I lifted my eyes and looked out of the window at the snow falling from the dark sky, the snow silently covers the sidewalks, the cars, the roofs of houses in a sheet of white, the snowflakes slowly twirl in the air – big white flakes, so big they seem to cast shadows as they fall. A little girl, no more than six, is sleeping fitfully beside me. I gently caressed her hair and pressed a kiss on her temple. She is my daughter; I still can hardly believe that. I remember when I would say it out loud, again and again like a chant – “You are my daughter, I am your mother,” to internalise it, lest I forget.

She was only three when we met her, a small bundle of bubbling joy – her small body hardly able to contain her laughter. She was all that we weren’t, our bodies had been dragged down by grief and years. Her happiness was contagious, we knew only she could fill the holes in our hearts. We named her Kotha, it meant ‘talk’, very fitting for her talkative nature. The adoption process had only taken a few weeks but getting her a residential visa to take her from India to America had been months of paper work and multiple visits to the embassy. My husband and I had taken turns staying with her in Kolkata, bringing her chocolates and picture books. It had almost felt like we were bribing her for her love; begging her to keep choosing us, to live with us forever and to cure us.

My husband spent most of his time teaching her English. She spoke mostly in Bengali – a mother tongue I had not bothered to learn. He, however, was fluent in it and took pride in his cultural roots. I had known that marrying him would be like living with my mother again, listening to the droll of how rich our language is, but it had been love; and love meant compromise. He had patiently taught her the alphabet, slowly moving to words, and by the time it was my turn to stay with her she had almost become fluent in basic English.

We would talk about the butterflies and the hibiscuses we saw in the hotel gardens all day. I would tell her about the view from our balcony back home in America. She told me she had never seen snow, so I showed her pictures of a city covered in white and watched as her eyes twinkled in wonder. At night, I would read her stories of Cinderella and Tiana, hoping she would dream about the faraway lands and princes riding white stallions. But she always sleep-talked in Bengali. Her thin lips murmured foreign words that sounded vaguely familiar. The first night I had recognised a ‘don’t’ and a ‘please’, I had called my husband, fearing the worst. He was back in New Jersey and had just been leaving for work, “Take the phone to her,” he had said calmly. I sat there nervously as he listened to her repeated murmurs. He had finally laughed and told me she was pleading to not be fed bananas. I had laughed in relief too, we both knew very well how much she hated bananas.

Once her documents were all sorted, we boarded the flight to New Jersey. I had made sure to get her a window seat so that she could watch herself fly off the ground and into the clouds. During take-off she sang a song, Jodi tor daak shune keo na ashe tobe ekla cholo re.  My husband later told me what it meant, “if no one answers to your call then walk alone”. The next sixteen hours had passed in a blur as I tried to answer her innumerable questions about the new country. “They don’t speak in Bengali there,” I told her, she had looked heartbroken at that. Though the promise of long conversations with her father seemed to make up for it.

For hours, after he returned from work, the two of them would talk about everything that was singularly Kolkata and Bengali. He read her everything from Rabindranath Tagore to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. I was never a part of their evenings, but I was happy to give them the space. During our first parent-teacher meeting however, the teacher complained about her humming in ‘gibberish’ and complete disregard for the English children’s poems. We assured her that she would do better. From that day the conversations with her father were cut-short, replaced now with Humpty-Dumpty and Twinkle-Twinkle.

The following year, on his way back from work, my husband met with an accident. I had sat clutching Kotha in the hospital hallway waiting for any news on his condition. My thoughts had drifted back to four years ago when he and I had sat clutching each other in a similar looking hallway, outside the NICU; we had returned home holding hands limply, the towels and baby toys untouched in the backseat of our car. I was pulled out from my thoughts by a doctor handing us his death certificate. Even though she had known her father for only two years, Kotha understood the meaning of his death. She stopped singing in Bengali and all the Tagore books were pushed to the back of her cupboard. She did not want me to think about the hole that had been created in her life by his absence. But she could not control her dreams.

Tonight was no different. In her restless sleep she muttered foreign words again. It scared me; it scared me to think that there was this whole world inside of her where I could not go. I thought about my parents back in Kolkata, who did not know about Kotha, whom I had not met in more than a decade. The last time I had seen them, my father had been certified to be clinically deaf due to old age. My mother, who was a housewife had refused to learn English formally, she did not want to taint her mouth with a different tongue. They had left America when it had gotten too hard for my father to communicate with the people around them. My mother had tried teaching me Bengali when I was a child, my father tells me I had learnt quite a lot too. But as I started going to school, I shed my mother-tongue – like a snake, my mother would say– and let English take over me. Had she felt the same distance from me as I do from Kotha now? My mother did speak some broken English but it was hard to communicate without my father as a middle-man. We drifted apart – hurried and frustrated conversations collapsing into a stretched silence.

I soon drifted to sleep, holding Kotha close. In my dreams I saw my mother, she stood towering over me. I did not know if she had grown or if I had shrunk, I cowered under her gaze. The monster that was my mother, picked up my shaking body and put me in her mouth. She did not swallow me; I sat there on my mother’s tongue, staring at the wall of her teeth. When she opened her mouth again, I saw my dad sipping tea in our balcony in New Jersey. A great vibration ran through me as my mother started singing, Jodi tor daak shune keo na ashe tobe ekla cholo re.

I woke up sweating and my heart beating fast. I picked up my phone from the nightstand and scrolled through my contacts. With a deep breath I video called them. Bright sunlight streamed through the phone and I could hear the chirping birds in the background, it was afternoon in India. A slightly fractured image of my mother appeared, she had aged a lot since the day I had dropped her at the airport ten years ago.

“Surprise,” she exclaimed.

“Hi, maa. Ho-how are you?”

“Nice,” she paused and then asked, “You?”
“I… I”

The tears poured down my face uncontrollably. I knew it was selfish of me to make her worry when I was the reason behind our frayed relationship, but I had been bottling it all in for too long. I told her everything in tear-laced words, the NICU and Kotha and the accident. I did not know how much of my rambling she understood but I had all the time to explain it to her carefully later.

When I was done talking, she turned the phone to my father. I balanced my phone on my knees and signed to him, “How are you?” but he looked confused. A wave of sadness passed over me as I realised that even the sign language for my father was different from the one I had learned here. I waved to him as a ‘hi’ and then clumsily tried to act out ‘how are you?’, as though we were playing dumb charades. It struck me all over again how distanced I had become from my parents, neither of them could now understand what I said. I started crying again, this time in guilt. I could not ask Kotha to shed her mother-tongue for my selfishness. She needed to feel the comfort of her language and as her mother it was my responsibility to fill the gap left by my husband’s passing.

“I am coming back to Kolkata,” I finally said.
My mother turns the camera to herself in surprise, “Oh?”

After a long pause she asked, “America?”
I shook my head, “No more America, I miss you and baba.”
I smiled at her through the screen trying to muster up some courage, “And I want to learn Bengali.”