Exiled at Home: Homeless in My Mother Tongue
The words left my mouth in Bengali, the language of my birth, my mother’s lullabies, my father’s anger—but landed in the room like foreign objects. My wife stared at me with the particular expression reserved for moments when familiarity reveals its sharp edges. We had been married fifteen years. We had shared a bed, dreams, the careful choreography of daily life. Yet in that moment, speaking the language I had known longest, I felt more alien than any stranger in any foreign country.
The cruelest exile is the one that happens in your mother tongue.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, switching to the same Bengali words I’d been using since childhood. But they emerged twisted, carrying freight I hadn’t loaded, triggering responses I hadn’t intended. The gap between intention and interpretation yawned wider with each attempt at clarification, until I stood on one side of a chasm carved by my own vocabulary, watching understanding retreat like low tide.
We assume fluency guarantees accuracy, that speaking a language since birth inoculates us against its betrayals. But every language is a living system of meanings we didn’t choose, inherited assumptions we never questioned, cultural DNA we carry without reading the code. When I speak Bengali, I’m not just arranging words—I’m activating generations of context, triggering responses programmed before I learned to think.
My son asks me to explain a Bengali phrase, and I realize I don’t know why it means what it means. The words exist in my mouth like ancient artifacts whose original purpose has been lost. I can use them effectively, but I cannot decode them completely. Even in my native language, I am partially illiterate, fluent in forms whose functions remain mysterious.
We are all foreign speakers in the language of our birth.
The loneliness hits hardest in moments of emotional urgency, when precise communication becomes survival. Trying to explain my anxiety to my wife, I reach for words that should fit perfectly—words I’ve carried my entire life—only to discover they’ve changed shape in my mouth. The Bengali word for “disappointed” carries undertones of judgment she hears as criticism. The phrase for “I need space” translates in her understanding to rejection.
We are both native speakers engaged in mutual mistranslation, fluent in the same language but illiterate in each other’s emotional dictionary.
I think about the millions of conversations happening right now between people who share mother tongues but inhabit separate meanings. Parents and children speaking the same words across generational gulfs. Spouses discovering that fifteen years of shared vocabulary has created not clarity but an elaborate system of beautiful misunderstandings.
The tragedy is not that we don’t speak the same language—it’s that we think we do.
In coffee shops, I eavesdrop on conversations in Bengali, my ears tuned to the frequency of home. But what I hear increasingly feels like a language I’m losing access to. The young couple at the next table uses phrases I recognize but don’t quite understand, Bengali words infected with English meanings, creating hybrid expressions that belong fully to neither language.
I am watching my mother tongue evolve without me, like a river changing course while I stand on the old bank, speaking to waters that are no longer there. The language of my childhood is becoming the language of my past, and I am becoming a tourist in my own linguistic homeland.
My mother, before she died, sometimes spoke to me in a Bengali so pure it felt archaic, vocabulary preserved from a Bangladesh that exists now only in her generation’s memory. When she died, whole dictionaries of meaning died with her—words I understand but cannot use, expressions I recognize but cannot replicate.
Each generation becomes partially foreign to the one before it, even when speaking the same language.
The deepest loneliness comes not from being unable to express yourself, but from expressing yourself perfectly and discovering that perfection is not enough. When every word carries your exact intention but lands in the world carrying someone else’s interpretation, you realize that communication is not about linguistic accuracy—it’s about the impossible task of making one consciousness visible to another.
Sometimes I catch myself editing my thoughts before speaking, not translating between languages but translating between versions of the same language, trying to predict how my Bengali will sound in someone else’s Bengali-understanding ears. I have become a simultaneous interpreter of my own meanings, never quite trusting that my words will survive the journey from my mouth to your understanding intact.
We are all refugees in our native languages, carrying passports to countries that exist differently in every speaker’s mind. The language you learned at your mother’s knee is not the same language your neighbor learned at his father’s table, even if the words are identical.
What does it mean to be homeless in your mother tongue? And how do we build bridges across the spaces between shared words and separate meanings?
