The maternity nurses in the tiny German hill-town were exasperated. ‘The black one’s bawling again,’ my mother heard them whisper among themselves. I was a talkative child and before I could talk I cried. I cried till neighbors peeked in enquiring what the pandemonium was all about.

My first five years, the formative years, were spent listening to and speaking almost exclusively German. In Remcheid, then West Germany, any taxicab would take you to Fischer Strasse 13, where the little ‘German-speaking black girl’ lived. In fact, my German came out with such immaculate enunciation and gusto that our Kindergarten teacher, Frau Lissen, chose me over native German-speaking kids to mentor non-German speaking newcomers so that they could pick up the language faster.

I recall prattling, a pair of whimpering Swedish twins and a quiet Turkish boy in tow, urging them to respond in German during our pie casting expeditions at the sandbox and as we maneuvered the ginormous seesaw in unwieldy layers of stockings, sweaters and coats. Frau Küper, my 80-year old adopted grandmother who lived next door, befriended no doubt during my squealing sessions in early infancy, told me stories of how she had survived the war, interspersed with lectures on how you should never waste food or leave curtains undrawn in the evening, further stretching my repertoire of German vocabulary and syntax.

As a child, one of my mother’s loving nicknames for me was Kelti. Since the German word for cold is kalt, and I was just beginning to acquire a few English phrases, I assumed my nickname had something to do with coolness. It was only after we moved to India when I was six and I was simultaneously expected to learn Bangla (more popularly known as Bengali), Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and pick up scraps of Oriya, Assamese and Punjabi along the way, that I understood my name originated from the Bangla kalo, and the Hindi kali, both in turn derived from the Sanskrit kaalam, meaning black. Therefore an English translation of my nickname would be Blackie.

It was not essentially derogatory in the Indian context, where almost every shrine and Hindu household I visited (unlikely Hindu monotheism), appeared to be dominated by an idol of a much-revered naked blue-black goddess standing regally over a prone pale man, who I later learnt was Shiva. In fact, in spite of a bias for light-skinned women when it comes to mating rituals, respectable synonyms of the more colloquial Kelti, such as Shyama or Krishna are household names in Indian families. It was only when I moved to the US that I realized it would be hopeless to expect my always politically-correct African-American spouse to call me by my familiar childhood nickname. We’ve been married six years now and she still calls me Anjali (On-joe-lee) in the honeydew moments before bed, or by my German middle name Angelika (Ung-gay-li-ka) when she’s less than pleased with me.

Growing up in an Irish missionary convent school while immersed in a quintessential Indian family in Eastern India, Tennyson and Tagore, Goethe and Gandhi, Joyce and Jamini Roy, Max Müller and Madhushudan Dutta, Christ and Krishna speckled my consciousness as naturally as multicolored confetti on New Year’s Day. People around me commonly spoke and wrote multiple languages fluently, seemingly effortlessly switching from one language to another mid-sentence. Even taxicab drivers could manage to converse in at least three. My teachers certainly did not consider it any bravado on my part when my attempts at writing verse blossomed in two or three languages simultaneously. At the variety shows we staged at school, it wasn’t uncommon to have Ghalib’s ghazals, recitations from Tagore, Irish folksongs and a Shakespearean act all in the same program, often performed by the same group of students.

Not all my encounters, however, with the adoption and application of languages have been this joyously inclusive or benign. My ex-husband, a Calcuttan from a family of award-winning intellectuals who took pride in their contribution to Bangla language and literature through their articles published in prominent newspapers, their contributions to updated editions of authoritative Bangla dictionaries, and their knowhow of the latest fads in Bangla fiction, thought it a heinous offense that I wrote my journals, poems and other scribbles primarily in English.

