I must have been 10 years old when my teacher called me to the front of the class, my notebook open before her.
“The spellings of your English words are all wrong,” she said, holding up the pages covered in red markings for the entire class to see. I wanted to sink into the ground and disappear.
I imagined everyone’s eyes on me. My face burned hot, flushed with shame, as I heard her stern instruction: “You need to talk in English all the time – in school and at home.”
Why We Wrote This
For our essayist, learning English as a child meant adopting a new worldview and shedding an old one. Today, she’s rediscovering her culture.
I didn’t have many of the luxuries my other classmates enjoyed, including a crucial one: No one at my home spoke English.
My parents grew up in India when it was still under British rule. My grandparents didn’t feel safe sending their daughters to school in a town occupied by British soldiers, so my mother received only a few years of primary education from tutors who came to her home.
My father, on the other hand, was the first in his family to attend college. Both were married at 17 years of age and struggled to build a life in a country impoverished by British colonialism.
English was the pathway to success – the currency that could unlock better jobs and lead to upward mobility.
My father enrolled all six of his children in convent schools. These schools were established by European missionaries to provide high-quality, albeit expensive,
British-style education.
When the expense became too much, my siblings were transferred to more affordable Hindi government schools. For some reason, I was allowed to continue at the convent school.
It was a gift. A responsibility. A burden.
The school’s library, its walls lined with books by British and American authors, became my sanctuary. I spent hours immersed in “Little Women” and the works of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and Shakespeare.
I started to read, learn, think, and write in English.
It wasn’t just a language I was learning – it was a worldview. Adopting it meant letting go of many of the traditions my family had taught me. No one explicitly said that many festivals and customs of my culture were regressive, but I internalized the idea nonetheless.
I preferred English scones to my mother’s homemade laddus, a popular Indian sweet. White bread, sold under the brand name Britannia, seemed more appealing than fresh, homemade rotis. I cut my hair short and wore jeans and skirts.
But at home, I was still the traditional girl. I spoke only in Hindi and gave no hint of the books I was reading. I continued to wear certain cultural accessories, like glass bangles, at home to please my mother.
I was 12 years old when my mother slipped glass bangles onto my arm at a religious festival. The next day at school, I panicked when I realized I was still wearing them. In my rush to remove the bangles, one broke and pierced deep into my skin.
“See how God punished you,” the nun chastised me.
I carry the inch-long scar from that wound to this day, etched in my memories and on my skin. More than the pain, I recall the sting of humiliation.
As a child, I quickly learned how to navigate the two worlds I had come to occupy. In one, native-language Indians were seen as inferior. In the other, English-speaking Indians were becoming part of an aspiring class, a fashionable new country.
When my sister learned to play the sitar at her school, I played the bagpipe. I fought to pursue a profession, a path that girls in my family were not allowed to take. As we grew older, the gaps widened, like a seam coming apart, impossible to mend.
Eventually, I immigrated to the United States, a land no one in my family had ever visited.
When I came to America, I thought I had mastered English. So, it came as a shock when I was confronted with questions: “Where did you learn English?” “How is your English so good?” “I don’t understand your English.” “Your accent is too heavy.”
I have been defensive, at times aggressive, and too often confused. I sometimes respond with a witty quote from V.K. Krishna Menon, the architect of India’s foreign policy. When an English woman once remarked on his English proficiency, Mr. Menon quipped, “Of course my English is better than yours. You merely picked it up; I learned it.”
But the truth is, I feel alienated. My life and identity were shaped by postcolonial forces that brought English into my life – forces that demanded sacrifices to truly learn it.
The result? No matter where I am, I feel like an outsider. So, I reach back and learn from my mother, who I now realize was my best teacher.
Despite her lack of education, she learned to sign her name in English. Slowly and laboriously, she would shape the letters of her name, a Sanskrit word for one who does not lose composure: S-h-e-e-l-a.
That was her attempt to fit into a new world, an effort to embrace, even if she did not fully understand, the choices her children were navigating.
Now, I have my own children, and it heartens me to see that, for them, there is no struggle to embrace English and Hindi.
As for me, I’ve started writing in Hindi by penning a column in one of India’s largest-circulating dailies, the Navbharat Times. As with my mother’s English signature, writing in my native language is slow and laborious.
Yet, like my mother’s attempt, it’s an effort to reach out and embrace what seems foreign or, in my case, lost. But above all, it is a nod to my siblings, and to a world that got left behind.
