Venkatakrishnan 1 Akshayaa Venkatakrishnan Professor Gary Vaughn Intermediate Composition 2089 31 January 2014 Reading like a Book: Redefining

Human Interaction I present to you, the diminished seventh chord! chirps my aging piano teacher, squinting through the thick bifocals that are far too heavy for her little nose. She plays another chord, her waxy, heavily-veined fingers moving adeptly across the keys as she sings, Lets diminish this chord! Take the V7 chord and lower every note by a half, except the bottom one, in order to form... In order to form a more perfect union, booms the voice of the schools lone government teacher. His arms are unproportional, much longer compared to the rest of his small frame, and lead to his hands gripping a copy of the U.S. Constitution, the ends of his shirt sleeves leaving a significant amount of his forearms uncovered Uncovering a language is more than words: theres cultura, historia, geografa La profesora trails off as she rummages through her Mary Poppins purse behind the podium. Pero primero, debemos aprender los conceptos bsicos The atom is the basic building block of matter, rumbles our sophomore chemistry teachers voice from somewhere between his bushy white mustache and his equally dense beard. The thin skin under his eyes is dark, probably from late hours of baseball coaching and homework grading. As the bell echoes in the hall and another class of haggard students streams in, he picks up his bottle of Coke and scribbles the nights homework onto the dusty chalkboard...

Venkatakrishnan 2 Gerta coughs, and lifts the can of Coca-Cola Zero to her thin lips. I will never forget, she whispers, her raspy voice barely discernible, a damp tissue crumpled up in her other fragile hand. The poorly-lit room holds haphazard stacks of photo albums and old German books. As columns of dank dust dance around our heads, she coughs once more and brings the tissue behind her glasses to wipe her little blue eyes. She chuckles morosely, and with words slathered in a heavy German accent, murmurs, You must cherish the present when it is a present, because you never know. Things like this are ancient history...but when you are ancient, these things arent history. Because these things, they are your past, and the past is what makes history so devastating. That devastation is my memories. The earliest memory I have involves a broken Snapple bottle, garbled literacies, and a homeless man. Ill explain myself before your imagination turns to the grisliest outcome, but let me start by saying that it was an absolutely average day that should not be stuck in my head at all. My parents had the afternoon off, a rarity in their eighty hour weeks in the hospital during an era when it was considered an initiation into the medical field rather than an inhumane practice. I remember that it was sunny, because sunny in Queens, New York, translated directly to muggy, sticky, and far too hot to stay inside. Sunny days in Queens meant everyone embraced the underlying definition, and resulted in little clumps of people of all races and creeds traveling down the veins of the borough, window-shopping and chomping on street food to the jumbled tunes of language and laughter. My parents didnt have much money to spend on interesting meals, their own diet consisting of day-old Dunkin Donuts and strawberry milk, and I was an especially picky eater, but the Dosa Hut a few streets away was always the first choice, a rare (albeit greasy) luxury that held the happiest memories for our little family. Once we ate, we

Venkatakrishnan 3 would slowly meander back to our one-bedroom apartment by the hospital, cold drinks in our warm hands and the chaotic song of Queens on a sunny Saturday in our ears.

My mother, grandmother and I in New York. Photo by my dad, Venkatakrishnan Rajaram.

Back to the Snapple bottle. I cannot quite remember the flavor, but the bottle had a peachy tone to it, hinting towards similar contents. The flavor lost all importance the moment that the glass bottle kissed the patchy grey sidewalk, shooting shards in every direction. This is where the memory becomes vivid, the way that pain becomes shooting and sharp after hitting your humerus on an unexpected corner. Streams of lights flashing off the broken glass, streams of people side-stepping the glinting danger, streams of scared tears running down my face. I was mumbling a strange set of syllables, but it was not my hysteric state that made the speech incoherent. At the age of four, I was still trying to pick up English, but was too strongly rooted to my native tongue of Tamil to pick up on the nuances of a new language. The result was a lingual buffet, of sorts. I picked and chose bits of each language to string my sentences together, leaving my parents, grandmother, teachers, and strangers understanding some of the words I said, but never grasping the meaning I attempted to convey. In turn, I could not understand what they were trying to say to me, my understanding of Tamil muddled by alien syllables and my grasp of those new words still very loose. I was living in a world where no one elses words would suffice, because in those few months of my life, I belonged to no one elses literacy. I had invented my own out of chance. Their words meant little to me, and I was left deriving meaning from their behavior. I do not believe that I developed into an intuitive person because of any

