The other day, I went shopping with a friend. While discussing what we were looking at, we spoke to each other in Sindhi so that the shopkeeper wouldn’t understand, almost as if it was a code language. Thinking about this incident, and the way I sometimes use this beautiful language which is spoken by so few, makes me aware of the deep layers of trust and connection that are built into relationships where we share Sindhi as a common language. Even when I hear someone speaking another language and switching the ‘d’ sound with ‘r’ – saying “vara pav instead of vada pav” or “Nidmal” instead of “Nirmal”, using a pronunciation that is typically Sindhi – I don’t just find it amusing but also feel a kinship, because it awakens in me the comfortable awareness of being a Sindhi-speaking woman myself.

However, Sindhi was not my primary language. As a child, I learned English first, because it was how my parents communicated with each other. I picked up a Chinese-English accent during my brief stint at a preschool in Hong Kong where my mother and I Iived for some months when my parents separated. This made me stand out when my mother and I moved to Jaipur to live with my grandparents. As the land, air and water around me changed, there was also a huge shift in the languages spoken around me. I was thrown into unknown territory, with my family speaking in Sindhi at home, and my friends conversing in Hindi at school. As I juggled with these two new languages, I felt like a misfit.