Written by: Sneha Saha
Edited by: Aanvi Chhiber
There is a word in Bengali called pichutaan.
It does not have an exact English translation, but it lives somewhere between “longing” and “the ache of being pulled back.” It signifies a bond so strong it makes you want to return to a place or person even when you want to move forward. It is the feeling of sitting by the window as the train pulls away, watching the platform shrink and stretch into colour through the glass. It is the split second’s hesitation before you hand in your boarding pass at the gate. It is the sensation of something soft tearing, of leaving and being left, all at once.
Language carries memory in ways we rarely notice. For bilingual people, every word comes with a choice: which version of yourself do you want to speak from? The English-speaking you, who knows how to say things neatly, academically, in ways that sound good in emails? Or the Bengali-speaking you, who feels things first and explains later, who can summon entire afternoons with a single word?
For instance, there is no English equivalent for abhimaan. You can call it pride, or wounded love, but it is not quite either. It is the quiet sulk that comes from feeling unloved by someone who should have known better. In another language, it just sounds smaller, like the feeling shrank on its way out.
That is the strange tragedy of bilingual memory: some feelings are only real in one tongue. When I try to recall a childhood afternoon—the tinny sound of a pressure cooker, the lazy fan, the smell of turmeric in my mother’s sari—the memory comes with a soundtrack of Bengali words. If I retell that same moment in English, something essential disappears. The image remains, but it is hollow, like a photograph without colour.
When you live away from home, you start to live in two linguistic time zones: one in your mind, one in your mouth. You call your parents, and the first few minutes are always awkward, like your tongue is jet-lagged. You forget basic words (daalim, shuto). You replace them with English ones because it is faster, and then you hate yourself a little for it.
Your parents start to switch too, throwing in English so you will understand. “Eat your food properly,” your mother says, when she once would have said, bhalo kore kha. The code-switching becomes a quiet apology from both sides. You for forgetting; them for not following.
Linguists call it language attrition, the gradual fading of your first language as you speak in another. But that term feels too sterile for something that feels so personal. Because when your language fades, your memories blur with it. You start remembering feelings instead of words, textures instead of names. The soundscape of your childhood becomes background noise.
The language you speak shapes how you remember—not just what, but how. If your mother tongue has a word for a feeling, your brain remembers it more vividly. If it does not, the feeling still exists, but slips through your mental net more easily.
For example, pichutaan. Once you name it, you start to notice it everywhere: in train stations, in old photographs, in the way your mother’s voice cracks slightly on long-distance calls. Before the word, it was just a vague ache; after it, it is a story. In Bengali, my childhood memories feel warmer, closer. Words like jhilmil (twinkling), mishti (sweet), borof (ice) arrive with smell and sound built in. They are sensory, whole. In English, those same memories turn neat and flat, like pressed flowers.
When you move away, you start to forget words, not because you want to, but because you stop needing them. Holud becomes “turmeric.” Chaa becomes “tea.” The old words grow dusty in the corners of your mouth. At first you correct yourself, then you stop. English starts to take up more space in your head, rearranging the furniture. And sometimes, new memories start to form in English. You fall in love in English, fight in English, make friends in English. You start saying I love you instead of bhalobashi because it feels easier, less vulnerable. Almost, less embarrassing.
There is a quiet guilt that comes with that, loving in one language and remembering in another. You start to wonder which version of yourself is real.
Westernization makes this loss feel subtle, almost dignified. We call it fluency, assimilation, progress. The dominance of English is seductive because it offers mobility, belonging, and modernity. It is the language of jobs, of essays, of borderless aspiration. In Bengali, feelings used to be messy and layered, full of pauses, repetition, softness. When we abandon that, we abandon the emotional register our culture built over centuries – the particular way our people have known how to love, to grieve, to joke, to complain.
That is not to say we do not love English. We do, fiercely, intimately, almost in the way you grow to love a place you once thought was temporary. It is the world of Austen and Kafka, of yellow subtitles on grainy films, of cheesy passwords and first email ids, of the fading alphabets on your keyboard from years of unfinished drafts. It is the language that raised our thoughts even as it rewired our instincts. It is how we dream now, how we joke, how we narrate ourselves to the world. And loving it does not erase the loss; it only makes it harder to name.
And yet, memory keeps certain words alive, like small pinpricks of light in the dark, cobwebbed corners of your mind. You forget the word for coriander, but you remember mishti doi because no other language can make it taste right. You forget tukro (fragment), but pishir bari (aunt’s house) stays, heavy with childhood laughter. When something hurts or startles you, it is the mother tongue that rushes out first. Memory is the stubborn part of language that refuses to leave. The result is a kind of liminal space in which the bilingual tongue invents new hybrids (My roommate is bhalo). You dream in both, love in both, lose in both. It is a rebellion against forgetting, and a confession of it too.
But the strangest thing about forgetting and remembering is that they mimic each other’s rhythm. You forget slowly, and you remember slowly. You hear an old song, and a word surfaces. You smell your mother’s cooking, and a proverb you have not used in years slips out. Memory teaches the tongue to remember again.
There is comfort, though, in knowing that language does not disappear completely. It hides. It waits. One evening, while chopping vegetables, I suddenly remembered the word piyajkoli – tender onion shoots my grandmother used to fry with potatoes. The word appeared in my mouth before the image did, like the memory had been waiting for the right moment to surface.
Some words do not travel with you. They stay behind with the people who never left, in kitchens that smell of mustard oil, in the rhythm of streets that no longer pause for you. You can leave home, speak in another tongue for years, but one day, a smell or a song will unearth a word you thought you had lost, and for a moment, you will be home again.
There is a word for it.
Pichutaan.