I am not sure exactly when or why I came to choose English to write in over the other languages I knew. It must’ve been somewhere between choosing ink over oil as my medium in artwork and yoga over karate as my daily fitness regimen. The point is that none of these transitions were premeditated. Looking back now, I think I would still choose English to write in, over the other languages that layer my psyche. Not because I think it’s the most beautiful. English can only aspire to the preciseness of Sanskrit or German, the subtlety of Urdu or Hindi, or the effortless lyricism of Bangla or French. Yet, writing in English is the most convenient and practical as it’s the most widely understood. With over fifty percent of the lexicon liberally borrowed from other languages, I think of English more like a collage than a painting, more like a carnival than a play. Although, as any linguist will tell you, it’s not just the words that are the identity of a language, but the way a language allows you to use its words. And American English or Amerikanishe as the Germans call it, as well as British English, sets up strict flagpoles of acceptable usage where clichés inevitably sink and swim with the tide.

In the beginning, when the honeymoon period of our marriage had still not mellowed, he would read the Bangla historical short stories and novels of Sharodindu Bandopadhyay to me in bed. That is still my only good memory of our time together. Perhaps he thought he could crowd out the other languages from my mind. I will never know. Of all the things he grew to loath about me during our brief marriage, the most piercing perhaps was my inclination to read or recite Shakespeare aloud to myself or cuddle up with PG Wodehaus or Sidney Sheldon, when I was feeling low. On his part, he could not reconcile why Indians still acted as indentured slaves of the bloody British by holding on to their language long after they’ve been purged from the country. Such traitors, if he could have had his way, should be hanged. On my part, I couldn’t fathom how language could belong to a people like excavated pottery, particularly a people whose mission has been to plunder and enslave the rest of the world, scattering their language and cultural artifacts like a philanderer does his semen. I couldn’t fathom why the deplorable couldn’t be shaken off from the pleasurable at the doorstep of every intellect. And I couldn’t for the world fathom why Sharodindu and Shakespeare could not coexist on the same altar.

Although I did try to make the marriage work through days when dinner dripped from the walls following one of his episodes, I finally let go. I figured conditional love was a poor bargain for the freedom to read and scribble as I please. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Immigrating to the US in my late twenties, I immediately felt the brunt of isolation on account of the way I speak and write. My professors, colleagues, the university administrators and officers of governmental research funding organizations spared no opportunity in labeling me an alien, perhaps taking their cue from the immigration office. In those days when my dreams of dedicating myself to neuroscience research had not yet died untimely, I found myself chastised as an illiterate bum and later largely ostracized for speaking in an un-American manner when I used an uncommon metaphor or an unusual turn of a phrase. Nevertheless, I was thrilled to wrap up my research efforts that were going nowhere in such hostile surroundings and transition to a teaching faculty position. I’ve always enjoyed teaching and looked forward to expose youngsters to the quantum leaps in biology made in the past decade. When I finally decided to give up teaching as a career-goal altogether and leave the college teaching position partially because students complained about my outlandish accent and manner of speaking, it was more than hurt. It was the final snuffing out of a cherished dream.

Yet always the pragmatist, I enrolled in American accent classes, not just to make myself less obtrusive to the sensitive American ear but also to develop my hobby of narrating audiobooks into a viable career far from the condescending clutches of academia. However, my instructor, unhelpfully enamored by my speech, refused to help me alter my accent and usage. She said I should stick to what I have and not try to take speech classes unless I’m recovering from brain surgery. She believed in time our culture will become more inclusive. I recall smiling back at her earnest, well-meaning face and thinking, if the current political climate is any indication, inclusivity will definitely not be on the rise anytime soon.

I do believe my accent coach had a point but I also knew, having grown up as part of the bonafide American fabric she has no clue of the degree of alienation and isolation immigrants experience owing to differences in language. Diverse as we are, there are very few bridges between our social compartments or our languages, and there certainly is no consideration for the immigrants’ linguistic contributions except for a pat on the back for succumbing to the overpowering forces of assimilation and homogenization. The multilingual mind generates layers of subtle nuances in meaning across languages. Although the production and basic understanding of language is a conscious neural activity, the mechanism of arriving at profound realizations and generating associations through creative leaps is largely mysterious and subconscious.

I am no linguist but in my experience, one way layering of languages happens to distinguish multilingual speech and comprehension is through the overlapping of phonetic elements of one language on another, subconsciously, to create an emotional response that is not possible when awareness is acute and elements of distinct languages are clearly categorized. The monolingual can estimate this in how speakers in any language deftly deal with homonymns and all the consequent ambiguity they impart to the spoken word.

