A Woman of Many Tongues
The Beautiful Chaos of Living Between Languages
Some days I wonder what it must feel like to think, argue, cry, and spill one's emotional tea in just one language. Must be so peaceful. No polyglots chattering, no mini-language committees, debating on which words you should let out. Just pure, unfiltered expression. But that’s not my life.
There are days I think in Malayalam, write in English, and go on to explain it to a friend in Hindi. Imagine a radio, and someone gets to randomly twist the dial – one second it is humming a Hindi love song, then it’s a comedy dialogue from a Malayalam movie, and suddenly a Gujarati cooking show interrupts the broadcast. I live between languages. It wasn’t always this chaotic.
Photo by Pranali Bankar on Unsplash
As a young girl who went to a convent, English was gospel, and grammar was the holy book. Our teachers were warriors dressed in crisp cotton sarees, glasses perched on their nose ridges, armed with red pens - who had zero tolerance for misplaced commas. Our school corridors were guarded by walking CCTVs, and speaking any language other than English was a punishable offense. “Think in English,” they said. “Only then can you write well.” And so, we tried.
At home, Malayalam was the queen. It was my mother’s sweet lullabies, my father’s philosophical ramblings, my aunt's scolding, and my brother’s whining. My mother very strictly made it clear, “The world will teach you many languages, but only home can teach you your own. Speak whatever you want outside, but here, it has to be Malayalam.” I owe her for nurturing my love for Malayalam and planting its culture deep within me.
Then came Hindi - the language of cartoons, playgrounds, and television. It was part of schooling, but I soaked it up more from Bollywood movies, news channels, and Shaktiman episodes. Gujrati came a little later – a background hum on the streets, the language of shopkeepers, autowalas, and gossiping aunties. Slowly it found it sneaked into my sentences, slipping into my morning bargains for the extra dhaniya and mirchi (coriander and chilli) with my vegetable vendor or translating my mother's sambhar recipe for my neighbours, until one day, it felt less like a translation and more like a part of me. The real struggle, however, was emotions.
You see, I don’t just live between languages—I feel between them too.
Joy, anger, frustration – they all arrive in a crazy jumble. My brain tumbles over a pile of emotions, searching for the best language to express them. But before I can choose, translate, and attempt to make a coherent argument, it is usually too late. The other person has already built a stronger case, and I’m left with awkward pauses, incomplete sentences, or worse—crying. Because sometimes picking a language is harder than picking my battles.
Photo by Ricky Singh on Unsplash
Just when my brain was trained to live in this linguistic chaos, I went and married a Gujarati. As if juggling three languages wasn’t chaotic enough, I went and willingly stuck my neck out for a fourth.
The first few months of marriage was a crash course in Gujarati kitchen vocabulary. My mother-in-law, would ask me for something and all I did was stare back blankly trying to decode and match her pronunciation to any word in my language dictionaries. What did she ask for? A spoon? A pan? A grater? I’ve lived in Gujarat my whole life, but at that moment, it felt like another planet. She is going to think I am a fool. Some days, the oil is hot, the seasoning is ready—but my brain isn’t. I fumble through spice names in Malayalam, then Hindi, then useless English, but Gujarati refuses to show up. And just like that, the oil is burnt.
I tried. Oh, I really did.
But here is the thing, I have this habit – an ingrained instinct of switching languages based on how deeply I feel about something. So, a casual conversation in Gujarati? No problem. But the moment I need to add some warmth, intensity, or passion, my brain auto-selects Hindi. Just when my brain finds a rhythm, my phone rings. I see Amma’s name. I’m mid-laugh, cracking a joke in Gujarati, in a millisecond, without thinking, I answer, “Ha, Amma.” One moment, I’m in Gujarat; the next, I’m home in Kerala.
My poor husband, caught in the crossfire of my language chaos, is probably the only one who truly sympathizes – watching me juggle tongues like a malfunctioning radio, never quite sure which frequency I’ll land on next.
But he too has his set of complaints.
“Why do you always add unnecessary ‘H’s in Hindi typing?”
“I do not.”
“You do. It’s never ‘Tumne khana khaya?’ It’s always ‘Thumne khana khaya?’” He pulls up our chats—proof of my rogue H’s.
“Thumko pata hai na, I’m already so exhausted...” one message says, with all the dramatic flair of a Bollywood climax scene.
“This is why we can’t argue properly,” he laughs. “Your angry texts feel like some badly dubbed South Indian movie—intense, dramatic, but the words never match the emotion.”
There were times when I made a stern decision to ‘fix’ this, and speak one language fluently, without flipping between languages like a malfunctioning Google Translate.
But I’ve come to love this beautiful mess. I am not just one language. I am all of them.
I am the girl who cried in Hindi, but dreamed in Malayalam. The woman who texts in dramatic, extra-H in Hindi, but writes poetry in English. The wife who argues in a mix of Hindi and Gujarati, only to end up laughing or crying halfway through. And if that means I live in a constant state of linguistic whiplash, so be it. Because in all this chaos, I have found my voice. Language is more than just words. It’s our experiences and how we see the world.
And no matter what language I speak in—I will always be heard.
Women, much like languages, are always adapting. We shift, we translate, we soften, we sharpen. We take on different forms to be understood, to be loved, to be included. But no matter how many roles we juggle, how many languages we switch between, and how many selves we have to be—we will always belong.
Because we are more than the words we speak.
We are the stories we tell.
- Nisha Nair (Nisha is a passionate absurdist, creative nomad, and curious curator of stories. She writes about nature, everyday moments, and people—everything that moves her deeply. She lives by the day and documents by night, collecting stories from billboards, magazines, café corners, gossiping heads, kids in playgrounds, and even forgotten phone booths. She treasures her alone time but is never truly alone—with stories always finding their way to her.)