“অ, আ… AW, AH, SHORAYO, SHORAYA…” Auntie’s teeth were stained with magenta lipstick as she pronounced each syllable. She pointed at me, “Tomar naam er moto. AW-MI-TA,” She wrote my name on the wobbly white board, the shunno of the vowel (AW) অ, the swoop of the (MI) মি and the final tally of the (TA) তা. I was fifteen, my flushed face dotted with acne as I sat behind a row of little kids. There were Arjun and Ayesha, who would always tease each other, bump shoulders against me, whisper for me to join either one of their “teams”. Arjun was a star student, while Ayesha mumbled along, the vowels all discombobulated, points of articulation all wrong.
I grew up with Bangla. The language was spoken, rather than written down. It was teased out of me. My cousins would unfold all my origami and call me the riska-wala’s (rickshaw driver’s) wife whenever I whined. I would yell “Stop it! Stop it” with my American accent, and they would hear, “Stupid, stupid!” then point at me.
I ran back and forth between শুদ্দ ভাষা (shuddo vasha / proper language) and the country dialect my cousins taught me back home. They would talk to me between mouthfuls of perfumed lychee, and pause to spit out the fat seed. Their voices would be filtered through the shaky fan on the ceiling, as we reclined on the couches in rooms without ACand the sun cut through the windows. We’d play hide and seek: ১, ২,৩… (ek, dui, tin…).
We’d play beyblades, the ripoff metal ones from the market, boxes marked with fake Japanese. They would spark against the tiled floor.
My grandmothers would braid my tangled hair, ask about school in slurred syllables, the sharp scent of betel leaves between their blackened teeth. I would take a baat ghum, (an after lunch-nap), then wake up with creaky eyes, take in the sunkissed azaan through the pink mosquito net draped on the bed frame.
I learned to speak my mother tongue during the summers my family took in Bangladesh. I was surrounded by it, and had a need to use it in order to talk to my cousins, aunties, and uncles. Reading and writing was superfluous – all the shows I watched were dubbed in Hindi and subtitled in English. Sometimes, I would ask what a certain sign said. My mother would read the swirling, yet angular, Bengali-Assamese script, then say something like: “pharmacy” for the word ফার্মাসি (pronounced phar-ma-shee).
Before our parents invented “Bangla School”, us American-Bengali kids used to sing and read poetry in Banglish. আমরা করবো জয় would become, “AMRA KORBO JOY,” typed in Arial Bold, with handwritten indications of when to stop for the instrumental, or to breathe. Our elders had different opinions on how to teach us Bengali Culture. Sure, they could always take us to perform at Durga Puja, or to feast on Eid… but how much of the language should they speak at home? What if it interfered with us learning English? The fear was planted by our kindergarten teachers post-9/11, during the supposedly evergreen era of the first African American president.
Growing up, I’ve learned to minimize the Bengali part of me in order to relate to my mostly white American classmates. I didn’t tell my friends about the Desi events I went to every weekend, and they never asked. Some of my friends weren’t even allowed to stay at my house, or go for a simple playdate.
When I was little, things were black and white. My classmates were true Americans, while I was somehow tainted, somehow a bit off. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen many first and second generation South Asian kids live between cultures and embrace who they are. Some know Bangla entirely, and some only know how to speak; some speak shuddo, and some speak Sylheti. Some speak with a heavy European accent and some with no accent at all. Some live in mostly white areas, such as my hometown of Saginaw, and some live in Hamtramck-Detroit, the city with the highest immigrant and Muslim population percentage in the United States.
I was inspired to learn to read and write Bangla due to my family and the Bengali/Bangladeshi communities they exposed me to. I swear, I hear Bangla being spoken at least two out of the five times I’m waiting for the bus here in East Lansing. It’s the 7th most spoken language in the world, just behind her sister, Hindi.
After several summers of study, I can read short poems and speak almost fluently. It was strange, learning to read again, learning that the English letters you were used to weren’t as exact as you once thought. Think of the word “teeth” then the word “three” – where does your tongue go? The “t” in teeth goes to the roof of your mouth, while the “t” in three goes between your teeth, producing slightly different sounds. Bangla distinguishes these two sounds by labeling them with ঠ and থ respectively. They also differentiate between aspirated and unaspirated sounds.
Getting the tiny, nuanced differences between these sounds was so difficult; my mother used a spoon for me to pronounce the letters correctly. She used to reaffirm, that for the aspirated letters, the sound comes from the throat: “ক koh… খ KHO!” Ma would pronounce it with a zipping sound from the back of her throat. It was not until my senior year that I learned that I could just pronounce it with a simple puff of air. I didn’t need to be so aggressive.
Everytime I go back to Bangladesh, my Bengali improves. Through chatting with my cousins, aunties, uncles, and elders, my vocabulary expands. Sometimes, I catch new words in songs too. It’s always a bit embarrassing when a little kid corrects your pronunciation, but you learn to deal with it. You learn to deal with the teasing, and instead look to the people who encourage you. You learn to deal with the teasing when they speak only in Bengali to tease you; it’s a sign you’re going in the right direction. For me, Bengali is a thread between myself and my family, my culture, and my history. “অ, আ… AW, AH, SHORAYO, SHORAYA…” – the simple chant tells a tale of embracing one’s culture in a place where your culture is not the norm, and reinventing a new space to thrive.