A journey from one language to many - with no destination! (Part 1)

A confused boy, early morning wake up calls, he has to go to school. The boy asks his mother, have you put all my books and copies correctly inside the bag? Mom says, yes. The boy goes to school and finds out the books for one of his primary language periods are not there! He comes from a pre-school where this language was not taught. Also he is yet to communicate properly in English - he fails to tell his teacher what happened here. Neither in the mother tongue Bengali, (the reason for which I will state now) and nor in English, which I was just getting to learn. 

The above is an incident from my life, it was way back in 1987. 

(Back in the age of the dinosaurs - even though I had heard that computers could play chess with humans already back then.)

The thing is - language was created as a tool of communication, but it has ended up being a blocker for communication.

My struggle with languages started early, from the pre-school. It was a setup where the primary language of communication was Bengali. Even though I could teach myself to read and write in Bengali, I found it hard to express my thoughts, even in Bengali. Even at the age of say 4 or 5. I say "even" because Bengali was the language spoken at home. The difficulty came from the fact that everyone in the house spoke the language so correctly and so eloquently that it was hard for me to follow. Mother was almost like literature walking from one room to the other! With long sentences and unknown words. I was just looking for plain sentences like - come here, go there, take this, do that. But no, she would not state that way; she would ask the same, but with the background context and with the consequences of not doing it properly. It was hard!

Then came my father, he would often talk in a loud voice, and articulate his thoughts in chaste Bengali. Sometimes he would talk about politics, society, cinema, sports - with words I had never heard of. He was especially particular with adjectives and adverbs while stating his views. Bengali is a language which hosts many a colourful words - the adjectives are really sweet. The adjectives are so sweet that even if they are used to depict something bad and wrong, they somehow end up sounding sweet!

Anyway, pressed between these two literary personalities, I had two choices - either to get drowned or to keep swimming. I decided for the second one. One good thing happened - I had received some Bengali books at home. Children books and with pictures. The words were hard in the beginning, but they kept registering on my head. The good part was - I could save one word inside my head and afterwards could recollect and bring back its meaning when I would find it again.

The journey was still tough. Mom and dad would keep saying complex sentences with "which", and "that" and compound sentences with "and" and "or". Their sentences would be long and philosophical. So, I needed to listen a lot too. And finally came the diction. When mom was angry she would have a louder tone, when dad was happy he would speak faster. The saviours were my grandparents to be honest. Bengalees at core, graceful and concrete - they were speaking softly. Mainly due to their age and also due to
the fact that they were seniors of the family.

[To be continued]