Lost In Translation

There is a word my grandmother used, one I can't recall anymore, for the kind of quiet that settles over a house late at night when everyone else is asleep. I know that I knew it once, it lived somewhere behind my teeth like all her Malayalam words, yet at some point between one visit and the next, it slipped out of my mouth and never came back.

I was born and raised in Australia, in houses that smelled like whatever my mother was cooking layered over whatever the rest of the street was cooking. My parents grew up in Kerala and carried their language, careful and precious, across a long distance, hoping it survived the trip. For a while it did. I understood everything said around our dinner table. I just answered back in English, because English was the language of school, of television, of the friends I wanted to impress, and it was always the faster reach.

I used to think losing a language was a single event, like a door closing. It isn't. It's slower than that, and quieter, and much more embarrassing. It happens in the pause before you answer your aunt's question over video call. It happens when you reach for a word and find only its shape, the outline of where it used to sit, and you fill the hole with English because English is always standing there, patient, overqualified, ready to do the job.

Nobody tells you that a language needs to be paid rent. That it stays only if you keep speaking it, keep making room for it, keep choosing it even when the other one is easier. I didn't choose to stop. I just chose everything else more often, for years, the way you don't decide to lose touch with someone, you just keep saying "next time" until next time becomes a decade.

By the time I noticed, I was translating my own childhood back to myself. I would remember a memory in Malayalam and have to carry it across a bridge into English before I could tell anyone about it, and something always fell off the bridge on the way. Not the facts. The facts survived fine. It was the feeling that didn't make it across, the specific tenderness in a word my mother used only when she thought I was asleep, the rhythm of a lullaby that just lies there flat once you translate it.

I used to feel guilty about this the way you feel guilty about forgetting a friend's birthday. A small, private shame, easy to hide. Then during a trip back to Kerala, I reached for a word of greeting and grabbed the wrong one, close in sound but wrong in weight, and watched my grandmother's face do something complicated, amused and sad at once. I understood then that this wasn't a private failing. It was a whole shelf of my inheritance, quietly repossessed, and I hadn't even noticed the moving truck pull up.

Here is the part I didn't expect. I have started relearning it. Not fluently, not fast, and not out of guilt anymore, which surprised me most. I bought a notebook. I call my mother and ask her to just talk, about nothing, about work or what she's cooking that night, and I write down the words I don't have anymore and the ones I never had a proper chance to learn the first time. My mother laughs at my accent, the same accent she used to correct when I was small, except now the correcting feels like a gift instead of a chore. I am, almost at adulthood, doing the homework I avoided as a kid.

It is slow, and it is humbling, and some words never come back no matter how many times I ask. The one for that particular late night quiet is still gone. I've tried a few different relatives and gotten a few different answers, none of which feel exactly right, the way a photocopy of a photocopy stops looking like the thing it was copied from.

But I've noticed something growing in the space where the old words used to be automatic. A kind of attention I never had to have as a kid, because as a kid I never had to work for any of it. Now every word I recover feels chosen, the way things feel more yours when you've had to go looking for them. My grandmother is patient with my slow, wrong sentences in a way she wasn't patient with much else. I think she understands that I'm not just learning a language back. I'm asking, in the clumsiest way I know, to be let back into a room I walked out of without noticing the door.

I don't know if I'll ever get all of it back. Some of it, I suspect, belonged only to her, and it will leave the world when she does, the way certain things only ever really worked in one person's hands.

But I'm keeping the notebook. And when I find that word for the quiet at the end of the night, because I will, eventually, from someone who happens to remember, I'm going to write it down twice, so that whatever I forget next, I forget a little less completely than I forgot the first time.