Venkatakrishnan 4 innate capability, but simply by the nature of my childhood, where any human interaction required heightened perception of motion and expression when words could not be involved. Snapple, a hybrid language, and a homeless man. The story would not be complete without him, for he was the one who completed my earliest literacy by adding an appreciation that I had not quite grasped. As I stood on that street corner, the smells of Dosa Hut still fresh within my nostrils and a saline taste invading my mouth as tears continued to drop off my cheeks, I had no reaction to the words poured down by the people surrounding me. I remember bending down, picking up pieces of glass in my little hands, only to be scolded by my mother, her lips tightening her face like a puppet master, the lines around her mouth the strings of a marionette. I could not stop myself from angrily picking up the sharp pieces, my mothers sharp words dulling in comparison. What stopped me was a strange hand that appeared from the right. Dry and red around the knuckles, thin patches of hair creeping up on a bony wrist. The rest of the shattered Snapple bottle pieces were quickly swept up by the angular but knobby fingers, tossed aside. I cannot recall the exact features of the man attached to the appendage, but I remember the feeling I felt when this stranger, living on the corner of the street, trapped behind waves of indifferent people on an intolerably sunny day in Queens, reached out to help me. The disappointment and embarrassment became confusion, then became genuine appreciation and awe at the kindness of a stranger. Looking back, I wish I could recall more of this occurrence, more than a few fingers, some shards of glass and a wet patch on the concrete; I wish I could go back to that moment and say the words, in any language, that I wanted to say but couldnt muster: thank you. The thought clattered noisily around my head, unable to be translated into the elegantly laced sentences that I

Venkatakrishnan 5 heard all around me. As my parents grabbed my hands and tugged me away, I mustered up the only action I could send in the mans direction: a simple smile. I firmly believe that the reason that the memory is so vivid is because that was when I first began to understand the unique perspective that I was granted. The man crouching by me in the street was not rewriting my literacy, instantaneously making me realize the importance of communication. Instead, his silent, unprovoked, and truly kind gesture taught me more about the potential of humanity than words had ever expressed. Others have the opposite experience, with words opening an entirely new world within the one they have been living in for so long. For Malcolm X, learning to read words from a page woke a long dormant craving to be mentally alive (360). In my experience, it has been seeing beyond the words that have made the difference in my understanding of others. By being thoroughly unsure of how to direct my learning of a single language, my parents had instead sparked a different kind of literacy within me; without learning how to communicate in words, I learned to draw connections through a combination of observation and listening. It was a literacy of loving details, a non-traditional literacy that still motivates my every thought and action. Really, all literacies are the same at heart: it is about capturing moments, cherishing a source for every feeling that pounds through your mind, whether good or bad. I learned how to read people before learning how to read pages in a book, but it has made life into a grand quest of listening to people for more than just their words, appreciating thoughts and ideas and events for being singular, definitive fibers holding together a giant, complicated web. Literacy may not be the immediate term that comes to mind for defining this understanding, but it really is fitting once the definition of literacy is stretched beyond its

Venkatakrishnan 6 expected bounds. Literacy is about appreciating and pursuing a particular craft, equipped with critical thinking and thoughtful analysis. To me, learning about people and searching for connections in the details is what makes life enthralling. It can be as simple as helping two people meet and discuss their shared interest in Canadian coin collecting, or as intricate as uniting a group of teenagers and creating an influential force of change. Its about seeing the connections between the lanky teacher with an obsession with James Madison and Gerta, the seventy year old nurse whose faith was never shaken when her homeland was falling apart. A literacy in human interaction is so much more than jumping from one person to another and listening to them speak. It is seeing the direction that their eyes take when they talk about their opinion on climate change, hearing the excitement infiltrate a voice when discussing the importance of the British Invasion to music, or their cheeks tinge with modest embarrassment when discussing Joyces romantic choice of June 16th for Ulysses. Being literate in human interaction means more than hearing what people have to say, and remembering them as more than a mosaic of their past. Human beings are too complex to be boiled down to a pile of personality traits, physical features and major occurrences, but we are still an amorphous composition of varying levels of these. It is about living in the present, understanding the past, and being open-minded about the future. Stephen King said that all the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree (305). Yet every form of art is an attempt to translate pixels of humanity into something tangible, something to not just be put into words but truly experienced by the head and the heart. When we learn to appreciate others for everything they have to offer, their potential clicks into place, like a jigsaw piece fitting into the puzzling realm that we generally describe as life.

Venkatakrishnan 7 Sometimes when we listen to others, we simply wait for key points that allow us to interject our own input. Being literate in understanding another person means hearing what they have to say as more than just a talking point, but using every sense to get the full picture of what they are sharing in more than just their words. It gives us the opportunity to discover the moments that make us realize that every little detail of life is beautiful and intertwined. Paths cross, destinies parallel and perpendicular, terminal velocity of moments. Every memory is a singular dot, each dot individually extraordinary and meaningfully intertwined. We are able to take others opinions and agree, disagree, or develop them, learning something from every new thought. Since our paradigms shift on a daily basis as we grow more intelligent by the second, these opinions continue to change, with every new book to check out, old song to give another listen, or something else to set the mind racing and the heart beating just a little bit faster. It is about learning of the history behind science, the science surrounding mathematics, the mathematics in music, the music of nature, the nature of mankind. Seeing how the details of life are so interlaced that a casual conversation on tourist spots in Greece can turn into light banter on romantic comedies or a heated debate over the state of Europes economy. No matter where a discussion begins or where it leads, we are bound to gain some insight into the lives and lifestyles of each other. In the end, every individual experience contributes to a society that is built on the memories, the words, the cries, the voices and rejoices of generations, past and present. This literacy in human understanding does not begin or end at any particular place within this web; instead, it requires a collective appreciation of all that we have to offer each other, whether in words, thoughts, pictures or actions.

Venkatakrishnan 8 Works Cited King, Stephen. What Writing Is. Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 305-307. Print. X, Malcolm. Learning to Read. Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 354-360. Print.