On July
Vanakkam, friends, family, and curious acquaintances!
Today marks one month as a resident of the great Chennai, India! To those who are catching up— I received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2020 to teach English in India, had it postponed due to You Know What, and spent two years oscillating between “move on with your life, your 401K isn’t going to contribute to itself” and “don’t close this door on yourself before they close it for you.” I got the news in March that we were back on, left what little I owned in my parents’ house to collect dust, and moved to the other side of the world in July.
Since July 9th, I’ve been riding a pretty constant whirlwind of orientation, flights, apartment hunting, furnishing, shopping, Tamil lessons, English-teaching training, and calling our wifi hotline no less than four times to issue complaints about random outages. As my Tamil tutor (and quasi-Indian mother) Sujatha would say (and does frequently)— “that’s India!”
I’m finally feeling settled here in Chennai, the capital city of the southern state Tamil Nadu, in a lovely apartment with my two roommates (both Fulbrighters as well) near the beach. I’ve found parsing through my experiences thus far to be more difficult than expected. Mentally, I’m spinning— learning more per second than I have the ability to process or fully communicate. I’m asked “How’s India?!” and there is no adequate answer. It’s the most complicated, nonmonolithic Goliath of places. It’s the 7th largest country in the world. It’s home to 28 states, 22 official languages, and 1.38 billion souls (and climbing). While western depictions typically only highlight its tropical climate, it’s incredibly ecologically diverse spanning from the Himalayas to the Rajasthani desert to the (yes, tropical) Kerala backwaters. Its religious history is storied and harrowing and deep (understatement!). The food is, as you may have guessed, fantastic. It is a multitude, a sensory explosion, a universe. And even that doesn’t do it any justice.
As I’ve been here, my sense of things beyond have begun to fade, creating the impression that India is in fact the entire world. I am buoyed mostly by all of you, reading this probably as I sleep. I think of home often, especially scenes of the Blue Ridge Mountains or the James River which, once mundane, have suddenly turned sharp and rose-tinted in my mind. Though the food has been delicious, no one will be shocked to hear of my intense weekly cravings for cheese, be it Kraft or Chèvre (paneer is working overtime to quell this). And I miss my people deeply. I have so much I want to tell you all! As an act of creative self-discipline, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on India on a (minimum) monthly basis. Catch up with me every 9th-ish and enjoy my ramblings if you’d like. I promise to you only mental clutter and truth. Below you’ll find my first installment.
On Communication—
Let me start by saying this: An American in America generally knows what’s going on. They have a lifetime of formal education on the fundamentals of language, collective regional and national history, a rough understanding of current political events and how they came to be. Furthermore, they have an informal, almost subconscious shared understanding of physical and verbal cues, biases and sublimity that largely dictate how they socialize, how they connect. An American in America tends to know how to quietly decipher the insincerity in a stranger’s smile, articulate sensitive matters to an authority figure, or express appropriate affection to a new acquaintance.
An American in India can say the same for practically none of these things. Aside from my roommates, I am essentially alone in my gestures, mannerisms, idioms, expressions. Likewise, my efforts of interpretation extends far beyond the Tamil language and are actually spent far more on deciphering the non-verbal. While extreme emotions, such as joy or anger, have proven to be more universally comprehendible, the more nuanced facets of communication and connection, I’m coming to realize, are not. I struggle daily to know whether my cab driver’s head shake is an affirmative or negative movement. I’m never quite sure when the conversations about politics or regional conflict among the teachers in my staff room are sarcastic or genuine due to (according to my own interpretation) their incongruent elements. I arrived with little background on the specific Tamilian social, economic, political, and religious factors that might allow me to inference these things (though I am learning as quickly as I can). Every wink and mouth twitch and hand flutter are not what I expect them to be and I find myself just praying that no one is secretly mad at me (not a new sensation, but a more consistent one nowadays).
Learning Tamil is an endeavor I’m doing rather clumsily. I really enjoyed the 40 hours of concentrated language study given to us by Fulbright, an experience that just further proved how much fun learning can be when you are given free, concentrated time to do it and stripped of the pressure to hit a standardized benchmark. However once I step outside of the classroom, like an old nightmare cropping up from my high school years of French class, I am stunned by the language on the streets, not at all what I was hearing in the quiet, slowed-down classroom version in which the language had been introduced to me. The benchmark, I quickly realized, was simply my ability to navigate my life here. Moreover, the people of Chennai take one look at me and don’t even bother speaking their mother tongue to the confused-looking white woman (understandable). I try my best with phrases like “Evalo?” (“How much?”) and “Change irudka?” (Do you have change?) and am usually met with a chuckle and a comment on the funny way I pronounce Tamil words (not the best response for my self-esteem but, again, a response to which I take no offense). Mostly, though, they know enough English and I know enough independent Tamil words to know what I need to know and be on my way.
It has been a strange experience to feel so restricted in the ways I am able to interpret communication and communicate in turn. It has become practically essential to debrief my day with my roommates and give the rest to pen and paper, or I’d go mad with it all sitting inside my head. I’m learning how to speak a new language, as well as how to speak English all over again in a way that can be understood (this has meant swapping American words for their British counterparts most of the time…). It’s all good though. Great, in fact. The brain is stretching and fingers are typing more than they usually would. I’m visiting home in my books. I am learning what communication can mean without the shared cultural understandings to which I’ve become accustomed and almost codified as universal. And I’m vowing nevermore to take for granted my beautifully innate understanding of American sarcasm, head nods, or side eyes.
A sneak peek:
Topics to look forward to include— thoughts on hospitality, solitude, fashion and body image, Tamil culture, teaching, yearning, and, of course, food.
This site is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely my own and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.