The Tamil teacher at the community centre is called Mr. Sethupathi. He has been teaching in Singapore for two years and hates, hates, the way we speak it.
“Like eating banana with the skin on,” he told us on the first day. “Wrong. All wrong.”
I sit at the back near the window. Outside, laundry flaps from HDB block poles like colourful flags, my mothers washing – ellaathiame – is somewhere there. I imagine her hands moving through the fabric, while I sit here, learning to pronounce words that dissolve in my mouth like paper.
Mr. Sethupathi writes on the whiteboard. Sharp, and perfect. Mine looks like a child’s.
He circles my sentence in red. “Naan sor saapida poren” he stresses. I had written ‘Naan sor eduthu saapida poren.’ I added the ‘take’ without thinking.
“You do not ‘take’ food. You ‘eat’ food. That’s Singlish,” he says. “You are translating, not writing. Tamil is Tamil. English is English. Do not mix.”
The class nods. I nod too. But inside, kulappama, I am arguing.
At the hawker centre this morning, my Chinese friend Wei Jie asked what I wanted. “I’m taking nasi lemak,” he said. “You want? I take for you.”
When my mother places food on my plate, she says “Edu.” Take this fish. Take this curry. It means: I am giving you something, please receive it. How can eating ever be separate from taking?
I look at my red circle. I do not know how to explain that ‘take’ is not a mistake. It is the shape of my hand reaching toward hers.
I trace the எடு in my notebook.
By the time we move from grammar to phonetics, the sun has fallen from its midday peak and the shadows of laundry poles have lengthened, but Mr. Sethupadi’s energy hasn’t flagged.
“Your pronunciation is wrong. It is ‘Kaadh-al,’ not ‘Kaad-al.’ You are swallowing the sound.”
We repeat like parrots. “Kaadh-al. Kaadh-al”. The word lodges in my throat like a fishbone. I cough it up. Still wrong.
The girl beside me is Malay. Her name is Aisyah. She is here because her grandmother is Tamil. Her Tamil is worse than mine, but when she speaks, it sounds like music. She draws the words out soft, like singing.
I hate her a little for it. I hate that wrong can sound right when it’s hers. I hate that my tongue will never learn that gentleness. I smile at her. She smiles back. The hate sits in my chest, small and hard, and I feed it.
“Kaad-al,” she whispers, practising. Her version is gentler. It sounds like the way she says “Cinta” in Malay, all warmth.
I think about the girl I like. She is Chinese. Her name is Mei. When I imagine telling her, I do not hear Mr. Sethupathi’s sharp ‘Kaadh-al’. I hear Aisyah’s soft ‘Kaad-al’. I hear my mother’s voice, mixed with the radio.
காதல்.
the script states back at me. Hollow.
Maybe my Tamil is lazy. But laziness is just another word for ease. For the way you speak when you are home.
“You cannot mix languages! ‘Unnai really miss pannren, ma’ is not a proper sentence!”
Mr. Sethupathi holds up a student’s homework like evidence of a crime. Everyone laughs. I do not laugh.
Because that sentence is my mother.
Every Sunday evening, she calls my grandmother in India. At minute five, she cries. At minute twelve, she laughs. At minute fifteen: “Unnai really miss pannren, ma.”
Every single time.
And my grandmother, three thousand kilometres away, says back, “I miss you too, kanna.”
My grandmother does not speak English. She knows five phrases. ‘Hello. Okay. Thank you. I miss you too.’ She learned them from my mother. She keeps them like old photographs.
When my mother says “Unnai really miss Pannren, ma,” my grandmother understands everything. The ‘Unnai’ is my mother. The ‘really’ is all the memories they never made. The ‘miss’ is the space in the house where she used to sit. The ‘ma’ is both of them, tangled together in a word that belongs to neither language.
Mr. Sethupathi crosses out the sentence. “Write it properly next time.”
But I want to raise my hand. I want to say: Sir, that sentence is proper. Proper in my kitchen. Proper in the phone calls that cost two dollars a minute. Proper in the language my mother made to hold two countries together.
I do not raise my hand. But I write the sentence down in my notebook. Unnai really miss pannren, ma. I underline it. I do not correct it.
After class, Mr. Sethupathi calls my name and stops me.
Softly, he says. “I am hard on you because I want you to learn properly. Tamil is a beautiful language. You should honour it.”
I want to tell him: I am. I am giving up my Saturday mornings to be told my tongue is broken. To choke on correctness.
What I say is: “Yes, sir.”
He pats my shoulder. “Practice. You will get there.”
I walk out. My mother’s washing is dry by now. Veedukku ponum. But instead, I stop at the playground. I sit on a swing. I take out my notebook and read my sentences. The wrong ones. The mixed ones.
Naan sor eduthu saapida poren. I will take food and eat it.
Naan unnai really miss pannren, ma. I really miss you.
A group of children are playing nearby. Chinese, Malay, Indian. They are shouting in Singlish. “Wah lao, you cheat!” “No, I never!”
They are seven years old. They do not know they are mixing languages. They do not know they are wrong.
They sound like home.
I push the swing. Up and down. The sun is hot on my face.
Maybe one day I will write a sentence that Mr. Sethupathi calls correct.
But tonight, when my mother calls my grandmother, I will sit beside her. I will listen to her say “Unnai really miss pannren, ma.” I will not correct her.
