Mother Tongue, Other Tongue: On waking, loving, and grieving in translation.

A guest post from Nishad Sanzagiri

Exploring Life through the Written Word

Dear Friends,

Nishad Sanzagiri

was born in Kolhapur and spent his early years in India before moving around quite a bit. He lived in the U.S. for a year as a child and did most of his schooling in the Middle East, before studying International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and completing a master’s in South Asian Studies at Oxford. Since then, he has worked in management consulting and, more recently, in the space between geopolitical risk and strategic communications. This summer, he is leaving his corporate job and moving to India for a year to write a book about the country’s sacred geography — a narrative travelogue tracing spiritual and religious sites across India’s many traditions. This journey is part homecoming, part exploration, and something of an inward search. Nishad has always felt at home in the in-between spaces: between languages, cultures, and countries. This next chapter of his life is a way of sitting with that; of trying to understand one of his many homes a little more deeply. Outside of writing, he loves cycling, painting, and wandering on foot, especially somewhere green or with water by the side.

Enjoy this guest essay from Nishad.

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I live a life in translation: between languages, between selves. English has become my voice — the language of my pen — but my mother tongue, Marathi, still lingers on my breath.

Each morning, the first sound that escapes my mouth is a sigh I’ve made since childhood. One that carries my mother’s name.

Aaai guuh.

Aai, in Marathi, means mother, yet it’s more primal in this instance. It’s the sound that emerges without thought. Like when you’re frightened awake from a nightmare or when you stub your toe in the dark. But it’s not always out of hurt or fear. Sometimes it’s just a stretch, a morning yawn, a long exhale that carries a smile, the same syllables, but this time they are softened. Relaxed.

Depending on how it’s said — the curve of the lips, the furrow of the brow, the scrunch of the nose — it can hold frustration, affection, exasperation, or tenderness. A sigh, a scold, a laugh, a letting go. It carries everything, really. A shorthand of emotion that resists translation. And the more I think about it, here, in a room bathed in pale English sunlight, it feels strangely out of place.

I haven’t spoken Marathi in months. Not properly, at least. My dreams, once laced with Marathi lullabies my father hummed, now unspool in crisp English. And yet, every morning, my first breath still carries my mother’s name as if I were calling out for her voice, her hands, the scent of her cooking, or the safety of something once unquestioned.

I sit up slowly, letting the morning light slip through half-closed blinds. Around me are books in English, newspapers tracing British politics, and mugs stained by yesterday’s coffee … essentially, my full-bodied adult life. But beneath these tokens of assimilation lies something older, something harder to name — a self caught in an untranslatable, unresolved in-between.

The quiet gap between waking and words; the aching but beautiful confusion of a life lived in translation.

***

I grew up in Muscat, Oman, in a home where Marathi reigned supreme. My parents made sure I not only spoke it but could read and write it too. My mum especially glowed when others praised my fluency: “He speaks so well despite living abroad,” people would say. That admiration was a kind of currency, a reassurance that we hadn't lost ourselves entirely to distance. I was proud of that — quietly smug, even, for being the only one of my friends to know the difficult vocabulary in a language that hardly had utility in our milieu. For being so voracious even when the redundancy of it was clear early on. It was a signal that my parents had succeeded — and by making them look good, I in turn had done my job as an obedient, ‘ideal’ Indian son.

So yes, there was a time in my life when Marathi came easily and instinctively. It never felt like effort, given it was the only language we used at home. It bound us.

But now, living in the UK, that loss feels sharper. It’s more personal, more chosen. Because I can still read and write Marathi. I just ... don’t. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a Marathi book and I don’t hear it in my daily life unless I seek it out. And what used to feel like inheritance now feels like something I've let slip through my fingers.

There’s guilt in that. Not the abstract guilt of forgetting, but the specific ache of having chosen — or failed to choose — to keep something alive. A language that once belonged wholly to me now waits quietly in the corners of my mouth, unused.

***

Living in translation isn’t just linguistic. It’s cultural, emotional, even sensory. It’s the experience of belonging to two worlds and to neither, all at once. A delicate balancing act like being uprooted from one soil and asked to bloom in another, unsure if your roots will ever settle.

In the UK, I’ve become the unofficial interpreter of all things Indian to my white friends. A casual reference to a Bollywood film becomes a seminar: “Wait, so why did they break into song again?” I explain emotional logic, family dynamics, and cultural traditions and watch amusement blend with bewilderment. I understand the confusion, and yet it exhausts me. This expectation that everything must be rendered legible.

I sit with bated breath looking at my friends as they watch the Bollywood movie I’ve chosen, wanting to wipe off (through explanation, of course) every grimace or furrowed brow, or leaping with joy every time they get a reference or like a song. It’s then that I feel seen.

It happens with festivals too. Diwali is not “Indian Christmas,” Holi is not “like that Easter hunt we did but with colours.” These analogies may seem harmless, even well-meaning, but they flatten what they try to explain. Diwali is a festival of light, yes — but also of new beginnings, returns, relationships between husband and wife, between siblings, new ledgers, gold purchases, mythology, and memory. Holi is about mischief, divine love, and the chaos of colour as cosmic play. And how do you explain touching elders’ feet? That reflexive act of reverence that is muscle memory and comes as natural as breathing for so many of us? In translation, the warmth of respect becomes an awkward ritual: an exotic performance.

