I was sitting in an English class at university when I noticed something strange. The professor was lecturing in English. My notes were in English. The textbook was in English. But inside my head, a quiet voice was translating everything into Bengali. My mind was working in one language while my mouth spoke another.
I had never noticed this before. Once I did, I could not stop noticing.
All day I function in English. I write emails, read reports, give presentations. I am fluent. People compliment my accent. I have won awards for essays written in this borrowed tongue. But when I think—truly think, the deep thinking that happens when no one is watching—my thoughts return to Bengali like water finding its level.
This is not a choice. I do not decide to think in Bengali. It simply happens. The way my heart beats without instruction, my mind thinks in the language it first learned.
When I am afraid, “Allah” escapes my lips before I can consider which god to address. When something delights me, “Bah!” comes out—that untranslatable expression of wonder and approval. When sorrow arrives, the sorrow is Bengali. The tears that fall are tears that learned to fall while listening to my mother’s voice.
I have tried to explain this to friends who speak only English. They nod politely but do not understand. How can they? They have never experienced the distance between living in one language and feeling in another.
I try to tell them about “brishti.” They say it means rain. But it does not mean rain. Rain is water falling from clouds. Brishti is the smell of wet earth, the sound on tin roofs, the feeling of sitting by a window watching the world dissolve into gray. Brishti contains monsoon memories and childhood afternoons and a particular kind of melancholy that has no English name. When I say rain, I am only describing weather. When I say brishti, I am describing a feeling.
The same with “Ma.” They say it means mother. But mother is a biological category. Ma is the specific warmth of being held by the person who first loved you. Ma is the smell of her sari, the sound of her voice calling you for dinner, the safety that existed before you knew the world was unsafe. I can say mother and mean nothing. I cannot say Ma without meaning everything.
Every language contains worlds that other languages cannot enter. This is why translation is always betrayal. We move words across borders but leave their souls behind.
I learned English from necessity. School required it. Jobs demanded it. Success depended on it. I learned it the way I learned mathematics—as a tool, useful but cold. It lives in the front of my brain, where skills are stored.
Bengali lives deeper. I did not learn it. I absorbed it. It came to me with my mother’s milk, with lullabies sung in the dark, with the first words I ever understood. Before I knew what language was, I knew this language. It is not a skill I acquired. It is the fabric of my consciousness.
When I fall in love, I fall in Bengali. The feelings arrive in that language. The longing, the hope, the fear of loss—all of it Bengali. I can describe love in English, but I cannot feel it in English. The heart does not accept translations.
When I am angry, I curse in Bengali. Silently, inside. The English curses I know feel like performance. The Bengali ones feel like release. They carry the weight of genuine fury. They connect to something older and more honest.
When I dream, I dream in Bengali. The people in my dreams speak this language. The streets look like Dhaka, even when they are supposed to be London or New York. My subconscious has not learned the other languages I speak. It remains stubbornly, beautifully, monolingual.
My prayers are Bengali. I know the Arabic words for formal prayer, and I know religious English phrases. But when I speak to God in the middle of the night, when no one is listening and nothing is formal, I speak in the language my mother taught me. I suspect God understands all languages equally. But I can only mean what I say in one.
I think this is what “mother tongue” truly means. Not the first language you learned, but the language of your mother. The language that carries her voice, her love, her particular way of naming the world. Other languages I speak with my mouth. This one I speak with my blood.
There is a sadness in this discovery. I have spent years perfecting foreign languages. I have worked hard to sound native in tongues that are not mine. I have wanted to belong in places where my language is not spoken. And I have succeeded, mostly. People cannot always tell I am foreign.
But I can tell. Inside, where it matters, I remain the boy who first learned to speak in a small apartment in Dhaka, listening to his mother’s voice. That boy does not know English. That boy speaks only one language. And he is still there, underneath all the acquired fluency, thinking his Bengali thoughts.
Perhaps this is not sadness. Perhaps it is gift. To carry a language inside you that no one can take away. To have a home in your own mind, regardless of where your body travels. To know that somewhere beneath the performance of functioning in foreign tongues, there is a voice that remains authentically yours.
I have met people who have lost their mother tongues. Children taken to new countries, immigrants who forgot in order to belong. They describe a particular kind of homelessness—not geographical, but linguistic. They dream in languages they no longer speak fluently. They feel emotions they cannot name in any tongue they remember.
I do not want that homelessness. So I protect my Bengali. I read it even when English would be easier. I speak it with family even when we could communicate in other languages. I write in it sometimes, badly, just to keep the connection alive.
Because this is not just a language. This is who I am before I became who I had to become. This is the original voice, the one that existed before education and ambition and the world’s demands reshaped me into someone more acceptable.
When I die, I suspect my last thoughts will be Bengali. The words my mother first spoke to me will be the words I carry into whatever comes next. All the English and the other languages will fall away like clothes I no longer need. And I will be left with only the essential thing: the language my soul speaks.
The language that was never learned.
The language that simply is.