Over a few months, my South Indian lilt was sandpapered down, replaced by more boring inflections, and by the end of high school, my dual life had begun. Within those school walls, I sounded as American as the rest of them. As soon as I got home to my family, I was the thickly Indian-accented Chennai child that my ma and pa had raised and loved.

Now, nearly a decade later, I still fall victim to nagging thoughts about having picked up a "second" accent. For instance, yes, I know that it's problematic that some accents are granted more capital than others. Yes, it's problematic that markers of certain cultures buy access while markers of other cultures become barriers. It's problematic that even subconsciously, I knew adapting would be easier than reversing centuries of internalised racial paradigms. Of course I know these things. They keep me up until the wee hours, writing essays like this one.

But try explaining any of that to a 14-year-old at a brand-new school.



So, call it an identity crisis, call it weakness, call it a cultural selling out. Call it what you will. I didn’t have a name for it then and now, only “survival” comes close.

It was so instinctual that I didn’t even notice the transition until I was standing behind a podium at graduation, in place to make a rousing speech about hopes and dreams and changing the world. I’d spent weeks writing it and still, as soon as I spotted my family in the audience, I felt wholly unprepared.

I was an infant again, learning for the first time how to move my mouth to make words.

All my worlds are here, I remember thinking, as Chennai and Mumbai and America poured off my tongue, spiraling into giveaways. Which world do I speak like now?

My audible identity crisis followed me to New York City where, for five years, I silenced phone calls from my mother any time I was within earshot of American friends or classmates or colleagues.

The few Indian friends I had there all led similarly binary lives, taking calls in other rooms, going silent as collateral damage whenever our worlds collided. We navigated social groups on instinct alone, having calibrated how much we dared roll our R’s in each.

“I’m not doing it on purpose. I can’t do it on purpose,” my best friend Meera would often singsong in the privacy of our Water Street living room.

(Her can’t didn’t rhyme with ant; the r in her purpose went completely overlooked, desi style.)

“Nobody understands, na. It just happens,”

I did understand. I do understand. Meera and I lived in the Venn diagram overlap between Indians who live in India and Indians who, maybe briefly and maybe forever, crave assimilation elsewhere.

Now here we were, each with two accents at the ready at all times – both equally real, both really our own.