no equivalent

chi, cha

tamil, nouns

disgust, disbelief, shame, refusal…

How you express disgust says a lot about you. Most people scrunch up their face into a crinkle, some avert their eyes; my partner goes 'uehhh' or fakes gagging with his mouth formed into a perfect circle. I will only utter a loud cheee or a cha (not to be confused with the hot beverage, chai) with a straight look at whatever repulses me. I think a lot of Tamils do it too. But if you ask me (or us) what it means, I will freeze and pull my face into an incomprehensible expression, just like what the word represents. There is simply no word to describe these noises except as an interjection. Actually, chee (or a short, curt 'chi') can mean many things –– shame, disgust, loving refusal, surprise, a polite refusal of things as they are if repeated back to back ('chi chi') –– and so can 'cha', from disbelief and disappointment to a longing for something that cannot be brought back from time. Can two words contain entire cosmologies of the vocabulary of disdain? Perhaps.

The closest word I can compare these to in English is 'fuck'. Fuck yes, is a resounding agreement, while fuck no is emphatic disagreement. There are many ways to swear and express anger, displeasure, doubt, repugnance, and generally other unpleasant emotions, but so far none have achieved the magnitude that fuck can represent. Fuck, along with play and set, is a polysemous word, maybe not in the truest sense but in the way that you say it. Fuck is also etymologically difficult to trace, which not only makes it pliable as a word but also pleasurable. I find such elasticity and pleasure with using chi and cha, both of which are polysemous words, i.e. words that have many meanings, in a galaxy of other such words in Tamil.

The first time I used chi in front of my English-speaking partner, it was snappy and unceremonious. My partner, delighted that I was speaking in Tamil, tried to imitate the word in a similar tone and voice. It made us both laugh. I said 'cha' out loud – I was missing my sister, my comrade in such activities. We grew up liberally using chi, cheeee, and cha in various cadences for things that so much as mildly annoyed us – we used it for almost everything. But here I was, three decades later, unable to coherently explain the concept of such words to my partner, who assumed it to be a swear word. It wasn't fuck, but the way you say chi matters.

Tamil swear words are more vulgar than ones in English because Tamil is as much a bodily language as it is guttural and retroflexive i.e. sounds are crucial for distinguishing words. On this journey of explaining Tamil to my partner, I was telling him the difference between ennai (me) and eNNai (oil) which is also the basis of a popular joke from a Tamil movie, bear with me here. A man who arrives at the big city, and is asked to mind his brother-in-law's corner shop for a few hours, decides to have fun with one of his customers using Tamil. In turn, the customer decides to play with him via Tamil as well. The shopkeeper asks 'what do you want' and the customer replies 'I want oil' which gets translated to both 'what the hell do you want' and 'oil'. This exchange goes on for a while till the shopkeeper is left harried by this conversation. When he finally realises he's being played and understands what the customer actually wants, he brings him groundnut oil on request. When he's about to pour the oil into a glass bottle, the customer baits the shopkeeper again with 'is this good oil'. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a normal question but the words for good oil in Tamil can also interchangeably mean sesame oil. And so it turns out that the customer was merely asking if the oil was of a decent quality while also pulling the shopkeeper's leg. There is more to this joke which ends with the shopkeeper running back to his village but I couldn't accurately translate it entirely to my partner. And even if I did, I found that there were gaps in comprehension and ultimately, a loss.

Translation brings forth a third language, a liminality between where you have been and where you want to go, a frankenmonster between Tamil and English, which volunteers an ambiguity. How this ambiguity can give way to clear meaning is through intonation, context, and purpose with little oddities sprinkled throughout. As an Italian phrase goes, translators are traitors; you can either sell yourself out and produce a flawed meaning or you stay true to the language and fumble through words, concepts, and significance. I think either way, the translation is knotted, confusing, and inherently ruined. In such cases, you simply have to say chi or cha and walk away.