[...] She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her hands on. Maybe, it struck her, the issue all these years had been purely linguistic, maybe her mother had shut down her attempts at conversation only because they were expressed in a language that she could, at best, speak haltingly, a language in which she inevitably appeared less intelligent than she really was.