Sometimes, I really hate rice. It’s a South Indian staple, an integral part of our culture and blah, blah, blah, but on some days, it is the last thing I want to see sitting on the dinner table. But now that my grandmother is staying with us, it is a given that we have rice at least three times a week.

It’s not always the rice that bothers me, though. Sometimes it’s wearing the Hindu dot on my forehead right after I come home from school. Other times it’s having to speak in my mother tongue, Tamil, instead of English. Whenever my grandmother insists on these actions, I roll my eyes. Who cares if I don’t wear the dot some days? It’s just a speck of paint, really. And she knows that I can speak Tamil, so what’s the big deal if a few English words slip out? Besides, it’s just a little difficult to switch to Tamil after having been immersed in English for the entire school day. But that’s yet another thing my grandmother doesn’t understand.

On some nights, I look at my grandmother with her ten-year-old cotton sari and red dot pressed firmly on her forehead in contrast to myself, dressed in an American T-shirt and denim jeans. It is then that the ever-widening cultural gap between us staggers me, and I quickly avert my eyes.

I have always considered the gap between my grandmother and me as inevitable; to me, it was something that has always been there and always will be. That’s what happens when you stick a 72-year old Indian woman with an American-born high schooler, I figured. But what I failed to consider was that every one of my reluctant sighs, scoffs at Indian traditions and spoken English words helped to create that distance in the first place. My grandmother may have yet to understand my American accent, and she may feel baffled at some of the jokes in the TV shows we watch, but that doesn’t mean that she has to be treated like an outsider. Some aspects of Indian culture may annoy me, but speaking in English and refusing to wear the dot are hardly worth the frown that forms on my grandmother’s face every time I do. My grandmother may not be part of American culture, and I may not be fully part of hers. But my grandmother is part of my family, and that’s what counts.

I have learned to stifle my groans when my grandmother makes rice and to shut my mouth when English words beg to come out. To be sure, I can be reluctant to speak Tamil. But I surprise myself at the ease with which the Tamil conversation flows every night. And when I look at our dinner table now, the hated rice is no longer the first item that catches my eye. Instead, I see jokes shared and understood across three generations. I see jeans and saris sitting side by side and wrinkled hands clasped with smooth ones. Most of all, I see the smile on my grandmother’s face and I know that I might hate rice today, but ten years from now, it will be the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I will think about the happiness that surrounded us – the happiness that came from a few compromises.

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