My Mother Tongue Comes Back When I Write
I think in English all day, but poems arrive in my grandmother's words.
I argue in English, apologise in English, dream mostly in English, and then at two in the morning a poem shows up at my door speaking exactly like my grandmother.
It happened again last Tuesday. I was in bed with my diary balanced on one knee, trying to write about the sound rain makes on a tin awning, and the English words kept arriving like consultants: correct, punctual, useless... Precipitation. Percussion. Patter. Then, from some cupboard in the back of my skull, out fell jhomjhom, and the rain finally sounded like rain.
Jhomjhom is not a word I have used in conversation in fifteen years. It is a Bangla word, and it belongs to my Thakuma, my father's mother, a four-foot-eleven woman from Howrah who never once spoke to me in English and never once needed to.
Let me be clear about what I am confessing here. I am the finished product of a very common Indian assembly line: English-medium school, engineering entrance coaching, a job in Gurgaon where I write emails that say things like "circling back on the below." My Bangla survives at the level of a seven-year-old's, because seven is roughly the age I stopped growing it.
I can order fish. I can be scolded. I cannot discuss politics or file a complaint. For most of my adult life I assumed the language had quietly left me, the way childhood friends do, without a fight, without a note.
Then I started writing poems, and discovered it had never left.
It had just stopped talking to the part of me that pays rent.
The woman who kept a library in her mouth
Thakuma fed me dinner by hand until I was six, on the roof of the Howrah house, under a sky the colour of a wet slate. Every mouthful of rice came with a toll: one rhyme per bite. She had hundreds. Nonsense rhymes about moustached moons, lullabies where the fields flooded silver, verses about jonaki, fireflies, that she claimed were the lanterns of people we had loved and lost. I swallowed the rice and the rhymes together, and I honestly could not tell you now which one my body kept for nourishment.
She smelled of mustard oil and Boroline. Her cotton saris were so soft from washing that they had opinions. When she laughed she covered her mouth with the corner of one, as if joy were slightly indecent. This is the person my poems apparently learned to talk from, and they did not consult me first.
We moved to Delhi when I was seven. The rhymes came with us for a while, then thinned, then stopped, the way a river does when you dam it upstream and call the dam a career. Phone calls to Howrah shrank to the same eleven sentences. Have you eaten... yes. Is it cold there... a little. She would slip in a line of some rhyme and I would laugh without fully understanding it, and neither of us mentioned that.
She died in January, in her sleep, at ninety-one.
At the shraddha ceremony, a cousin asked if I remembered the firefly rhyme.
I opened my mouth and found the shelf empty.
I could remember her hand, the exact temperature of rice from her fingers, the Boroline... Not the words. I stood in that incense-thick room feeling like a bank that had lost the deposits but kept the vault.
What came back, and how
For four months I did not write about her. I wrote around her, which any poet will tell you is the most exhausting route between two points. I produced tidy English poems about "loss" and "absence" that had all the emotional temperature of a boarding pass. It was only when I found a page of grief poems late one night, and read strangers being braver than me, that I sat down on my bed, opened the diary, and let the first line arrive without supervising its passport.
It arrived in Bangla.
Not fluent Bangla. Broken, seven-year-old Bangla, spelled half in Bengali script and half in desperate Roman letters, with English holding the grammar together like cheap tape.
But the nouns, the nouns were all hers. Jonaki. Shondhe, that particular word for dusk that English flattens into "evening" and loses the smoke in. The poem was eleven lines long and I cried through roughly nine of them, and when I finished I understood something I have been trying to phrase properly ever since.
English is the language I live in. Bangla is the language that lives in me.
Since that night, this is simply how it works. Work, worry, small talk: English. But the moment something matters at the level of the spine, my mother tongue walks back in without knocking, sits down, and starts dictating. The poems about family come out bilingual whether I like it or not. My diary now looks like a border town, two scripts trading goods down the middle of every page.
I tried translating one of the bilingual poems into clean English once, for a submission. I did enter it into a monthly poetry contest, and I do not regret that, but the translation taught me a hard lesson first: some words are not carrying meaning, they are carrying people. Jonaki translated to firefly is still an insect. Jonaki left alone is my grandmother on a roof, pointing at the dark, telling me the dead keep lanterns. You cannot footnote that. You can only trust the reader to feel a light they cannot name.
Reading through profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, I keep finding the same confession in different alphabets: a woman whose poems arrive in Tamil though her emails do not, a man whose Punjabi surfaces only in verse, like groundwater. We were all told our mother tongues were the past. Nobody warned us the past owns the deepest well.
The part I found out too late
Last month I told my mother, half joking, that Thakuma had colonised my poetry. My mother went quiet in the way that means a fact is coming.
"You know she couldn't read," she said. "Or write. Not even her own name until your grandfather taught her to sign it for the bank."
I did not know.
Ninety-one years, hundreds of rhymes, a whole spoken library balanced in her memory like water carried on the head, and not one word of it ever written down by the woman herself. Every verse she gave me was kept alive purely by mouths, hers and her mother's and some great-great-grandmother's before that, a relay of breath running back through centuries, and I had been the runner who dropped the baton for fifteen years and still, somehow, got handed it again.
So this is what I do with it now. On nights when the poems come, I write her language down in ink she could never have read, in a diary she will never hold, on a bed in a city she visited twice and found too loud. It is a strange direction for an inheritance to flow, from her mouth to my page. But when I shape the Bengali letters, slowly, badly, I notice they are round and small and slightly bent, like a four-foot-eleven woman covering her laugh with the corner of a sari.
The firefly rhyme has not come back to me yet... not whole.
But last Tuesday, after the rain poem, I turned off the lamp, and for a second the dark outside the window was full of small lights, and I knew exactly whose lanterns they were.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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