Hindsight informs me that this was madness, but I still remember what were essentially elocution lessons as being great fun. No 8 year old can resist a tongue twister. The South London accent is at its best on screen when you watch John Boyega in Attack the Block. If you haven’t seen it, imagine hard Ts, much kissing of the teeth, and frequent abbreviations. This speech of mine was pared down to something more generic. I no longer obsess over class but that voice I lost permanently. There was one upside: the compelled performance brought with it a totally unearned confidence in using language. Muslim woman and migrant child I may well be, but no one would query my integration. I talked, someone once said in praise, like I was white.

The hierarchy of migrants involves race and class, but it’s really about words. Or rather, about the fact that we’re most comfortable with the people who can do more than simply communicate with us. Languages allow room for humor, empathy, and dry asides to be slid into a short riff. They require confidence and don’t much care for textbook learning. English spoken without visible effort is preferable to the careful sort, which is still better than when it emerges devastatingly broken. Fair enough. But settling in, assimilating without losing yourself, requires a bit of support. It requires a semblance of familiarity, even thousands of miles away from home. The presumed ghetto has a purpose.

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When I moved from London to a university town, I told half truths about my upbringing. I deployed those constructed plosives to buy assimilation. And yet I still said my prayers in Arabic. Perhaps the latter triggered my homesickness. It wasn’t a particularly long bout but it was intense and absurd. I missed the food, the gallows humor and even the gossip of home. One new friend made the mistake of convincing me to play some late-90s hip-hop, increasing my melancholy. It sounded like home, like a neighbor blasting music from the other side of my bedroom wall. Then I started chatting with the people of color I saw daily out in the city, though none were fellow students. A young woman who worked in a corner shop and a middle-aged Turkish man who sold me chips at questionable hours, became allies that I could crack particular jokes with. I didn’t have an epiphany or fill a spiritual vacancy. But with enough distance, came a bit of insight.

There is so much worry in the U.K. today about the wave of immigrants coming into the country. This deserves to be heard. But I can’t blame families like my own for building communities like the one I miss. I can understand the need to lapse back into Urdu in the beauty parlor. I can sense the delight of reading your horoscope in the Tamilian magazines. I know what it is to yearn.

Occasionally my friends are bemused as to why the shy figure I introduce falls short of the matriarch in my anecdotes. I don’t know how to explain that said woman has been wandering around the kitchen all week in preparation for meeting them, rehearsing possible conversations. I don’t know how to explain that her Indian ways often embarrass my assimilated, English self.

My folks eventually left for the suburbs they once imagined but kept in touch with the old bit of town, the way you do with family. Most of the people we know there voted to leave the European Union. They are once-upon-a-time economic migrants who worry about jobs and housing and a new wave of immigration. They speak clear English. I present them with liberal arts arguments against Brexit but end up using buzzwords like “cosmopolitan” and “globalization.” Worthy words, used so often, so publicly and earnestly by politicians here that they have become useless in meaning. My old neighbors are proud of exiting the EU. Their arguments are as infused with patriotism as my own. I disagree with them on just about everything. But I also see them as most things a successful migrant ought to be: proud grafters, unconcerned with all possible rankings, British. Brexit has pitched the notion of the cosmopolitan and globalized against the patriotic and communal. But I’d wager that places such as the urban melting pots I grew up in, where the imperfection of speech bests judged articulacy, show the joys of English pluralism.

“I just want them to understand me,” Mum will say about meeting my friends. “I think my accent is getting a bit softer though. But what if it is fast? You all speak so fast these days.” Always, I laugh her fears off, knowing her to be paranoid and my friends to be an embracing sort. I cannot comprehend the instinctive discomfort of permanently living in a language that is not your own, the mastery of which proves your worth. That is the gift I have been given. But if I were emigrating today, I’d want to pick a city where a South Asian beautician can be found to deal with my eyebrows. And if there’s a chicken and chip shop next door, so be it.

