiths. i learned a few baseline recipes so we can have dal and idli with sambar at home, but i only know so much and i will never have that ingrained "you'll know how much ginger garlic paste to add" touch that all the tiktok and youtube recipe aunties have. it's just not a part of him in any way other than his bloodline.

i don't know if this bugs him. this is one of those issues that he just doesn't process with words, and he may not think too deeply about it. the few times his multiracial identity has come up beyond a throwaway line, it's often come with some weird situation someone put him in. the hotel clerk in new orleans with his same last name, who was so excited to see him until she also saw me. the times he's been screened while i was let through. the times he's been asked what his "real" name is, thanks to piyush jindal and nimarata randhawa. y'know, that sort of thing. so i don't want to pick his scabs, if there are scabs to pick.

i wish we had a world where this stuff wasn't so fraught. it isn't fraught for some of us, who just get to pick and choose who we say we are without raising an eyebrow. and this time is full of forces who DEMAND the power to strip the very essence of who you are and impose their false conceptions on you. if they aren't actively trying to destroy, disappear, or erase you, that is. it's so antithetical to every principle of freedom, of liberty, of e pluribus unum, of every good and right thing in the world. it should not matter. but it does. so as i listen to a replay of the indian premier league and think about the dal i am about to fix to go along with tonight's tikka, i wonder. and in a small measured way, i mourn.