My Mother Tongue Has No Proof Of Address

My great-grandfather owned a house in Dhaka.

I inherited its address.

Blood, apparently, has a better postal service than furniture.

In 1947, my grandfather and his brothers

left for Calcutta.

They ran for their lives.

The house was left behind.

A family can survive a country

and still lose its place in it.

The address survived the border.

The house did not arrive with it.

My parents were born in Calcutta.

So was I.

Three generations in one city,

and still, I was asked where I came from.

At school, refugee was a word

children stapled to my surname.

I had never crossed the border.

Never lived in the country

that had apparently followed me here.

My grandfather fled for his life.

I grew up being asked to account for his escape.

Bengali was supposed to be my mother tongue.

My father spoke it.

My mother spoke it too.

It passed between them.

I was close enough to hear it,

not close enough to catch it.

I should have known it better.

There.

The sentence I keep dressing up

as historical consequence.

English was where I learnt

to name things.

By the time I learnt to speak

of what my family had lost,

I was already speaking English.

I learnt where Dhaka was.

I learnt which side of the border

my grandfather had escaped from.

I can account for the journey

in a language that never made it.

Bengali came down through the family.

English was where I learnt what had come down.

Hindi entered through the business of living.

Maithili came by association,

in fragments borrowed from other people's mouths.

Kannada gathered at the edges,

a few words at a time.

I am a multilingual porridge.

No original recipe.

No identifiable cuisine.

I have written entire histories

of why I cannot speak Bengali.

In English.

With considerable fluency.

Fifteen years away from Calcutta.

I begin a sentence in Bengali.

The first word gets out.

The next will not form.

By the time I can reach for it,

English is already finishing the sentence.

I don't know whether this is grief

or an elaborate form of vanity:

the belief that a language

should have waited for me,

that inheritance should have survived

my failure to meet it halfway.

My grandfather left Dhaka.

What crossed the border

did not cross intact.

His grandson found himself

in a language he had not brought with him.

I can give you its history.

I can give you its address.

I am not fluent enough to inherit it.

Not foreign enough to mourn it cleanly.