Chapter Text
I am sorry, daughter, but I do not want you to go to Hogwarts.
You will flounder into rooms you were meant to march into. You will hide the things you were meant to display. You will trade in your pavadais and blouses for shirts and skirts and you will make yourself invisible while you learn to live inside them: cotton chafing tightly over your chest, skirts stopping above your knees. Ties to go around your neck, strips of cloth that you will not know how to twist.
“Can you teach me?” you will ask, and that will be the beginning.
You will shorten your vowels and speak circular words, shed the sharp consonants of the tongue you were born with. Learn to wield magic with the tools of another, a stronger medium, easier. Better. You will learn the words Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus, and you will read, further still. Committing to memory an unnecessary language, an essential language. You will wield it with the grace of a pretender.
You will exchange your innocence for avarice, you will learn to fill yourself to brim with knowledge: foxtrot, waltz, Byron, Shelley, pudding, ham; heels, stockings, coats, hats, knives, forks. You will live with false awareness, affectations. “Reckon it’ll rain today?” and “She’s lost the plot!” and “I’m positively knackered.” You will chip away at parts of yourself to better suit the lips of incompetency: Parvati becomes Pav; Padma becomes Pads. You will fashion for yourself a name diluted from the thick syllables of your birth, so others may drink without choking.
“Where are you from?” they will ask, with pronounced accents and upturned noses. You will say, “India,” and they will say, “Oh?” And there will be murmurs, the tilting of heads, the crowding of questions like, “How did you learn our language?” and “Can you talk to snakes?”
“No,” you will say. And you will realise they do not know. They do not know that they forced their language down your throat long before you were born. But you cannot tell them that. Their Bible teaches you it is bad form to pin down the sins of a father, so you oblige their holy book and weather the whispers of “poor country, dirty country,” and “slum people, snake-charmers.”
“Salazar Slytherin could talk to snakes,” you will say, and leave it at that.
You will learn hate. You will learn class. You will wield steak knives and soup spoons and despise the spices that once stained your fingers yellow: vile habits, shameful habits, unaesthetic, Indian habits. You will bask in the English air with English charm and English wit and when you open your mouth, only English will come out.
And still, it will not be enough.
And when you come back, you will be a stranger in your own home. You will speak to your grandmother in an old, polluted tongue. She will meet you halfway, because she has been conditioned to admire this contamination. She will not tell you that your own language is older than Latin, richer than Greek, more storied than English will ever be. She will guide you to an old table and serve you rice on a plate with a spoon, and you will take it, for you will have forgotten the use of your hands.
“What you learned in Hogwarts? Teach something,” she will ask, and you will correct her, you will correct this woman who has braved countless battles before you were born, disempowered, broken.
“What did you learn,” you will say, in perfectly enunciated English. You will look at your grandmother, with a fading voice and a bent back, hair braided atop her head and a saree draped over her body.
You will look at your grandmother and you will teach her to tie a tie.