Some things resist translation not because they’re complex but because they’re embodied. I know every word of some mantras whispered in temples — chants in Sanskrit and Marathi etched into my memory long before I understood the meanings behind those syllables. They don’t need explanation for they emerge from the body, fluent, automatic, and untranslatable.

How do you explain that?

***

When my parents visit London the tension becomes visible. They cut queues without hesitation, a rite of passage in India, but a cardinal sin here. I guide them gently back into line, apologising to strangers who say nothing but glare with precision. They don’t understand the devotion to order. They haven’t lived it. Their emotions are loud, honest, immediate. Mine have softened into subtler gestures and quieter words.

Sometimes I envy them. Their clarity. Their refusal to self-edit for comfort.

It’s not just them. A family friend once asked, genuinely puzzled, why I walk during lunch breaks, sandwich in hand, pacing the same few streets. “But why?” she frowned. “What do you get from just … walking?” In her question, I heard something familiar: a certain pragmatism common in many Indian households, where walking is either utilitarian or a marker of not having the luxury of a car. But here, in this new life, I’ve absorbed different values: walking as mindfulness, as exercise, as autonomy, as something gentle and unhurried. Even that, it turns out, is a translation.

And then there is work — always in English, always curated, always performed. My competence is measured not just in skill, but in how seamlessly I translate myself into a form of corporate gibberish that is hard to translate into any language, let alone Marathi. Most days, I think in English. But occasionally, in fatigue or frustration, a Marathi phrase slips through. “Kay karu aata?” I mutter — what do I do now? — surprised by the ease of it. As if that primal tongue never truly left me. It reminds me of a scene from Modern Family, when Gloria, exasperated with being misunderstood, cries out: “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?” It’s played for laughs, but there’s truth there. Because speaking in a second language can flatten you. Your wit, your depth, your fire … they all become slightly dulled, slightly delayed.

These slips remind me that translation is never finished. It’s a process, not a product. Even after a decade here, I’m still arriving.

***

There’s something especially tender about translating love. Because I’ve found love here, in this new language. My vocabulary of affection, of emotional honesty, is in English. This is the language in which I’ve said “I love you” and heard it said back. And maybe that’s not surprising — in South Asian families, love is rarely spoken aloud, it’s merely shown in actions. In presence, in food, in late-night cups of coffee, and in the gentle cuddle at night.

So when I speak of love now, it’s in English. It’s the language that has taught me to articulate tenderness.

But grief? That’s still in Marathi.

The loss of my grandmother — the first grief I vividly remember feeling — was felt entirely in Marathi. I remember her last words, the condolences spoken at the funeral, the hush in the house, the way people comforted each other without crossing certain emotional lines. And so, the words I associate with loss still arrive in Marathi, even now. English softens them too much.

I love in one language but grieve in another. I laugh in one language, but cry in another. Perhaps that’s the deepest form of being split — when your joy and your sorrow are housed in different tongues.

***

With time, I’ve learned to trust this incompleteness. To live in the gaps. These days, I no longer explain myself to everyone. The UK has grown familiar and I move through its rhythms with ease. Friendships here have ripened. We laugh, share routines, speak in shorthand. I’ve stopped translating every emotion.

But the deeper my roots here grow, the more distant home begins to feel. But I’m trying to see the beauty in this too. In this always-becoming. My parents sense it — in the pauses during our phone calls, in my struggle to find the right Marathi phrase, in my laughter at references they no longer recognise. They know, quietly, that becoming someone new means leaving something behind. And it helps, of course, that they are fluent in English, although that also contributes to the complacency on my end towards Marathi, because I know they’ll adjust and understand both my language and my life.

Perhaps that’s the secret of living in translation: you never fully arrive. You live in motion, between languages, between selves, hoping those closest to you will meet you somewhere along the way.

***

The great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, in his autobiography Book of Disquiet / Livro do Desassossego wrote, “My homeland is the Portuguese language.”

Paraphrasing him, I’d say that my homeland is Marathi — and yet, like any exile, I may never fully inhabit it again. I’ll always linger in a no-man’s land, between the pull of English and the push of Marathi, forever inhabiting the spaces between the languages.

And some days, I catch myself wondering: Do you know how slow I’ve become in Marathi? How clumsy? How often I pause now, reaching for words that once lived on the tip of my tongue?

***

It’s a Saturday morning and the blinds are half-closed. I wake slowly, surfacing from a fevered dream. It’s one of those gentle mornings, thick with delirium, the kind of awakening you can only afford when there are no alarms and nowhere urgent to be. Eyes still closed, I roll onto my back, arch my shoulders, and stretch my arms toward the ceiling. A ripple of tension moves down my spine. My jaw opens instinctively, and without thinking, the sound escapes: Aaaaai guuh.

It’s the same syllables I’ve carried across borders and years, from one life to another. It’s tempting, in moments of fatigue, to choose clarity over contradiction. To surrender to one version of myself. But here I am reminded of a couplet from the great Indian poet Nida Fazli:

har aadmi main hote hain das biis aadmi

jis ko bhi dekhna ho kai baar dekhna

Every person carries within them tens of others

When you look at them, look more than once to truly see.

And so I want to scream, “see all of me, please.” See the version that wakes up saying Aaaai guuh, and not just the one that spends the day speaking in English. The one that loves in one language and grieves in another.

Who feels at home in fragments — and, in doing so, pieces together something resembling a whole.

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