Whose Tongues Come First

The iMessage pops up at eight-seventeen am. ParentSquare. My youngest’s school.

The notification is in Tamil.

The script feels familiar, yet none of it is comprehensible. I tap the gear icon. Nothing useful. The three dots. The profile. A menu four screens down. I find the language preference by Googling, by following an internet stranger’s directions.

When the dropdown finally yields, English sits on top. Spanish under it. A separator line. Then every other tongue on the planet, alphabetized, kept beyond a thin gray bar.

I select English. The relief is visceral. I close the app.

My mother tongue is what I speak with my children. Also, what I cannot read. I grew up in Tamil Nadu. The alphabet I know in a pinch. Storefronts, yes. A poem, no.

In my fifties, this is a lingering regret. My youngest is in middle school. Her notifications come home in characters my education skipped.

My athai quotes the Thirukural. Appa read Shandilyan. Amma is a fan of Rajam Krishnan.

My grandfather worked all over India. He told me, when I was eight, that the national tongue would open the subcontinent and what he had grown up speaking would close it. This was the eighties. Home felt small to a man who had crossed every state line.

So mine stayed where his pragmatism left it: in the mouth, not on the page. School made Hindi the second language and English the primary. By college I lived, taught, and dreamed in the colonial one.

“Tamizh ezhudha padika theriyadha?” was a common refrain in my teens and twenties, one I belligerently pushed back on. I did not need Tamil when I had English and Hindi.

I see now what the armor was. The inheritance had arrived in my own voice. I spoke it as plain truth. The empire does not have to be in the room. The dropdown remembers whose tongues come first.

In 2022 we drove to Las Cruces to meet my twins’ father’s family. Their paternal grandmother is Diné. What she taught us across three days I came home carrying. She said her grandchildren call her Nálí. I clung to that word for it meant acceptance. By the second afternoon there was a book in our hands, a primer for young readers. Under the awning of the hotel entrance, she talked about the kids who were taken to boarding schools and the words that left with them.

We came home. I ordered a workbook online. The YouTube videos went into a folder. For months I kept forwarding links to two phones that left them on read.

None of it took root. The twins are seventeen now. They know “Nálí” and the word for water, and that is the whole vocabulary.

I had mistaken my hunger for theirs. The grandmother had already given them what she could. The rest would have to come from them, in their own time, if it ever did.

Last year I started learning Korean.

On Wednesday evenings I sat at a desk and copied Hangul onto a worksheet, with the patience I never gave my own alphabet. I sound out the syllables. The language rolls around strange in my mouth. A smile arrives when I recognize words in songs I hum along to.

I have listened to Korean music for years now. ARMY, forever. I sing loudly in the car after a concert, mumbling lyrics I had not learned. What grips my throat when I open a Tamil text loosens in the classroom. There is nothing yet to fail at.

The grammar is fresh. The verb sits at the close of each sentence and the syntax makes me grin. My teacher encourages me gently, saying my pronunciation is good. No one has ever said that about my reading in any other tongue.

The song that surfaced all of this was “Aliens,” off Arirang. Seven men in two languages, laying claim on the word the world had aimed at them.

When transcultural adoptees describe themselves as foreigners in the cultures they were severed from, I have always heard them from the periphery. My twins were brought home at ten months old. How they view their inheritance, birth and adoptive, is something I have to wait for to know.

But under the hot shower, listening to seven Korean voices sing about being aliens, I felt myself inch toward the center of that circle.

To be born into a language and never learn to read its poetry is its own estrangement: not exile, not severance, a slow drift that happens in plain sight. It is not what my children carry. But I know what it costs.

The ParentSquare dropdown is still in my head. English first. Spanish under it. A separator. The rest of the planet behind a thin gray line.

Not where I started. Where I was placed.

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