Passage III

At Home in a Language

When I was a child growing up in Delhi, India My parents and I will have spent our summers in Calcutta, India, visiting my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We took the train over eight hundred miles from Delhi to Calcutta, which I considered a treat as itself. I loved the dining car, the cozy sleeping berth in our cabin, and the gentle rocking motion of the train that would lull me to sleep at night. As an adult, I prefer to travel by car.(35) When we arrived at the Calcutta station the next morning, we were welcomed announcing train arrivals and departures over the intercom by the sound of the Bengali language.

Back in Delhi, the language most people commonly spoke was Hindi. Though I spoke Hindi fluently, it wasn't my first language. My parents were born in Calcutta, where most people spoke Bengali. They had lived there for years before they got married and moved to Delhi, where Hindi was widely spoken. Because my parents had grown up speaking Bengali, we spoke Bengali, not Hindi, in our house. It was not surprising, then, that hearing Bengali on the streets of Calcutta made me feel right at home.

Being in Calcutta was a comfort to me because I could speak almost exclusively in my first language. Store clerks, cab drivers, bus drivers, schoolchildren, families picnicking in the parks: it seemed like everybody in Calcutta spoke Bengali. It only took me a day or two to adjust to not having to manage two languages. Communicating with such ease was a relief; in Delhi I felt split in half, but in Calcutta I really felt like two people.

I also found life in my grandparents' house easy to get used to. Their house was always overflowing with members of my father's family. Being an only child, I savored this time spent with relatives. My aunts and uncles loved to tease me and tell me jokes and stories. I would skip through the rooms of my grandparents' sprawling house with my cousins, thrilled to have all that extra space in which to play games and have fun.