My father and I spent a lot of time in the car. This isn't surprising, of course, given the traffic situation here. During this time, we talked incessantly about Bangladesh, in English, as is our wont. We do this in America too, which is one of the reasons my Bangla is piss poor, my younger sister's even worse, and my little brother's downright embarrassing.

Abbu occasionally interrupted our conversation to speak to our driver, Jalil, in Bangla. Jalil was a wiry little man with an ambitious moustache and a nervous eager demeanour. He often hunched over the steering wheel as if to bodily urge the traffic jam loose. It was during one of these asides that I realised that my father was hilarious, in Bangla. Amma often alludes to Abbu's wit and humour. My siblings and I had always shrugged it off, seeing no sign of it ourselves. To us, Abbu was always the professor. Stern, meticulous, exceedingly formal. But that was in English. In Bangla, however, he swung from shuddho to slang in the space of a sentence. And his angle never failed to surprise me.

"Ey, Jalil miah!"

"Hah sir!" Jalil replied, half smiling in anticipation.

"Tomar horn-toh, gola kharap hoyah gesay. Theek korthay hobay-na?"

And Jalil and I were unable to respond because we were cracking up. Of course it's true that everyone contains multitudes. I just hadn't grasped that one of my father's was the jokester. Not that Abbu let go his lectures completely. At one point, we found out that Jalil had two kids back home, deshey, and he hadn't yet sent his daughter to school despite her being of age. Jalil soon had an earful about the necessity of education, particularly for girls, since they have enough disadvantages without being illiterate to boot.

In inspecting my own linguistic performance, and thus personality, I came up with this inescapable conclusion: in Bangla, I am a simpleton. My language skills are such that I can explain the psychological reasons why I don't like to eat meat, but not the political or environmental ones. I can describe my sister's love marriage with an American, but I can't tell you why it makes sense to choose your own partner in a place where families and friends are flung thousands of miles apart, and so you better be damn well-matched with the one person you get to see everyday.

February in Bangladesh has everyone abuzz with the books. People flood Bangla Academy every evening to browse the hundreds of new books being published in this month, listen to poets and writers and singers, remember the war we fought to speak the way we wanted. I was doing my best to regain some measure of the fluency of my childhood. It was perhaps an impossible task since I was only here for a few months. But now that I was aware of it, I was more troubled with the idea that my father had spent all my life outside his country, speaking a language that appeared to trap him into one limited version of himself. Especially since he had marched these streets with the throngs, half a century ago.

Inside the compound of Bangla Academy, there were still stalls being erected. It was only the beginning of the fair, and not everyone was set up. My father had a list of four books he wanted to buy, but tracking down each publisher's stall appeared to be a hopeless task. It seemed there was no order to the order of the stalls. When we finally found the information booth, the multiple page list of publishers was not alphabetised. My father and I looked at each other askance, and then tripped over each other to ask why.

"We have no software to do that," came the mumbled reply.

Hmmm...

Despite a rapid thumb and willing manner, a search of the list produced only one publisher on the list. Fine. We collected one book and kept wandering. Luckily, the dust wasn't bad yet. It was early afternoon, just after lunch, and book lovers were most likely enjoying a Friday siesta. By chance, we stumbled across a second publisher, one that the information desk promised was not on the list. The man behind the stall counter had a baul deep voice and longish hair to match. He laughed when Abbu asked him why he had been hiding his stall from the mela organisers.

"Sir, we should be on the list. We came yesterday," he said, his voice rumbling through his chest.

Abbu responded, "Pa goola dhoray gehsay, apneder khojay. Ar duita boi baki asay... Akhon bolen, ki korbo?"

Somehow, my father managed to sound graceful through his complaint. Maybe it was his long suffering tone. Or his elderly ways that automatically elicit tolerance. Or perhaps it was that in Bangla, Abbu came across exactly as he intended, which in this case turned out to be persuasive. The baul immediately sat Abbu down, got his list, and sent a boy running to find the other two books.

There is something about the way I speak English that is very different from the way I write it. My spoken English is often simplistic, blunt, repetitive. I'd like to think that in conversation, my language habits are more storyteller-like, easier to understand, more entertaining. And hopefully a front for a far more elegant and complicated interior.

For entirely different reasons, my spoken Bangla is also roundabout. My gaps in vocabulary force me to dance around topics, go off on tangents in order to explain the gist, sometimes unavoidably avoid the very thing I want to talk about.

My cousins on my father's side grew up in the village in Feni. When I was young and visiting Bangladesh in the summers, this stark difference in our cultural and geographic upbringing didn't matter. A jump in the pond or flick of the carom piece didn't require assimilation or empathy on either side. It was only as an adult that I became a stranger to my cousins, and they to me. The fact that they were all men now, and I a woman, made it even harder to relate. It was with their wives that I was expected to converse now, even though we'd just met. Luckily, every single one of my cousins was arranged (or in one case, chose) well. My bhabis are unilaterally gems, each sharper, more hysterical than the last. Give one an inch, and the mile was spent laughing, usually at the expense of each other and their unknowing husbands.

But how was I to answer their endless questions? After they overcame their initial shyness, they were insatiably curious. Who was it I was holding a candle for in America? There must be someone. Who wouldn't choose to get married, after all? If I wasn't already, at the rotten old age of 32, I must not want to at all, right? Not quite.

Dottie Bhabi got my love of the traveling life as she's the only of them who's left Bangladesh's borders. But she imagined I might want to be a nomad forever, which was certainly not the case. Dalia Bhabi and Momota Bhabi understood why I might not wish for all the responsibilities that came with starting a family. But they probably didn't know the importance I placed on commitment and loyalty. And was there any hope of explaining my reservations about the legal, informal, and patriarchal institution of wifedom? Not in Bangla anyway. No, in my father's mother tongue, I left my listeners with the impression that I didn't really know what I wanted, and perhaps hadn't even understood the matter altogether.

My father returned to the States shortly after my abortive social reprogramming attempt with the bhabis. And I found myself bereft. It wasn't just that I missed laughing at his silly jokes, at his charming finicky ways. It wasn't even the sudden loss of his instant Bangladeshi encyclopaedic knowledge, no matter the topic, social, political, lingual, or historical. It was the fact that when he left, he called it going home, whether he was speaking in English or Bangla. Even though there was no doubt in his mind where he was from. This meant he got my double cum halfwit life as a Bangladeshi American. And he forgave me my linguistic lapses, whether formulatory or fundamental. Mostly I missed him because despite our essential philosophic differences, he knows that there is more to me than what I'm saying and how I say it. He knows, from personal experience, that language is elemental describing who we are, yet telling only part of the whole story.

Abeer Hoque won the Tanenbaum Award for Nonfiction (San Francisco) in 2005.