Bhalobhashi: A Late Love Letter to the Mother Tongue

by Ridita Manzur

Bangla was the first language I spoke. In fact, it was the only language I spoke until I was five years old. From Rangpur, to Dhaka, to Vancouver, I had heard only Bangla. I didn’t learn how to say “mom” or “dad”, it was always Ammu and Abu. The first times I was held, breastfed, loved, and fussed over it was in my mother's arms and in my mother tongue. 

I started kindergarten in Alberta with a thick accent and not knowing a lick of English. To make things worse, I was the only non-white child sitting there on that paint-stained rug, trying my best to understand the words my teacher was reading out from the children’s book. The world circled around me like a whirlpool of sound and light and colour and I couldn’t understand any of it. I could only sit quietly, like a rough brown rock washed up on a white sand beach. 

At five years I told Ammu that I would never speak Bangla again. Try as she might to speak to me in the only language she knew, I would never respond unless it was in English. I spent all hours of the day practicing the English alphabet and watching cartoons that didn’t speak in my parents foreign accents. By six years old, nobody would have guessed that I was born anywhere but Alberta. 

My parents gave up on speaking to me in Bangla because I would refuse to respond. Besides, Ammu was trying her best to learn English anyways so she said it helped. However hard it was for a five year old to learn English, it was harder for a thirty year old stay at home mom. My parents would have never admitted it, but I don’t think I was quite as alone as I thought I was with my feelings of displacement. 

Ammu and Abu gave up on speaking to me in anything but English, but they spoke to each other in Bangla everyday. It became their secret language in our house. To me, it became a language spoken in screams and tears, heard secretly from the top of the stairs. I lived the exact same story as millions of other children of immigrant parents. Understanding from a young age that my parents were married more out of obligation than love. They found themselves at 25 and 30 agreeing to the arrangement to check off the box of what was expected at their age. And now two strangers with what was little more than a glorified business deal tying them together were raising a kid thousands of kilometers away from everything they used to know. They were overworked, exhausted, incompatible. Abu in particular had his expectations that a wife ought to shut up and know her place as a woman. From him, I knew all the Bangla words for worthless and stupid and whore before I knew the word for love. 

I learned later, when I was in my teens and actively trying to learn the language again, that to say “I love you” in Bangla you say “Ami tomarke bhalobhashi”. It roughly translates to “Of you, I think good.” When I first heard it, I thought it was so ugly and clunky. The opposite of romantic or poetic. It’s too many b’s and ee’s and its a whopping nine syllables. Am-ee tom-are-kee bhal-o-bas-ee. It’s a phrase that forces you to sound everything out with precision.You have to brace yourself for the commitment of saying all nine syllables and all three kees. 

So I never heard the phrase much growing up and I never said it either. I figured I would never need to anyways, I had sworn to never date a Bengali man. I made that decision when I was twelve and my Abu sat me down and told me it was a wife’s duty to let husband beat her and be quiet about it so she wouldn’t bring shame to her family. 

With my flings and lovers I always avoided Bengali men like the plague. And the two times I’d fallen in love, I never said the words “Ami tomarke bhalobhasi.” I love yous were quick and easy three syllable affairs. I never had to talk about the shame and the embarrassment I felt about my background and my language. Bengali became rust on my metal tongue. I still understood it perfectly and I could speak it if I was forced to. But anytime I had to make conversation with another Bengali I would politely choke out a quick “Maf koro, amar Bangla onek kharap.” Forgive me, my Bangla is very bad. 

I’ve spoken to countless young adults that have experienced this exact shame and trauma surrounding their language and culture. Language is more than grammar and syntax. It is identity. It is the thoughts in your head, the love you express to your world, the love passed down to you from your mother and her mother and all the mothers that came before you. To cut off your mother tongue is to cut off a part of yourself. 

It’s okay to have complicated feelings towards imperfect family members and to still love the language they spoke. It’s also okay to stumble over your grammar and to mispronounce words when you’re relearning how to speak. Language can be used to be cruel and language can be awkward and embarrassing to relearn. But there is nothing more beautiful than having a stray thought about groceries and realizing that you’ve begun thinking in your native language again. Feeling the words you grew up hearing around you start to become clear to your ears and on your tongue. 

Nowadays I try to talk to my mother in Bangla everytime I call her. I’ve tried watching the occasional Bangla soap opera (even if the narratives are a bit contrived and the editing begs for subtlety). 

I’m still not fluent in Bangla. I’m reasonably comfortable speaking it conversationally to my mother, but I still stumble over my words and mess up on sentence structure. And no matter how often I’m complimented on my Bangla, I still feel a little embarrassed to speak the language to strangers. The shame of repressing the language bubbles up again and its like I go mute. But despite all this, I love Bangla. I love being able to think in it. I love switching into Bangla when I’m too angry or upset to speak English and I can feel the words spill out of my mouth like they did when I was a child. So despite all of the syllables, I can very confidently say:

Ami shobshomai Bangla bhalobashabo.