“When words fail, wars begin. When wars finally end, we settle our disputes with words.” – Wilfred Frank.

We all have had moments in our lives when we faced inner wars when our words failed. Starting as a toddler with our very first creation of tiny ripples of language, many of us welcomed further extensions of such battles with words when we had to keep up with the same sheer determination. I did too.

I was born and I grew up in Bangladesh, and my first language is Bengali. But being in an English medium school all my life, my inclination has always been towards English, be it entertainment, literature, or medium of academics. As a result, my experiences with language have been an amalgamation of weaknesses in and disinclination towards Bengali and interests in English. As I press my pen on a paper to reflect to my very own pleasant, powerful, and often disastrous relationship with language, I find myself starting from my earliest days of holding a pencil.

I was 4 when I first started to write words in my native language along with English. I mastered English alphabets and writing some English words as well as speaking some full sentences by the end of Kindergarten. Back then, my mother gave me a few Bengali words to write down since Bengali was not taught at school yet and I had to learn it. I remember they were all flower names, about eight of them. Some of the spellings were complicated for a kindergartener. It was almost midnight when I started. My elder sister and my mother were in a different room when I was attempting with my spellings. I showed it to my mom after I was done, and the next thing I knew was her bursting into laughter. It was a matter of seconds before my sister joined her. I took my notebook back to look at my work, on the verge of tears – one of the most scintillating memories of Bengali words occurring like puzzles to me. Yet, I was a stubborn kid who was more than willing to keep trying to solve the puzzles until they turned into a picture that made sense. With a quivering voice, I kept nudging my mother to help me get the spellings right. I didn’t care if it was past midnight. But the mere 4-year-old was oblivious to the unraveling of Bengali tending to outstretch over years, amidst the quiddities of an English medium student.

Having my Bengali literacy along a bit defected line has been perpetuated by a number of factors. In 1^st grade, my mother started to propel me towards writing English short stories to bolster my English literacy. I was also inspired seeing my brother doing so. That’s when I commenced my journey with writing. I started storing journals when I was in 5^th grade. By the time I was in 7^th grade, I could distinguish between my English and Bengali literacy. My English teacher often gave me spotlight for my creative writing skills while it was comparatively harder to get a decent grade in Bengali tests. My parents would keep telling me that I can’t miss an A in any subject in my Cambridge International O Level final exams, not even in Bengali. I kept up with my attempts on that, but my disinclination towards Bengali literacy caused me to end up with a B in it and As in all the rests. In fact, there never was an English exam that I didn’t secure an A in.

One meaningful step in my English literacy experiences was starting to write poems. There was this one book in particular that led me to it. “Slammed”- a romance novel by Colleen Hoover lush with slam poetry. I read it two years ago and couldn’t help but get lost in the emotions the author vividly portrayed through poems. The urge to express my thoughts and feelings started the moment I finished reading the book. I didn’t care about how they were going to be or what someone reading them will think about them, although everyone who read them so far liked them. On rare occasions, there comes a book out of nowhere, and once you have read it, you will never completely go back. Slammed left an embodied trace with me as a notebook that has been containing snippets of my mind for over two years. Fun fact: I bought the notebook only a few days before I read Slammed and wanted to preserve something meaningful in it because of how beautiful I thought it is.

I have been quite a bookworm since childhood. English literature, be it fiction or non-fiction, is not only a huge part of my life, but also a part of me. When I talk about having secured an A in O Level English, I ascribe it to the hobby of regular reading. My repertoire of books that I read kept expanding at the highest rate starting from my young teenage years. Because of the number of plots, characters, and places, I started feeling stories brewing within me. Books really can take you around the globe and back. For me, they are indeed the epitome of peace and bliss.

I was a Cambridge GCE (General Certificate Education) student in high-school. When it comes to society and culture, there have been some challenges regarding social acceptance after growing up in a somewhat different way than kids whose medium of education has been Bengali and who followed the national education system. The ever so ubiquitous poor judgements about anything that deviate from what is the most common often issue some drawbacks for many. As for an example, someone I know through friends once asked me how many Bengali novels I’ve read along with the heaps of English ones. I honestly answered that I read short stories and news articles when I had Bengali in High School. There was so much backlash I received about “not being enough connected to my cultures” and “not valuing my mother tongue like I should.” Someone would say I shouldn’t let things like that get me down, but for the past few months, I have let it have me curve my way towards betterment in Bengali – I want to settle my disputes. I have been reading Bengali and listening to Bengali songs more.

As I grew up and reached maturity, the social trends in my country became one of the things that bother me the most. That as a result, make me cherish my hobby of writing even more – you can never run out of things to write about when you find yourself strung in ruminations about your surroundings.

I learned to read and write Arabic when I was in 3^rd grade and read The Holy Quran (central religious text of Islam), which is a norm a majority of Muslims conform. I also learned spoken Hindi by watching Indian entertainment.

Unique or not, journey with language is always an interesting one.