On the first day of Hindi class, I learned the word for “vomiting.” Not one of the words I would have introduced had this been my language class to teach, but in returning to the classroom as the student, I kept my criticisms to a minimum. The textbook was to blame. The authors organized the chapters to provide a handful of the characters in the Hindi alphabet, known as Devanagari, and then provided a small vocabulary list of words including those recently-taught letters. “A” is for “apple” and so on.
We started the Devanagari consonants with character for “kuh”—a line with two loops on each side like the wings of a butterfly. “Vomiting” contained this character along with the matra—two curved lines sprouting from its top like cockatoo flares. These signaled the “ay” vowel sound. A dot beauty mark rested below the stem of the “kuh,” to signify the sound had to come farther back in the throat, guttural. My teacher hesitated and then gave a side note that this was actually an Urdu word, not Hindi. “But we borrow from Urdu frequently.”
Was I even learning Hindi? That was what I’d signed up for several days earlier, having just rung in 2019 with the goal that this would be the year I’d learn the language. The closest school was the Beverly Hills Lingual Institute. On the second floor of a large office building were multiple classrooms with large windows looking out to San Vicente Boulevard weekend traffic. The website boasted a slew of language courses in Spanish, French, Persian, Polish, and my favorite, Serb-Croatian.
Nervous about my first day, I peered into my designated classroom and saw two non-Indian students. I panicked. I had been agonizing over the thought I might get a non-Indian teacher. This was meant to be my culture, my language, so the prospect of having an outsider serve as my point of authority would only worsen my insecurity. It quickly dissipated when a bald Indian man entered dressed in a light blue kurta and shockingly white pants. The moment he announced his role as our teacher, I exhaled. Fifteen minutes into the start of the class, an Indian girl quietly entered and took the nearest desk.
After his introduction our teacher went around the room with the question: Why were we learning Hindi?
The Indian girl and I had similar reasons. We had a connection to the culture through our families, but we didn’t have the educational training in the language. My classmate’s family was from the south and spoke Tamil, a far cry from Hindi. She was engaged to a man from North India, a Hindi-speaker. She wanted to be a good daughter-in-law. And I wanted to be a good daughter.
My father, an Indian immigrant, never taught me the language. For the sake of convenience between him and my white mother, English was the only language in our home.
This was his justification, but I didn’t believe it. His reason was too simple. Though never rooted in research, I’d heard of the warnings passed to immigrants to refrain from speaking their native language in the house for fear it would confuse their children. The idea has been debunked scientifically, but in the 1980s, the concept lingered, an old wives’ tale people held onto. For immigrants, assimilation meant survival, for themselves and their children. In Lucy Tse’s book, Why Don’t They Learn English? Separating Fact from Fallacy in the U.S. Language Debate, she states, “In the United States, the English language has powerful appeal, both economically and socially, and immigrants often internalize societal pressure to give up the home language in order to gain English ability.”
As I got older, I’d pester my father and like a broken record I’d repeatedly ask why he didn’t teach me Hindi. He answered, “What good would it have done to teach it to you? You won’t need it for a job.”
Though an outdated heteronormative term, we know “mother tongue” to be the first language we learn, generally the one passed down through our mother, the caregiver. I searched online and found that the term “father tongue” did exist, though a less common form of language acquisition because of the father’s prescribed role as the provider.
In many Indian households, the responsibility of the family’s economic security falls solely on the father’s shoulders. For mine, his success in the prosperity of our nuclear unit was the extent of his role as a parent. I rolled my eyes as he reiterated how he arrived in the U.S. with only eight dollars in his pocket, or how he didn’t want us to go to bed with an empty stomach like he had growing up. My father’s occupation as a general surgeon granted us a foothold in the middle-class, but also robbed us of his time. His work hours were long and erratic. Home was his refuge to quietly recharge—not to administer any language to his children.
“Can you speak the language?” people always asked me after they learned my ethnic identity. I shook my head and avoided their gaze. Lacking that potential fluency felt like a badge of shame. The simple “no” to that question not only revealed my educational gap, but in my mind, it also hinted my father’s apathy in my upbringing.
In lacking a “father tongue,” what did my father pass on to me?
* * *
Out of all the languages my father could speak, his English was the weakest. He never got around to learning more expressions, and he refused to increase his vocabulary. This led to many arguments, miscommunications, and the inevitable pockets of silence.
I’d read that people who speak more than one language have different personalities depending on the language used. I wanted to understand his Hindi personality. In English, my father wasn’t a talkative man. When he did, he stumbled into blanket statements he never apologized for. He took my idiomatic expressions literally and got angry with me for saying, “I’m killing it” because he identified the word “kill” as negative within any context.
For most of my life, I cautiously ambled around him, more cognizant of the words I chose in order to give him peace. When it came to being frank about how I was feeling, I went to my mother. I could vent to her freely and never worry about being misunderstood.
In embarking on this project at the age of 34, I was fighting a losing battle. My brain’s default in understanding the world was through the tenets of American English—that particular grammar structure, word order, and turn of phrase. Unless I quit my job, poured more hours into my Hindi homework than I did my writing, and perhaps make a multiple-year move to India, I was not going to achieve an ease with the language.
But it still mattered to me.
* * *
Hindi is phonetic. The alphabet contains ten vowels and thirty-three consonants—depending on who you ask. This is because some characters are straight from Sanskrit and will only appear in about three words in the entire lexicon.
In my binder of a photocopied children’s Hindi workbook, I practiced writing each letter over and over on the lined paper, first following the dotted lines and then mimicking the movements of my pencil on my own.
