Dreaming in English of Dreaming in Kashmiri: What You Can Only Express in One Language

Anyone can say “I love you.” Not everyone can say the things my mother does, not even I. “Myon zuv!””(“My life!”) she squeals to my children in Kashmiri, as she did to me. “Shoosh myon, redhu myon, poot myon!” (“My lungs, my heart, my teeny-tiny baby chick!”)

She would cut her organs to bits for them, she says. Smother them under her bosom. Put them in her pocket and carry them around all day. Turn into a teeny-tiny bird and watch them sleeping from their windowsills. “Love” is laughable. It can hardly compete.

This is how I was accustomed to being addressed when we arrived to live full- time in Britain from India, when I was almost three. I was bundled off to nursery school in the warm, aggressive embrace of Mum’s words, not speaking one crumb of English, and that first, mute week was a bust. My teachers radiated sweetness, but that wasn’t enough to surmount the fact that we couldn’t connect over language. I couldn’t be comforted by their words in this new place.

But I took it all in, and my little brain did what little brains do. Mum says I was quiet and dispirited until that Friday, when she asked how my day was, hoping for something better than a shrug. I looked at her askance and supposedly said, in English, “Oh? You no speak English?”

I learned quickly that I didn’t need much to express myself—just a small collection of essential words: “please,” “thank you,” “sorry,” “yes,” “no,” colors, numbers, “I want ___,” “where is ___,” “help,” and some foods. Exaggerated facial expressions and hand motions filled in the gaps as my vocabulary expanded.

Between the onslaught from school and cartoons, my third language was soon far more comfortable than the two we spoke at home. I don’t think it was English itself that I loved—I wasn’t especially drawn to the sound of it—but I took growing satisfaction in having clusters of new words start to make sense. Competence turned into a love of the language once I started reading, and I learned to take deep pleasure in expressing myself in my adopted tongue.

As I grew, surrounded by immigrants of all backgrounds, I became more and more attuned to scraps of language in general. I was drawn to the calming “zh-zh-zh” of Serbo-Croatian, which felt like having my head scratched as I fell asleep on someone’s lap. I traced the shapes of Khmer lettering, lined up like a row of elegant, dancing birds. I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet one summer. “Mockba,” I muttered to remind myself, laboriously writing out “Moscow.”

I loved existing on that precipice I first encountered in nursery school—just before the tipping point where cacophony starts to make sense. I took French in school and Italian in college. I’ve started to study Spanish many times, forever chasing the high of that original linguistic click. But my favorite language in the world will always be the one I left behind.

Kashmiri is a magnificent tongue twister of a language. It’s such a reflection of the core values of my people— so sharp, funny, and specific—that I end up reaching for it in situations I can’t describe in English. I’ll call our toddler a “khin-metz,” a snot-smeared, wild- eyed child. “This has neither neck nor tail” (“Na ho’t kun, te na lo’t”) might sprout out of my mouth when I’m confused, or, my favorite, “I hate it with both my eyes!” (“Don ech’hin chhum kharan!” )

The language, like my family, is wildly affectionate but also highly dramatic: If a cousin didn’t feel like studying, my Muni Masi might say, “Accha, tel’i dimmuv kitaa’bun naar?” or “Great, so should we set the books on fire?” A messy teen, I was daily awarded a “gold medal” in “tsot vahravun,” or “carelessly tossing garbage about,” and I remember Mum’s friend Nirja Auntie wrangling her son Vikrom to tidy up: “If anyone broke into the house, they’d think someone’s been here already.”

On our most maddening days, we (still) might hear “khash kar’ai,” a thrashing that literally means “I’ll cut you.” It’s much cuter and less homicidal in person, and no one ever lifted a finger against us. But with that kind of imagery, they didn’t have to. In my own parenting, I admit that my native tone can sometimes scare the children, and other parents.

“If you turn that corner, you’ll get kidnapped,” I toss out, casually, to the alarm of passersby.

“What? That’s terrifying!” screams my son, screeching his new bike to a halt. Is it? Not to a woman raised with threats of flaming textbooks, used to the threat of a parental knifing.

But still, I relish a good English sentence, spoken or written. I highlight books and write down overheard bits of dialogue. I remember first reading Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, a memoir of her time in a graduate student program in Comparative Literature. I must have underlined close to one-third of the book, cackling as she described a colleague as “average in both appearance and demeanor, like some kind of composite sketch.”

But beyond its being funny on its face, I loved her shorthand for the cultures she travels through—always in the context of language. Of her ancestral home, Turkey, she writes,

Most people just weren’t into novels at all. They liked funny short stories, funny fables, serious fables, essays, letters, short poems, long poems, newspapers, crossword puzzles—they liked practically any kind of printed matter better than novels. Even in 1997, of course, there was already Orhan Pamuk, already writing novels…and you could see how miserable he was about it.

And on Russian, her chosen field: “When the Russian Academy of Sciences puts together an author’s Collected Works, they aren’t aiming for something you can put in a suitcase and run away with.”

She ultimately spends some time in Samarkand, finding that “Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay.”

The observation offers insight into a specific culture while also making me think of the endless variation on organs my mother would have sacrificed for me. But, like my mother, Batuman also made me laugh, ending this passage: “What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to bode well for my summer vacation.”

