When I asked him about them once, he told me, to my amazement, that they were several years old. All I remember about him are his shoes, thin, stiff leather lace-ups that were always polished to a shine and kept in meticulous condition. He must have taken on extra after-school tuition not out of any special vocation, but out of sheer economic necessity. He didn’t have many pedagogical or even conversational skills and certainly not much creative imagination when it came to teaching a new language to a nine year-old, but he took me through simple drills, such as case signs and verb tenses. My tutor was a very thin, quiet man who went over some basics of Hindi grammar with me for a few months, until I was more-or-less up to speed with my classmates at school. And finally she engaged a Hindi tutor to come to the house weekly, after school. Next she labeled every item in the house with a piece of paper proclaiming its Hindi name. Mum made a large alphabet chart and posted it prominently, so that I could learn the characters and recite them aloud daily, memorizing them line by line: first the vowels- a-aa-i-ee-u-oo– ri, etcetera-and then the consonants: ka-kha-ga-gha-nga, cha-chha-ja-jha-nya and so on.

So it fell to my English mother, who of necessity was entirely self-taught, to introduce me to the language.

Fortunately I was not very far behind my classmates in Bengali (at least those whose mother tongue was not Bengali), but catching up on Hindi was another matter.īecause my father is a perfectionist, he refused to teach Hindi to me on the grounds that he might pass on incorrect grammar and usage, even though he could speak Hindi reasonably well (and, of course, it shared a script and much of its vocabulary with his mother tongue of Marathi). Agnes Convent School in Kharagpur I had to take examinations in both languages to my shame, my Hindi score was a resounding zero (a big laddu) and my Bengali score, for some inexplicable reason, a whopping six percent.

Since I was enrolling in an English-medium school in West Bengal, according to India’s Three Language Formula (TLF) the second language would be Hindi, the national language, and the third, Bengali, the official language of the state. By the time we returned I was nine and a half and my peers at school in India had not only been studying a second language for some time but had started a third. When my family left India for Greece in 1960 I was six and a half, and we had just started learning a second language in school.

Hindi alphabet with bengali alphabet