Vtel 2025-10-28T13:19:15Z

Rain lashed against the bus window as we jolted along potholed roads deep into Maharashtra's heartland. My knuckles whitened around the metal rail - not from the turbulence, but from the dread of arriving at my ancestral village as the family's linguistic failure. Grandmother's letters always ended with "Learn your mother tongue," but twenty years of Gujarati-dominated family gatherings left my Marathi limited to awkward nods and food-related nouns. That humid evening, when Auntie Shobha burst t

Last Rosh Hashanah, at my cousin's crowded Tel Aviv apartment, the air thick with laughter and clinking glasses, I stood frozen. My great-aunt Rivka leaned in, her eyes sparkling, and rattled off a string of Hebrew faster than I could blink. All I caught was "ma nishma?"—how are you?—before my brain short-circuited. I mumbled a weak "beseder," fine, and watched her smile fade into pity. That moment, my cheeks burning like desert sun, I felt like a ghost in my own family story. Duolingo's cute ow