“In memory’s bejeweled chamber, a picture of first love
is a dusty, faded, weathered old page
that the Bordoisila winds at dusk lovingly carry away.”

The words are too many for a haiku. In my mother’s tongue, the poem has a symmetry that bends out of shape when I translate it into English.

The Bordoisila is a pre-monsoon wind. It sweeps through the Brahmaputra Valley in April and May. Assamese folklore imagines her as a married woman, yearning to return to her childhood home. The summer heat sears her heart. In the wake of her longing, she tears apart huts, trees, and bamboo groves—anything that stands in her way.

The Bordoisila is not a gentle wind, and yet, in my mother’s poem, it carries away a beloved parchment—not wildly, but with care.

Every time I hear the poem, I look at my mother and see a different woman.

She reads out her haiku again, and I listen. My mother writes in Assamese, and because I cannot read the script, she must read it aloud to me. For thirty-seven years, she has been my mother. But since the pandemic began, she has also become a poet and a writer. A retired banker, she—like everyone else—was cooped up at home. Over sixty and diabetic, she was especially vulnerable to the whims of the illness that descended upon us all. Words became her shelter. Since the pandemic, she has published over ten books in Assamese.

My chronology is flawed. She has been a poet long before she became my mother. It took a worldwide crisis for her to find sanctuary, to uncover her love of language—her language—and reclaim it in words of her own.

I remember the day I held her first published work in my hands—Manasi. My elation and pride gave way to the familiar, aching realization: I cannot read the Assamese script.

Manasi is a book of poems. The front cover displays a charcoal image of a girl’s silhouette—an amateurish rendition, one she insisted I sketch for her. The title is written in stylized, looping Assamese letters. To me, it appears elegant and inaccessible, like my mother’s poems.

My mother retired from the Reserve Bank of India in 2017. Her life had moved with the rhythm of deadlines, reports, ledgers, and frequent transfers—shifting between the spaces of work and motherhood. When time grew strange during the pandemic, she began to write—imperceptibly at first, but with a quiet fervor I had not known before. She had always been a voracious reader, but it was the first time I saw her spin words of her own. She wrote poems, then flash fiction, translations of Bengali poetry, fairy tales for children, and then a short novel. It was like watching someone you’ve known forever open a door inside themselves. She was quietly shaping worlds with language—worlds that had always existed within her, carried with her all this time. Her writing was lyrical and unassuming in its depth. Did she stumble upon her talent in a moment of epiphany? Or was she always aware of the pulsing nucleus within her, waiting for a moment of repose—from work, from motherhood and grandmotherhood—to find its moment of flourishing?

I am half-Assamese, half-Oriya-Bengali by lineage, and entirely displaced by circumstance. I was born in Kamrup, Assam, but my roots are aerial. English is my only literary language, and my only tether to my mother’s homeland is my early memories at my grandmother’s house.

When I decided to translate my mother’s poems, I realized I knew just enough Assamese to grasp meaning, but not enough to feel the pulse of her poems without her guidance. We approached the task as co-conspirators. She would read them aloud, one line at a time.

The intimacy of the task caught me off guard. I was straddling the roles of translator and daughter. How often would these identities collide? Sometimes, asking her to repeat lines or explain metaphors became ways of capturing something of her essence in a different tongue.

I would pause her, ask questions, and try out variations.

“How do you translate Bohag?” I asked her once. “Can I just say ‘spring’?”

“But it’s not just spring,” she said gently. “Bohag is… Bohag. It’s the first month of the Assamese year… when the orchids bloom and the birds sing. The melodies of Bihu fill nature before it finds our voices. It’s more than spring.”

In another haiku she wrote during the lockdown, she mourned the absence of the dancing girls of Bihu:

“Again in Bohag, the orchids bloom, and saffron Nahar buds sway with the wind.
The koel and the Ketakis croon, the trees sprout leaves of many colors.
The bumblebees hum. But the dancing Bihu girls—where are they?”

The form was lost in English. It is hard to preserve the textures of longing in a language that is not native to the emotion it holds.

As I translated more of my mother’s poems, I realized her verses weren’t merely about nature or nostalgia—they were meditations on time, on impermanence, on the quiet griefs and sorrows that often go unnamed. She wrote about the serenity of pastoral life—boats crossing the Brahmaputra, girls walking barefoot in fields. I caught glimpses of her childhood surface in fragments. She wrote with a quiet courage, and in her words, I found a woman I did not fully know before.

At times, I wondered: would I have ever known this version of her—this poet, this translator of fairy tales—if not for the strange silence of the pandemic?

Language became our ritual, a new form of connection.

Through her writing, I learned parts of Assamese culture that had once been only figurative to me. I began asking questions—why do women wear gamusas on Bohag Bihu? Why is the Nahar tree considered sacred?

Yet, in this closeness, I couldn’t shake off the sense of an unreachable space between us. One that will always wall off a part of her identity from me.

It’s a haunting thought—that cultural alienation can affect your most intimate relationships. My divergence from Assamese, from the rhythm and symbols of my maternal language, creates a subtle but persistent veil between us. I understand her, and yet I do not. Not wholly.

Is this distance bridgeable? Will learning to read the script erase the chasm? Language is not constructed merely of script. It has its idioms and references. It is, above all, a way of seeing. I can learn to read Assamese, but can I learn to see the world as my mother sees it through her language—in metaphors shaped by the Brahmaputra, in the paddy fields of her childhood, the sound of the dhol during Bihu?

And yet, this act of translation—halting, imperfect, collaborative—is a kind of bridge. Perhaps the text we are creating, between her voice and my words, is the most honest representation of our inheritance. It is not a perfect transmission. But it is what happens when two people, linked by blood but divided by language, decide to meet in the middle.

The End