When was the last time that I dreamt in Tamil?

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  So, there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil even though the town was located in Tamil Nadu.  There were a number of Telugus. Quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi. Even Saurashtra!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home.

Which is why in one class during the elementary years, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  Not every kid was a Tamil.

Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said.

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things.  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

(I think Madhulika's family spoke Kannada at home.  Or was it Konkani?)

We did not know any better or worse.  Such linguistic diversity was normal. The way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes in that wonderfully autoethnographic essay:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

Another child of immigrants has an entirely different story to tell about her mother tongue.  In this intense essay packed with emotions, "over time, Cantonese played a more minor role in my life," she writes.  What led to the memory erasure?

I became furious that my parents weren’t bilingual, too. If they valued English so much and knew how necessary it was in this country, why didn’t they do whatever it took to learn it? “Mommy and Baba had to start working. We had no money. We had no time. We needed to raise you and your brothers.” All I heard were excuses. I resented them for what I thought was laziness, an absence of sense and foresight that they should have had as my protectors. When I continued to be subjected to racial slurs even after my English had become pitch-perfect, I blamed my parents. Any progress I made towards acceptance in America was negated by their lack of assimilation. With nowhere to channel my fury, I spoke English to my parents, knowing that they couldn’t understand me. I was cruel; I called them hurtful names and belittled their intelligence. I used English, a language they admired, against them.

In immigrant families in which "successful" assimilation leads to children not learning the language of the old country, grandchildren often don't have the linguistic ability to converse with grandparents.  As Aziz Ansari joked in one of his bits, the chats with his grandmother were ultra-short because he didn't know Tamil that his grandmother spoke.  

Of course, such problems do not arise if people simply stayed put where they were born.  But, that is not an option either.  Something has to give.  Sometimes it is the pink mother tongue that we sacrifice :(