Here’s a crude example. An English interjection used often in text messages and scripts to convey or simulate laughter is: Ha Ha! No English-only speaking person would associate it with anything but lightheartedness. However in a variety of Indian languages this is an interjection close to alas! It is actually not a true interjection. It is an abbreviation of the Sanskrit word hahakaar retained unchanged in a number of derivative languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Punjabi, Oriya and Assamese, and means a piercing cry of grief or physical pain.

It is not that the person conversant in any or all of the Indian languages and English mistakes the meaning of one for the other. The language police in the front brain is too alert for such slips. But there is a certain hesitance all the same in using the interjection as lightheartedly as a person speaking only English. Perhaps in the face of such subconscious quandaries and faced with spur of the moment decisions in speech, the multilingual chooses a different mode of expression, distinguishing her overall manner of speaking from the monolingual as such decisions pile up.

I have been translating Hindi, Bangla and Sanskrit stories and verses into English for over a decade and although I enjoy some gifts of translation such as seeing the spark of understanding in a yoga student’s eyes when she hears the story behind the naming of a yoga pose, or the doting look in my wife’s eyes when she understands the meaning of the love-song I sing to her, more often translations still feel like transgressions. In Bangla, a word for the verb ‘to look’ is the same as the word for ‘to want’ (chai). This has been used skillfully in poems and songs such as,

Pran chai chokkhu na chai

mori eki tobo dustoro lojja

which would translate in English as,

The heart desires but the eye doesn’t glance,

darn this discretion that can’t be overcome

Although a fair translation into English as far as meaning goes, it cannot capture the intended ambiguity that makes you do a double take. The meaning though translatable, the emotional effect and with it any possibility of appreciating the level of the poet’s refined craft, is lost. Odi et amo (I love and I hate) translations, as the Latin poet Valerius Catallus put it succinctly. However, I’ve learnt a lot about compromising from my auto-didactic efforts in translating. After all, the translation of languages, as any art, is not about being perfect. Most times it’s just about daring to throw a plank over the unknown.

In a recent interview for a science writer-editor position for a reputable biomedical foundation, the interviewers asked me whether I was a native speaker of English. I wondered whether I was a native speaker of German because that is the first language I spoke, or a native speaker of any or all of the Indian languages I know on grounds of ancestry, or a native speaker of English because that is what I’ve used in my academic sojourns and in my attempts at writing. I took a moment and answered that I considered English to be one of my native languages. Apparently that did not satisfy the board and although I answered their other queries satisfactorily, I did not get the job. Although like many prospective employers I’ve come across they too did not provide any reasons for their rejection, I take it they had a bias toward native speakers of English.

Those taking their first steps in the internet era, I suspect, will have a far greater exposure to global culture and languages, each imbibing distinct combinations to nurture their unique personalities and enriching their panoramic perspectives. Perhaps this will finally blur the borders that foster the use of language as a weapon for patriotism or terrorism, as a historical entitlement, or a crutch for identity.

But isn’t it paradoxical for a writer to try to distance herself from the language she inhabits so intimately by resisting to identify with the language as a native speaker or getting bogged down in the minutiae of the objective measure of native-ness to a language?

Even though it might seem paradoxical it’s not a trivial choice. Just as I am convinced it is high time we give up identifying ourselves as denizens of politically bounded cubbyholes and measure our acts and impacts in the global context, I also agree global empathy and integration does not need an Esperanto or for every sapien to be a polyglot.

What it needs is reverence for all languages. What it needs is the application of expertise and technology to transplant thoughts and ideas quickly and holistically form one lingual framework to another and not just translate linearly, forced to abandon untranslatable terabytes. Perhaps someday, like in Star Trek, we’ll all be carrying miniscule universal translators that convey the full scope of a sentence in any language.

But more than these technicalities, what is needed is the realization that the thoughts, ideas, stories and emotions conveyed are far more valuable than the language they are conveyed in. That is what I mean when I say I am reluctant to identify as a native speaker of any language. I have ensouled many.