My name looks different depending on who writes it.<\/p>\n
On my school notebook, it appears in English.<\/p>\n
My grandfather writes it in his language.<\/p>\n
My neighbour writes it in another script entirely.<\/p>\n
The sounds are almost the same.<\/p>\n
The shapes are not.<\/p>\n
When I was younger, I thought one version had to be the real one.<\/p>\n
Surely a name should have one correct appearance.<\/p>\n
Then I began looking around.<\/p>\n
Shop signs in my city appeared in several scripts.<\/p>\n
Railway announcements moved between languages.<\/p>\n
Film titles travelled from one alphabet to another.<\/p>\n
People changed languages halfway through sentences without asking permission.<\/p>\n
Nobody seemed confused.<\/p>\n
India had been doing this long before I noticed.<\/p>\n
One afternoon, my grandfather wrote my name carefully on a piece of paper.<\/p>\n
The letters looked beautiful, but unfamiliar.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat says me?\u201d<\/p>\n
He laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn’t look like me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause you haven’t learned to see yourself in it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sentence stayed with me.<\/p>\n
So he taught me.<\/p>\n
The first attempt looked terrible.<\/p>\n
My letters leaned in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n
Some were too large.<\/p>\n
Others seemed to collapse halfway through.<\/p>\n
Grandfather kept the page anyway.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later, I could write my name without copying.<\/p>\n
It was a tiny achievement.<\/p>\n
But something strange happened when I looked at it.<\/p>\n
The unfamiliar version no longer looked unfamiliar.<\/p>\n
It was still me.<\/p>\n
Not translated.<\/p>\n
Not changed.<\/p>\n
Just written through another doorway.<\/p>\n
Language is often discussed as a tool for communication.<\/p>\n
It is.<\/p>\n
But it is also a way of recognising ourselves.<\/p>\n
A word can carry geography.<\/p>\n
A script can carry history.<\/p>\n
An accent can reveal where a family travelled from, even generations later.<\/p>\n
Knowing more than one language does not divide identity into smaller pieces.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it makes identity large enough to contain more than one world.<\/p>\n
Today I can write my name in three scripts.<\/p>\n
None of them feels less real than the others.<\/p>\n
They are not competing versions.<\/p>\n
They are three ways of answering the same question:<\/p>\n
Who are you?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My name looks different depending on who writes it. On my school notebook, it appears in English. My grandfather writes it in his language. My neighbour writes it in another script entirely. The sounds are almost the same. The shapes are not. When I was younger, I thought one version had to be the real<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[637,631,622,621,635,617,636],"class_list":["post-4818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-indian-languages","tag-arts","tag-creative-writing","tag-fiction","tag-heritage","tag-history","tag-literature","tag-poetry","enable-dropcap","disable-2-columns"],"yoast_head":"\n