Bouma – or why I am learning Bengali

Friends sometimes ask me, disinterestedly, why I am learning Bengali.  ‘Well,’ I tend to shrug trying to make it all sound very practical, ‘We struggle out there, you know.’

The truth, whilst it starts with struggle and frustration is far more complex.

My mother-in-law did not teach my husband Bengali and has not, despite repeated requests in the early days, spoken Bengali to any of her grandchildren. We love India despite being born in Britain and feel it is our spiritual home. If our children spoke Bengali, then it would feel as if there were the possibility of communicating in Bengali in future through them.  But that – despite the purchase of bilingual books early on and frequent exhortation – is clearly not going to happen anytime soon.

I made a couple of half-hearted attempts in the past out of peek to learn the language so I could teach my children but I realised that this was not going to work.

It was a sudden surge of determination that finally resolved in me to develop the practical knowledge myself to function there as the family who we rely on move away to other parts of India and abroad.

And I made my angry start with cold and unflinching determination. But I had no inkling at that moment that I was in fact embarking upon what would turn out to be a love affair with a language, that was at once familiar and yet foreign, intimate and yet estranging.

Strange. But maybe not.

In 1945, 180 miles from Kolkata, my mother was born in Jamshedpur in Bihar in what was then British India. But at the age of 12 she left the country for England, never to return and she went on to marry an Englishman. Her maiden name was Portuguese and her family hail from Goa.

My husband is Bengali but how Indian (even) am I? (Let alone) how Bengali?

One day as I sat working through the complex web of kinship terms and asking my mother-in-law what you call your husband’s sister’s daughter and the like, I came across the word ‘bouma’. ‘Bouma’, I exclaimed. ‘What a funny word.’

‘That’s what they called you!’ my mother-in-law uttered, amused.’They always said that when you went to the market’.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, they always called you bouma’.

‘How can I exist within this web of Bengali kinship terms? ‘ was my first thought. ‘Bouma can mean younger brother’s wife or son’s wife’, was my second. Then the final realisation: ‘Ah, when I am with my 100% Bengali mother-in-law, then, of course I am Bouma’.

So, I may not be Bengali, but I am Bouma.