I didn’t tell my father I was taking a Hindi class, especially not at the beginning when all I could do was identify certain letters. Whenever a free moment arose, I grabbed a scrap of paper and practiced writing out the alphabet from memory. I re-created the oblong column my teacher showed us the first day, a malformed periodic table. Slowly, the letters didn’t feel as foreign anymore. With the introduction of matras, the small markings for the vowels, I could piece together small words. While pouring over my books at home, I sounded out a word and said it loudly, recalling that I had heard the word before and welcoming it like an old friend. I learned to become literate.
Still, every time I picked up the phone to call my parents, I couldn’t muster up the confidence to share my new project. With my father, I’d grown so used to our distance. He would ask how I was doing. I responded with the standard “fine.” He would ask if I needed anything. I would say we were all good. End of conversation.
By informing him of this language venture, things would change. We would have a shared subject to discuss further. There was also the possibility he would tell me the language is too hard and he would refuse to help me with it. At that point, I had lived a lifetime of trying different strategies with my father in order to improve our relationship, only to return to the same endpoint: he wasn’t going to change and I couldn’t keep hoping he would. At the end of the phone call, I would sigh in relief that my omission meant our routine remained firm.
* * *
My day job was as an English language teacher to adults at a local college. In class, I told jokes:
Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American.
Laughter filled the classroom. Jokes are difficult to translate across languages, but corny punchlines worked wonders. One day while packing up, the phrase “dad jokes” echoed in my thoughts. The anatomy of a “dad joke” is normally some silly pun. It’s been attributed to fathers because they’re mostly used by middle-aged men to their children. I knew this concept even though it wasn’t reflected in my family dynamic. In English, my father wasn’t the joking type. Based on my observations, he wasn’t in Hindi either. But like my students, he was extremely intelligent, laden with professional degrees and a prestigious career in medicine he had now retired from. He wouldn’t admit it, but language contributed.
Studies have shown that learning a new language at any age helps with brain function. New pathways form in the brain. While I slowly developed literacy in Hindi, I gained a new lens for how I approached the world. There were three forms of the word “you” and I had to decide the appropriate one to use based on respect and the person’s relationship to me. When switching languages, my sentence structure rewired from English’s subject + verb + object to Hindi’s subject + object + verb. I had to keep in mind not only the conjugation of a verb, but also its inflection according to a subject’s gender. A table is feminine. A house is masculine. There’s no explicit rule for gender—you just have to memorize. Instead of prepositions that appear before the noun referred to, there were postpositions, and their inclusion changed nouns, pronouns, and adjectives into another form known as the oblique.
It was no wonder then, that the two non-Indian classmates inevitably disappeared. “And then there were two,” I thought to myself as our teacher announced he would accelerate the class for my Tamil classmate and me.
In reality, this wasn’t my first stab at learning Hindi. I’d tried at different junctures in my life. The most recent was about two years earlier when I memorized the alphabet for Punjabi, a language similar to Hindi and Urdu, but not as widely spoken. This was my father’s first language technically. But without class offerings, I was rudderless. My textbook collected dust on the shelf.
Having a scheduled class with a teacher and fellow classmate assured I wouldn’t slack off. Paying for the course helped as well. At home, I found creative ways to keep motivated. Duolingo had recently released a free course in Hindi, and while it’s not the ideal method to learn a language, it provided an additional avenue for practice. While watching a Bollywood movie, I began to notice I could comprehend a great deal of their words. Inside, I started to feel more secure in my identity as Indian. Hindi isn’t the national language of India, but the fact that I could listen and speak a basic conversation gave me a stronger connection to the country where I’d always been an outsider. My father always referred to India as “back home” and with my ever-growing language acquisition, I felt I could too.
* * *
I told my mother first.
She later passed along to my father that I had been taking Hindi classes for the past few months. Then he and I spoke on the phone.
I stumbled, paused frequently, and racked my brain for the next word to form on my lips. He couldn’t understand me. I repeated. And again. Then, he repeated what I said, stopping after every word to translate it into English. I brought the phone away from my face and sighed. But what did I expect? My father had never been a teacher. Nor could I make him mine now.
“Dad said you have an American accent when you speak Hindi,” my mother told me later. “Then he asked if he had an Indian accent in English. Should I tell him?” she laughed.
Like the language, I had to grow more comfortable with more communication with my father. Over the next few weeks that happened. My Hindi homework became a bridge between the two of us. Here was a subject I needed assistance with where he was the expert. But even then, new problems arose.
“What’s the word for ‘information’?” I asked. There was a pause on the line.
“You know, I don’t remember,” he admitted. “Let me think about it.”
He had been so immersed in English for the past 40 years that he was losing his native language.
If Hindi had taught me anything, it was accepting that I would fail. I knew from the start that this wouldn’t change our relationship. I knew it wouldn’t make my father more open about himself, especially the stories of his childhood he’d hidden from me. But perhaps the acceptance of life as it is is why my Hindi flourished.
My father and I were in the same boat: him, attempting to retrieve a language in ruins, and me, trying to build at an age when language development becomes more challenging. So, I told him in Hindi that the language was difficult—mushkil.
“Actually, that’s Urdu,” he said.
Close enough.
Contributor Notes
Anita Gill is a writer and recent Fulbright Fellow to Spain. Winner of the 2018 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction, Anita has humor and essays in Prairie Schooner, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Essay Editor for Hypertext Magazine. Her website is anitagill.ink.
