I've had a complicated relationship with language for as long as I can remember. There isn't a single one I feel fully confident speaking. Not one. And I've been trying to figure out for a while now whether that's a deficiency or just a description.
Some context on where this starts. My dad is the most pure-bred Malayali I've ever met, someone who didn't leave Kerala for the first twenty-five years of his life. My mom is a Malayali too, but raised all over the country in a fauji family, which means she speaks Hindi with her siblings and a strange broken Malayalam stuffed with English with everyone else. So even at home, before anything else happened to me, there wasn't one language. There was a household dialect.
Then the moving started. I spent the first couple of years of my life in Japan, where my parents claim I spoke Japanese, having been put in daycare when I was barely a few months old. I have no memory of this and no evidence beyond their word, but I like knowing it's in there somewhere. When they went to the US for their post-docs, I learnt English, and English is still the language I think in. All my internal monologue, every half-formed thought, runs in English by default.
When I was around eight, we moved to Malappuram. Until then my relationship with Malayalam had been thin and embarrassed. I barely understood it, and my parents spoke to me in a mix of English and Malayalam while I answered mostly in English. School in Malappuram introduced me to a completely different Malayalam from the one I'd heard at home, the local Mappila dialect, which my parents weren't thrilled about me bringing back to the dinner table. But I learnt it. God, did I learn it. I spent the next seven years making both my Malayalam and my English sound as Malappuram as humanly possible, because the one thing I could not stand was being called the US-return kid. That was the whole project. Not fluency, camouflage.
Running underneath all of this was Hindi, which I wanted badly. My mom and her siblings used it as the secret language, the one that went over the heads of their kids and probably their spouses too. Cracking it felt like getting access to a room. That was genuinely my main reason for picking Hindi as my second language in school, and I'm a little sad to report it didn't work at all. I was terrible at Hindi for all seven years of it.
At fifteen I moved to Chennai, and the people-pleaser in me immediately began her next assimilation project. I glorified everything Tamil, the music, the food, the whole culture, and learnt just enough phrases to fake it. Mostly I modified my English to sound like a Chennaiite's, dropping an "apdiya?" or a "seri" into gaps where they may or may not have belonged. Two years later I moved to Haryana for college, and by then I was a pro at this. I made friends with the North Indians fast and decided Hindi was the thing to crack, again. My grammar was so bad, and my mistakes so consistently the wrong kind, that it crossed from funny into genuinely embarrassing. So I did what I always do and started speaking a khichdi of English and Hindi instead, except I was already speaking a khichdi of English and Tamil, so what came out was a third thing entirely.
The other problem, and this one is specific to Indian languages, is that they're similar enough to sabotage you. I'd hear a word in one and reuse it confidently in another where it simply does not exist. In Malayalam, soujanyam means free, as in buy-one-get-one-free. So I'd say something like "vah iske saath soujanya hai" in Hindi and watch a room of people try to work out what I could possibly mean. Not wrong exactly, just from nowhere.
Bangalore finished the job. I've been picking up Kannada here in fragments, from different people in different places, but Bangalore is funnily enough a hotpot of other Charus, Telugu-speaking Bangaloreans, Tamil-speaking Bangaloreans, Marwari Bangaloreans, and then the actual Kannadigas. The househelp at my place speaks a Kannada-Telugu mix, and I picked up phrases from her for a full year before I realised I hadn't been learning Kannada at all. I'd been learning Telugu. So now, when I try to speak any local language, every other Indian language I know shows up uninvited, and I confuse everyone in the room including myself. Add the grammar rules, each language pulling in a different direction, and what I'm left with is genuinely a language of my own. Population: one.
I noticed this paradox properly a year or two ago and did the obvious thing, which was to try and become a one-language person. Pick one, get good at it, stop embarrassing myself. I failed at that pretty miserably.
So lately I've been trying to reframe it instead, and I want to be honest that reframing is partly just what you do when fixing hasn't worked. But here's the thing I keep coming back to: I have never once had difficulty communicating with people. Anywhere I've gone, I've found common ground fast, and I'm fairly sure it's the khichdi that does it. One "beda" and a Kannadiga is your best friend. One "haanji" and you're some Delhiite's favourite person in the world. None of that requires me to be correct. It requires me to have been paying attention.
A friend recently shared this piece on Indian English, which argues that the words we flinch at aren't mistakes but a language still arriving, and that the flinch itself is the last bit of colony we're holding onto. It stayed with me. Languages were built to communicate, not to be dictatorial about who's allowed in. Mine seems to have decided, without consulting me, to evolve into whatever gets me understood in the room I'm standing in.
I still don't have a language I'd call mine, and I don't think that changes now. But I've stopped treating it as a gap where a real language should be.