Reading her memoir was the first time a book in English made me feel the same way that being immersed in Kashmiri does—like wandering through a garden maze of linguistic left turns. Sentences bursting with hyperbole. Unusual combinations of simple words that could reduce me to giggles. An almost Dada approach to metaphor: “Comparing Tolstoy’s Works to Babel’s is like comparing a long road to a pocket watch,” she writes, making as much and as little sense as our Kashmiri proverbs.

Her work made me feel less alone, for I had found another bookish woman who had gotten lost in the shrubbery of words and never wanted to leave. Here was someone else who saw that language was a landscape and offered a key to the psyche of its people. And whatever fortuitous combination of traits led to the way her words tickled me, thirteen years and as least as many reads later, I own three dog- eared copies of her book, in case I lose two.

But with all my enthusiasm for perfect English sentences, they still pale against a perfect Kashmiri one. “I’d remove your thorns with my eyelashes” was a new one from Mum last week—”Ech’er valuv seeth kadey kend.” It hurts me to receive those feelings but not be able to give them back to her, because I’m ashamed to say I don’t really speak much Kashmiri. I understand it completely, but once I learned English, it stuck. It was faster, and easier, for me to integrate if I spoke in the language of my thoughts.

“What language do you dream in?” I’ve been asked, when people learn that English isn’t technically my first. English, I say, always English.

But I wish it wasn’t. I dream of speaking in Kashmiri, because English never feels enough, somehow. How are the kids going to feel the depth of my love, I think, if I’m limited by tidy English phrases? And will I ever be as funny to them as my mother, who has the wildness and intensity of our native tongue at her disposal?

I think about this often under my mountain of cultural guilt. Because of our scattered, shrinking community, I was raised with a stronger-than-usual emphasis on preserving the culture, the food, the language. This extended to marrying within the community, and I tried to meet a nice Kashmiri boy, I really did.

Strangely, it wasn’t that easy to find one, working in entertainment in LA in the early aughts. So I met and married a wonderful guy from New York, who doesn’t speak one word of Kashmiri (although he’d probably love to), and we speak English together.

There’s a tired trope in immigrant-themed movies: “Mom, Dad, I’m American now!” the protagonist shouts, and the parents begrudgingly accept it. This is how we do things in America is the gist, and immigrant parents had better get in line.

But it’s a false argument, as anyone who’s been through the process can tell you. The fight has never been with my parents; it’s with myself. Building a life outside our tight- knit community meant the closing of a door and the grief that came with that.

I wasn’t necessarily ready to assimilate, because that meant leaving behind a piece of the culture I was raised with, in a way that can’t be easily replicated. I hear no Kashmiri in my day-to-day life unless I’m talking with my parents, and to practice it, all alone in my home, would feel isolating.

Everyone is full of advice about this. To raise kids as bilingual, they say, each parent should talk to the children in their native tongue. But this is unworkable for me. My husband wouldn’t understand what I was saying to them, so how could we all laugh at the same thing?

The joy of raising dual-culture children, for us, was going to be about passing down the best of both worlds. My husband is Jewish, so, when the kids are of age, they’ll start taking steps  toward bar and bat mitzvahs, a proper training in their Jewish heritage. I do my part—I cook Kashmiri food, we celebrate our holidays, we have our attire on lock.

But I wring my hands about the language and wonder how to build the children a bridge. They’re starting to be old enough to spend some of their summer vacation with my parents, who can (and will) immerse them in our language. But in the meantime, I’ve been watching closely, collecting scraps of evidence that an inherent love of words will blossom in both. Any words, even if they’re not in Kashmiri yet.

I seem to be in luck. “A spectacular baby,” our son called our daughter when he was four. He tears through his chapter books, bursting in, bushy hair on end, to ask for definitions: “Perplexed!” “Secretary!” “Brassiere”! We give him most, and fumfer around others, especially when he gets into the newspaper.

He does that thing all voracious readers do, where he knows how to read a word, and what it means, but not how to pronounce it (“BRACE-ee-uhr!”). He notices my delight at his verbal curiosity and plays around with it.

“I need to tell you something the baby does when you’re not around,” he said to me, solemnly, when she was one. “She makes up long words and says them in a clear voice.” He knew nothing would make me happier, or more frustrated. There’s the sharp, funny, and specific that I love.

He also may have willed something into being, because the toddler wasn’t far behind. She showed a strong preference for the more chewy parts of the dictionary. The standard “Hi!” and “Dada” quickly gave way to “octopus” (“oppodippo”), “helicopter” (“hakaliko”), and “jalapeño” (“jalapeño”).

She’d roll a new word around in her mouth, use it in a brief, take- charge sentence (“Oppodippo, sit, watch me eat oatmeal”), and then practice it in her crib until she fell asleep. Her bravery in the face of consonant clusters will serve her well, if and when she ever picks up Kashmiri.

The way the children use words together is playful and joyous, sating the same hunger that conversations with my parents always have. In these moments, seeing them delight in language, I do feel some inner peace, knowing for sure that I’m raising Kashmiri kids after all. They may not understand the language yet, but there’s still time for grandparent lessons, or textbooks.

And we cherish moments like the time when, as we put the baby to bed, she smiled up at Dada and said, clear as a bell, “Dishwasher.” Intention set, she cuddled in with her loveys to practice her new favorite word. An affectionate, ridiculous chatterbox, Kashmiri through and through. Myon redhu, myon shoosh, myon zuv. 

My heart, my lungs, my life.

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From Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo. Copyright © 2024 by Priyanka Mattoo. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.