When Your Heart Speaks Bengali and Life Speaks English

I’ve been speaking English for twenty years, but I dream in Bengali.

This fracture lives in my chest—the gap between the language of my thoughts and the language of my world, between the words that feel true and the words that get things done. When I travel, this split deepens into something that feels like homesickness for my own voice.

In Bangkok, trying to explain to a doctor that my stomach hurt, I realized I didn’t know the intimate vocabulary of pain in any language but my own. The words existed—”nausea,” “cramps,” “discomfort”—but they felt clinical, distant from the particular ache I needed to describe.

How do you translate the difference between “koshto” and “dukkho” to someone who only has one word for sadness?

Happy and I speak Bengali at home, but Arash is already starting to think in English. I hear it in his dreams, the way he mutters problems and solutions in a language that didn’t exist in my childhood. He’s growing up bilingual, but I wonder what he’s losing in translation—what thoughts can only be thought in the language of his grandparents.

The cruelest loneliness is being articulate in a language that can’t express what you most need to say.

I met a Syrian refugee in a coffee shop who spoke perfect English but couldn’t find work as a professor because his credentials weren’t recognized. “I have a PhD in literature,” he told me, “but here I am fluent only in ordering coffee and asking for directions. My intelligence exists in Arabic. In English, I’m just another immigrant with an accent.”

This is the invisible violence of displacement—not just losing your place, but losing your voice, your wit, your capacity to be understood as fully as you understand yourself.

I think about the writers who switched languages—Nabokov from Russian to English, Beckett from English to French. They chose exile from their mother tongues to reach different audiences, but what did they leave behind in that translation? What thoughts can only exist in the language where they first learned to think?

Sometimes, traveling in places where English is broken or absent, I feel relief. The playing field levels when everyone is struggling to communicate basic needs. Pointing and gesturing and smiling become the universal language, and suddenly my verbal limitations don’t mark me as less intelligent—just less local.

But then I overhear a conversation in fluent Bengali and feel such intense homesickness for linguistic belonging that I want to interrupt strangers just to hear them acknowledge that I, too, can speak with full complexity in the language of our shared childhood.

The loneliness of not speaking the language of your heart extends beyond words to culture, context, humor. The jokes that don’t translate, the references that fall flat, the particular rhythms of conversation that feel natural in one language but stilted in another.

What if fluency isn’t just about vocabulary but about the right to be completely yourself in words?