Summary

In the section “The Triangle” Jhumpa summarizes the three languages she knows, and describes the relationships between herself and each of them. She spoke only Bengali until she was four. She remembers feeling traumatized when she went to nursery school and had to learn to speak in the unfamiliar language of English. While she describes Bengali as her mother, she says that English was her stepmother who took over raising her linguistically once she learned to read. She felt like she was split into two people with one being the girl who spoke Bengali at home as her parents wished and the other one the girl who spoke English at school. When she was 25, Jhumpa began studying Italian. It was with the addition of this language that a triangle was formed. She believes that her act of learning Italian somehow helped her to...