In this strange and isolating year, reacquainting myself with Sylheti gave me a new understanding of my family
I never understood the Bengali girls at my London school who were proudly monolingual. “I only speak English,” they would declare loudly as if it were a badge of honour. Perhaps they felt that it lent them a sense of individuality in a student body that was 90% Bengali. Perhaps it proved that they were modern, progressive, assimilated – no longer tethered to the quaint customs of their immigrant families.
I took the opposite view and held my ability to speak Bengali close like an amulet, a secret cipher that unlocked another world. A language after all is more than just vocabulary, it conveys a multitude of subtleties: the pitch of a person’s humour, the sting of an insult, even the texture of grief. When my mother told me “amar shoril ekere kulya zargi”, I knew that the nearest translation – “my body is loosening at the seams” – failed to capture the poignancy of a woman in her twilight years lamenting the loss of her health.
