Idon’t know if you can tell, but I am one of those annoyingly polite parents. I waste a lot of time asking toddlers for permission, offer them elaborate choices and usually address them as aap instead of tum. I am also a mother-tongue chauvinist and liberally pile on my Hindustani on my children. Think Muslim socials in Eastmancolor.

To my credit, however, I do lose it properly once in a while. When that happens, I raise my voice and fire in rat-a-tat English: “What’s with this ridiculous deprived expression, man? Don’t I ever give you anything? Didn’t I just ask you what chocolate you want? If you want both Snickers and Gems, then say so. Don’t show me that sorry little face, Mamma is not really going to give me what I want. Get out of your victim state. Come on…”

By now it is not clear whether I am yelling at Aliza or myself. I shut up.

PAUSE in the room.

Aliza speaks. “Mamma, what you just said, can you say that again in Hindi?”

Choose your words: Children learn quickly. Photo: Thinkstock

My parents talk to each other in Punjabi. They chose to speak to us in Hindi. We went to schools where we were supposed to speak only in English. Then there is Dadaji, my grandfather who lives with us. In the 1920s, when he went to school in Punjab, the medium of instruction was Urdu and English. He reads the Gita every day for a few hours. In Urdu.

On the way to growing up and becoming a person of the modern world, instead of coming ashore with a handful of languages, I realized I had lost most of them on the way. Words wash up unexpectedly every now and then with music. Sometimes with a qawwali, a ghazal, or just a film song. As a parent, I decided to be somewhat systematic.

First, I chose their father carefully. When I first knew the charming, twinkly eyed man I eventually married, one of the tick marks on my checklist was on the entry: reads, writes and speaks Hindi fluently.

Our parents used to be anxious about whether we would speak English well enough. Our fear is that if we don’t intervene, our children will grow up monolingual, knowing only English well enough. And thus we have raised ours on a steady diet of polite Hindustani. Except once in a while, when I have no adult witnesses and the gears in my brain get stuck.

A couple of days after the day that I had yelled at Aliza, we are in the middle of a winter afternoon party.

I’m walking past the huddle of them giggling and exchanging stories when Aliza calls out to me. “Mamma!”

“Yes, Ali?”

“Mamma, that day when you got angry with me over the chocolate, you were just tired. And you didn’t know that.”

“Yes, Ali.”

“It wasn’t anything I had said.”

I sit down.

“Oh, Ali, I’m so sorry.”

I hold my ears. Because I broke my elbow as a teenager, it locks at a right angle, and I have to hold my left ear with my right hand and right ear with my left hand. Arms crossed like that, I look sorrier.

“I’m sorry, Ali. Should I become a murga also?” I start to sit on my haunches and hold my ears, looking like a sorry rooster.

“No, no, no,” she stops me.

I get up to move to another group of Sunday lunch people.

“And Mamma,” she calls out, “the other day when you got so upset because you thought that I had slapped myself in anger? I was not really angry at all. It was just a fly on my cheek.”

“Oh is that right, Ali?”

“Yes, you couldn’t see it, but it was a fly. Trying to make a hole in my cheek. And you thought I was slapping myself, ha ha!”

“I’m sorry, bambino,” I say and move really fast now. Run.

She’s got the words, this child. She’ll pick up the languages on the way.

Parenting: 1. Self-doubt: 0.

Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three.

Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com