Back in 2013, I sat in the lounge of an NYU building and told a friend casually, “Tongues don’t have bones.” My friend’s eyes lit up and they said, “Hey, that’s beautiful.” I had literally translated a phrase from Marathi, my mother tongue. That happy accident sparked off an important thought: How long had I gone without speaking a word of Marathi?
My mother tells me stories of how as a child, I was so fluent in Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi that my grandma got extremely worried. She asked mum how a girl like me, raised outside India, spoke Indian languages better than English. From then on, English got into the mix. I spoke Marathi and English at home, English and Hindi in school and Gujarati at my babysitter’s. As I grew older in a school where English was the primary language of instruction, the only language I found sufficient to express the madness of being a teenager was English. Hindi remained stuck in my schoolbooks and exams, Marathi survived a feeble life inside the confines of my house, and Gujarati disappeared like a long-lost lover.
Today, English, which I would technically consider being my third or fourth language, is the only language I can fluently read, speak and write in at the age of 24. I can speak fluent Hindi and Marathi while my Gujarati stills stumbles and falls. I can’t write any of the Indian languages that were thick as honey in my mouth as a child, and I’ve never been able to read Gujarati to save my life. And to add to this craziness, being raised Indian in the Middle East, I can read Arabic if I take my time but I don’t understand anything I read. I don’t think even the obvious response of an incredulous “WHAT?!?!?” does any justice to this mish-mash.
But what pains me most is that I find myself only expressive in a language that I wasn’t born with. As of today, I find myself eloquent only in English— Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi make me feel like a flailing child, drowning in a pool of her childhood. I crawl under my skin when I find myself unable to find the words for things in Marathi, Hindi or Gujarati. I get upset instantly and use English to fill the void. My mother and I talk to each other in a weird concoction of English and Marathi, which ultimately devolved to just English. Now, we refuse to respond to each other if we speak to each other in English. I’ve even suggested keeping a language jar in the house and the car so that we become cognizant of how much English we’ve allowed to pervade our lives.
When I call myself an Indian, there’s a myriad number of ways I identify with being Indian. Language should be one of them— but it isn’t. There’s a world of magnificent literature that exists in Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati but I’ve made myself systematically inaccessible to it. In an attempt to gain equal footing with the people I want to be surrounded by and the kind of environments I want to thrive in, I gave up the things I was born into. Unconsciously, I put English on a pedestal and lost the voices of my DNA. Sometimes, when I speak in English, I feel like an alien to myself. I’m hearing someone who looks just like me speak in a language I don’t understand.
A voice teacher who taught me at NYU told me once, “I want you to be Brutus’s wife Portia and talk to him in Marathi.” I took a while, translated my entire monologue to Marathi in my head and went ahead as I questioned Brutus’s doubts in trusting Portia. Every person in the room, despite being American and never having heard a word of Marathi, said that they understood everything I said as Portia.
I cannot connect back to being like Portia when I did that monologue. That eats at my heart. At 24, returning to Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati feels like shame, feels like I left my children abandoned in a forest. I’ve absolutely hated losing the very things that define my ancestry and lineage. The ultimate irony of it all is that even now, I use the language of my colonizer’s to bridge the divide.
Tomorrow, I’ll start going back to my childhood, unearth every book and song I can in Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati. If life and living is about finding our true selves, I have to return to the languages that I was born into. English can take a pit stop on the way.
