Snehal Amembal
My mother tongue appears to be changing
Rolling off my tongue differently
As if every year away from the motherland
clenches my vocal chords a little more. Sometimes,
I forget certain words, pronounce them awkwardly.
They sound strange, strangely foreign
And I am suddenly unnerved
SPACE
The boundaries between languages have blurred
Faint recollections of how I used to sound,
speaking my very first language of home.
I miss its sing song lilt, its emphasis on tone,
How it forgives complacent grammar.
A language that has no script to call its own,
A language like me that’s struggling to belong.
SPACE
I open my old suitcase seeking traces
of my mother tongue
SPACE
preserved within its folds,
Trying to remind me of its nuances
that seem to have eroded over time.
SPACE
I find an old family recipe handwritten by my mother.
I can’t help but read aloud
“Soyee?, lasuna?, piyaavu?”
Are they meant to sound like this?
Where do I pause? Why can’t I
enunciate clearly enough?
SPACE
I quickly put the paper holding
the recipe back into my suitcase,
I close my suitcase and push it under the bed.
I feel like I have let down this beautiful language
that moulded, protected and nurtured me.
SPACE
“Aaso ma chelda”
I hear a voice reaching out to me from miles away.
My mother’s voice in my mother tongue reassures me in a way that only a mother can.