My mother and I don’t talk. 

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           At least, not in the way that I want us to. My amma grew up in a small town in Southern India speaking Tamil twenty-four-seven. Everyone around her spoke the same language: her friends, her teachers, her parents. And when she chose to move she brought that language back with her to the United States, alongside my then 8-year-old brother and my father. 

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           My brother had a unique experience. He got to grow up in India for just long enough to remember it; remember the sweet-tasting mangoes plucked straight from the tree, the skittish stray cats frolicking in the lawns. Naturally, he also learned quite a bit of Tamil there as well, straight from the source.

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           I never got that chance.

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           Sure, I “learned” Tamil—picked up the basics from my often distant parents, expressions like how to say hello or ask someone how they’re doing. But I didn’t learn Tamil, not the real Tamil, not the kind that my grandma and grandpa and every ancestor before them spoke. Not the kind that my mother speaks.

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           Growing up it hadn’t bothered me that much, really. Sure, it was frustrating stumbling over my words every time I tried to conjugate a verb, but things could’ve been worse. What kind of first-generation immigrant didn’t speak a mix of English and their mother tongue anyway? It was natural for it to be broken; no one expected anything better. Besides, who cares if my conversations with my mother are a bit shallow as long as we aren’t arguing, right?

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           I didn’t really expect that to change. 

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           Sometime in 2021, after an unbearably long time of being cooped up at home following the start of the pandemic, I came out to my mother. In-person school had started again, and suddenly the way I dressed, the way I looked, and the way I was perceived started to matter to me a whole lot more than it used to when I was hidden behind a computer screen. I started to wear baggier clothes, different accessories, and changed my makeup—anything I could do to change who people saw me as. But it turns out it wasn’t as simple as just a few little things here and there; my appearance could only go so far if people were still looking at me as a girl. I needed to change my name. 

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           There was quite some time when I had changed it without telling my mother. I chose a silly nickname, nothing serious, and told everyone at school. It wasn’t ideal—teachers and staff still called me by my dead name—but it was enough. For a while, at least. But as the months passed I realized that this wasn’t just some tiny part of me I could squeeze up and crush into a little box to keep convenient. I needed to confess.

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           So I told her, while she was nodding off on the recliner one night; when the house was dimly lit and empty and it was just me and her sitting by the fireplace. It tumbled out of my mouth before I even knew it, and then her once half-lidded eyes were suddenly blown wide open, and she was staring at me in a way she’d never done before. 

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           Even with the fire burning, I’d never felt so cold.

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           I tried my best to explain, I really did. But more than ever I felt that wall between us, an insurmountable barrier taller than anything I could ever hope to climb. My daily lexicon of “hello”s and “how-are-you”s couldn’t possibly explain to her the intricacies of gender in modern society, much less what I meant when I said I was nonbinary. 

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           Language is vital. It is the beating heart of our communities; the silken string that ties us all together. I can’t talk to my mother, no matter how hard I try, because these icky English words go straight over her head, and her Tamil only leaves me scratching mine. We’ll forever be stuck at a rudimentary level of mutual understanding, only capable of exchanging pleasantries and occasionally discussing our days. 

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           But sometimes there’s more to it than that. 

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           Our bodies speak a language of their own, and that is one anyone is capable of understanding. When she hugs me close, or kisses my forehead, or wipes my tears away with the back of her thumb, skin cracked and rough from years of never-ending housework, there is no need for English or Tamil or any language at all for me to understand what she is saying. 

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           My amma never learned what I meant. But in the light of one dewy morning, a few weeks after our talk, I stood there in the kitchen with her and asked her to pick me a new name. She was hesitant at first, but I began to list a few off, and I could see the cogs in her brain whirring. 

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           “Surya,” she’d said that day, looking at me with a slight nod. “It means the sun.”

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           And that was all I needed.