Today is International Mother Language Day.

I was apparently three or four years old when someone asked me – what are you? They thought I would gape at this googly. 

According to family folklore, I quipped – Tengali. I am Tengali.

A portmanteau of Telugu and Bengali. 

By this time I had started speaking the Mother tongues of my parents in my own unique fashion. Conjugating Telugu words in Bengali and vice-versa. 

I can only imagine the consistent effort and truck loads of patience it must have taken my parents to teach me both Telugu and Bengali while we lived away from extended family in a city that had its own local language – Tamil. 

My guess is they both spoke to me in their own mother tongues, teaching rhymes in both languages and hoped that this child of theirs would absorb everything like a sponge and one day the efforts will pay off. 

Trips to Hyderabad for summer vacation meant reading Eenadu newspaper with Tatayya. And how did I pick up the Bengali script, you ask? Well, someone had to learn to read the titles of the upcoming movies on DD7. The first word I may have learnt the pattern of must have been – Mahanayak (Uttam Kumar).

Many years later, when I was in class 7 or 8, Amma felt knowing how to read Tamil was going to be crucial when I start taking public transport.
And so she requested the next door paati to teach me the Tamil alphabet. I was reading Tirukural, Tamil calendars and odd information on scraps from magazine cut outs.

And just like that, one year later, I was reading names of destinations on buses. Virugambakkam, Vadapazhani, Nungambakkam. 

Married to a Tamilian, I speak in Telugu with my mother, Bengali with my father and Tamil with the Husband when we need a code language. 

Su (in Bengali) Smi (in Telugu) and Ta in Tamil.