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AI: Well, I wanted to ask about language, and what language or languages you spoke at home, and then how that changed, if much, when you started school?

PJ: Our native language was Malayalam, which is the language of Karela. And my grandmother spoke almost exclusively Malayalam, she felt much more comfortable in Malayalam than in English, though she did speak English. My grandfather really liked to speak English, but he also spoke Malayalam, and my parents spoke it fluently, obviously. So we grew up listening to a lot of Malayalam, but not speaking it. And I don't know, my mother has a master's in English literature, and my grandfather was very, kind of, British, loved everything about the British. And so it was, it was always seen as a value, something good, to speak English. And it's not that we were discouraged from speaking Malayalam, in fact, I think that my mother and my grandmother might have tried to push us to do it. But then once we left and went to Indonesia, then it was almost exclusively English at home. We did learn to speak Indonesian and I still speak some Bahasa Indonesian, Indonesia. But that was mostly outside, and not at home. So even today, I understand Malayalam completely, but I don't speak it. I think I could if I lived there for long enough. And now -- I've always loved languages -- so now I speak Hindi because I went and lived in India for two years. But I had to learn it when I went there. I didn't know Hindi before, and in the north, a lot of people are really surprised. 'Cause people in India don't understand how big the country is and how diverse different parts are. And so you look Indian and you should be able to speak whatever the language is of that place. But most people in India grow up speaking many languages. My mother certainly did. They spoke Tamil, and I understand some Tamil because we lived in Tamil Nadu. And then she, she learned Hindi in school, and then she speaks English and Malayalam.

AI: And then when you started school in Jakarta, then...

PJ: It was all English, the schooling was all in English, and then I think learned French and Indonesian in school as well. And, and then at home, my parents would still speak to me in Malayalam, but in some ways, I think... in a way, I think that they might also be more comfortable in English, now, than in any other language. It's interesting, I mean, they certainly speak it fluently, but I notice that the times when they use Malayalam are if they're very angry, if they're sometimes very happy or there's a particular expression in Malayalam that we all understand, that, that you cannot translate into English. Or, or if they want to, you know, if we're in an elevator and we want to keep something secret -- [laughs] -- we speak Malayalam.

AI: That sounds familiar. My parents used to do that sometimes, speaking Japanese.

PJ: Yeah, yeah. It's very handy, actually. It's very, very handy. [Laughs]

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.