On a Teams call at work this month, I wished a fellow Tamilian colleague for puthandu. Usually that would have spawned a discussion on how different cultures ring in the new year. This time, a couple of others joined in and the conversation moved on. It felt normal.
There’s a piece circulating this week about South Asian fashion in America. The headline calls it “redefining identity,” which sounds right without being true. Nobody I know is redefining anything. They’re wearing what they’ve always wanted to. A kurta at the grocery store on a regular weekday.
The article quotes someone about the psychological weight of fitting in being replaced by the joy of standing out. The framing assumes fitting in came first, that it was the default, and that standing out is the destination. But for many of us, neither word fits. We weren’t fitting in. We weren’t standing out. We were getting dressed.
Arundhati Roy won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography last month. Mother Mary Comes to Me. A book about her mother, about Malayali womanhood, about the roots of a rage that doesn’t soften with age. The committee was chaired by Grace Talusan, who writes about adoption and identity from the inside. Two women whose work lives at the intersection of family, origin, and the stories we inherit. Neither needed to explain who she was to the room.
That’s what’s worth noticing. Not the award, the absence of translation.
When I first started writing essays, I spent too much time on what I now think of as the footnote impulse. The explanatory aside. The pause to define. Kaapi (a South Indian filter coffee). Kolam (a floor pattern drawn with rice flour). Paati (grandmother). As if the reader would leave if they encountered a word they didn’t already own.
I stopped. Not because I decided to be brave but because the footnotes were lies. Kaapi is not “a South Indian filter coffee.” It is kaapi. The scent of it at 6 AM is not a category. The kolam is not “a floor pattern.” It is what Amma drew at our front door every morning. The English gloss doesn’t translate. It replaces.
There’s a difference between the two that took me years to feel.
Translation assumes a destination. The reader is over there, and the word must travel to meet them. But the words I grew up with don’t travel. They stay where they are. The reader comes to them, or doesn’t. Either way, the word remains itself.
This is what the hyphenated life looks like when it settles. The slow refusal to convert what doesn’t need converting.
In The Smudged Hyphen, I wrote about the space between two names for the same person. The blur where Tamil and American overlap, where neither term is whole and the join between them is soft, not clean. I keep returning to the blur. Not because it’s unresolved, but because resolution was never the point. The hyphen is a smudge, not a bridge. It holds both without pretending they’re one.
These days, I don’t have to explain Golu to the people who come home. My invite list is eclectic. No one expects me to.
My daughters are seventeen. They wear what they wear. Sometimes a paavadai from Paati’s last visit. Sometimes whatever survived the laundry pile.
The fashion writers call this a reclamation. The literary critics call Roy’s win a milestone. But the word I keep circling is quieter than both.
Presence.
Not arrival, because we were already here. Not visibility, because we were never invisible to ourselves. Just the steady fact of being where you are, in what you’re wearing, saying the words you grew up saying.
Saathi is munching on murukku in the next room. All is well.
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