Opinion: An Immigrant Indian Writer Confronts a New Literary Universe in American English

In the 15th century, Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci undertook many a voyage—navigating rough seas for months, sometimes years, between Europe and the New World.

There’s nothing I would change about that sentence.

Alas, today I read and hear about students “navigating” their way through college, executives “navigating” their way through corporate politics, and pretty much everybody “navigating” their way through lives replete with deadlines, inflation, and stress.

Not a day goes by when I don’t hear America’s most colloquially abused marine metaphor. “All hands on deck” is a distant second.

My writerly antennae perk up every time I hear these words and phrases. When a writer moves from another country — in my case, India — to this one, she is met with new pathogens, new allergens, new words, and new ways of using old words. Or, to borrow a Silicon Valley term, she finds new “use cases” for certain words she thought she knew.

Thanks to American TV and Hollywood, both of which are wildly popular in urban India, I’ve long known that “breaking a leg” has nothing to do with fractures, “cutting cheese” has little to do with lactose, and “a piece of cake” is not about baking. But my journey of discovery runs deeper than acquiring a working knowledge of such phrases.

As I approach the English language in a whole new context, I’m tempted to riff on a concept from the Turkish author Elif Shafak, who speaks of ferrying words from the shores of one language to another. Now that I’m writing in, for, and about a new country, I too ferry words from one shore of the English language to another. They both lose and gain meaning in the process.

Moving from India, a British colony until 1947, to the U.S., which is its own insular galaxy apart from the rest of the English-speaking world, is linguistically jarring. Assimilating here means replacing dustbins with trash cans, and footpaths with sidewalks. Accepting redundant prepositions like sending things “over” or swapping stuff “out.” Stifling the urge to say, “No, you didn’t literally die after hearing that joke.” Knowing that “perfect” has little to do with perfection.

Assimilating also means adopting a whole new socio-psychological lexicon. I think I know what UC San Diego cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky means when she says that language and words shape our thoughts, and consequently, our reality. It’s hard not to wonder what a new vocabulary does to one’s voice, personality, and being.

Here’s an everyday example. In the U.S., when the friendly lady behind the sandwich counter asks how my day is going, she expects me to respond with a culturally approved “Good, how’s your day going?” or “Not bad” — my husband’s standard response. Or at most, with a comment that deflects attention from my subjective, inner experience toward something external, something neutral, a shared reality such as the traffic or weather.

Despite my extroversion, my appetite for small talk is … small. Telling the sandwich lady that my day is going fine and absently inquiring about hers seems shallow. It’s an unlikely conversation in India, where it’s not considered rude to ask a shopkeeper for an item you need, take it, pay him, and leave without so much as a smile. Despite India’s famed warmth and hospitality, everyday social interactions involving money tend to be transactional.

But when this sort of vacant chitchat occurs frequently, as now it must, I feel socially assimilated but psychologically inauthentic. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always responded with the truth when I’ve been asked how I’m doing — sometimes I’m doing all right, sometimes I’m not. I once stirred the pot by saying, “My day’s going terribly, how about yours?” to a colleague, after which a meaningful exchange ensued. We let strangers consume our interiority on social media. Why can’t we do the same in real life while someone bags up our burrito?

I also worry about the semantic dilution of words like “please,” “thank you,” and “sorry,” and how it will impact meaningful interactions in my life. I love how polite people are here, but if I punctuate every other sentence with “thank you,” what will I say when I really want to express gratitude? I’m used to uttering “sorry” and “thank you” as expressions of apology and gratitude, respectively. If “sorry” becomes a prefix to every request — asking someone to make way for me to pass through a narrow space, or to repeat what they just said — what will I say when I really want to apologize? The words will come, I realize. But will that mean I have changed in some fundamental way?

This psychological transit between continents has me discovering new aspects of myself. Migration has changed my choice of self-identifying words; I take an outside-in view of myself, almost as if I have become a spectator to my own existence. In India, it’s common to speak at least two to four languages. I speak English, Hindi, Marathi and a bit of Telugu. In the U.S., I make it a point to tell people I’m a polyglot. In India, for 37 years, it was something I took for granted.

I’ve become more acutely aware of my race. I used to be a South Indian from South Mumbai; as of 2022 when my plane touched down in San Francisco, I “became” South Asian, learning that identifying simply as “Asian” came with entirely different racial connotations.

From being just a regular woman — no more, no less — I am now a woman of color. Moving has given me a whole new view of the same face in the mirror. In India, a land rife with colorism, I’m considered fair-skinned and therefore attractive. It’s both humbling and liberating to use a different set of adjectives to describe myself in America — dark, colored, brown, tan. I am amused each time I check the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) box on forms, not least because I wasn’t aware of this acronym 18 months ago.

And then there is my writing life. Salman Rushdie once said every writer has their own relationship with the language they write in. As I recalibrate my love story with English, I worry about losing some of the creative magic I’ve cultivated over the years. It’s like coming close to mastering an art form and then being told the rules of engagement have changed.

At the same time, I’m letting my amusement with everyday Americanisms reshape my thoughts, a process that makes me feel creatively unmoored — and excited. This sense of loosening the reins of control over my craft has pervaded other aspects of my work, too. I find myself experimenting with new styles all around. My poetry, which has always had rigid rhyme and rhythm at its core, now runs amok into free verse.

Maybe I’ll find new, better ways of expression, working my way through a whole new universe of literary and personal nuance. I’m keeping an open mind on this journey. But I’ll be leaving the navigating to the sailors.

Ashwini Gangal is a Bay Area-based journalist and author of two chapbooks, Hormonal House and Yersinia Pestis. She grew up in Mumbai, India. This was written for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.