A Third Culture

A third culture individual is someone who was raised outside or spent a considerable amount of their formative years in a culture different from their parents; in other words, me. Being born in Bangladesh in 1998, my name was true to my rich Bengali heritage, Nandita. It meant loved by all, which my mother deemed fitting for a baby girl who arrived earlier than she was supposed to. Before I knew it, I could think for myself and had successfully internalized, like most children, my own name, along with the numerous embarrassing nicknames. I never gave a second thought to the deep connection I established already to the unique sound of familiar voices articulating the centuries old arrangement of three handy vowels and four consonants.

It first began in elementary school. At 3 years of age I was definitely too young to remember my time in kindergarten, but my first memory of someone other than my family saying my name is still vividly ingrained in my mind. It was the first day of 1st grade and I was anxious, as one always is, while the strange new teacher called out strange new names as she took attendance. It’s interesting to me to this day that I don’t remember the teacher’s name or face yet her voice rings clearly in my head.

“Nandita?” she said confidently looking around the classroom of identical looking dark-haired heads, in identical blue and white uniforms. The “o” sound unique to the Bengali alphabet had been substituted for the “a” sound predominant in the English language. It came as a shock to me and I remember visibly progressing from confusion, to alarm, and finally to embarrassment. I had never heard my name pronounced the way my 1st grade teacher had. The very individual who was supposed to be my reference point for accuracy had said my name wrong.

As a result of years of colonization, followed suit by a fast paced globalizing world, Bangladesh much like the majority of developing nations, saw the rise of numerous private, English-speaking schools. These schools are still striving to provide the children of the upper middle class and the elite with an overwhelmingly British education. Thus, being put in the best “English Medium” school at that point in time, we were only allowed to converse in English; naturally my name was also printed in English on the attendance sheet and being possibly one of the only Bengali names among numerous Arabic ones, the most natural thing to do was to pronounce it the way she saw it. Thinking back on it, the problematic nature of this situation becomes evident when a Bangladeshi teacher, standing in a classroom full of impressionable Bangladeshi minds, realizes that speaking the language of another culture and people comes more naturally to her than her own.

Flash forward nearly seven years, and I’m sitting in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. How did I end up there you may ask? I wish there was an exciting story to tell behind it but there isn’t. My father was transitioning into a new job, and after many fights, tears, and fruitless conversations on my part, I was finally uprooted and hopped on a plane to East Africa.

By the end of my first six months living in Nairobi, I fell in love with the city, the people and my school; The International School of Kenya (ISK), was located in the suburbs of Nairobi, a five-minute walk from my diplomatic, gated off housing compound. Like most international schools, it boasted an unimaginably diverse array of students and faculty and a world-class education that would create leaders to face the challenges of tomorrow. I was finally beginning to grasp the concept of what it meant to be a third culture kid because as much as I connected with my own culture, I was beginning to form a special bond with Nairobi. It was the kind of bond one forms with the first place, person or thing that reminds them, for the first time, of the feeling of being at home after moving away. Even though ISK, for me, managed to live up to all it promised and made me prouder of my Bangladeshi culture and heritage than I had ever been before it simultaneously made me lose contact with it.

It was my second semester of school in ISK, and I was sitting in Science class with Ms. Heisler, who was telling us how she had to bring her dogs inside the house the night before because a runway leopard from Nairobi National Park was suspected to be living in her neighborhood. I was about to zone out when she finally returned her focus back to middle school science and asked the class a question about the solar system, as we were studying space at the time. Since no one raised their hand, I saw Ms. Heisler’s eyes move around the classroom and settle on me, “Nandita! Do you want to answer this one?”

Even though I answered correctly and there was nothing essentially embarrassing or outwardly hilarious about that specific science class, the reason it vividly remains in my memory is once again because of nothing other than my name. My brain has yet to explain to me why and how I only noticed the mispronunciation of my name now, even though everyone I had met previously hadn’t pronounced it correctly either. “Nan-di-ta”, she had turned the softer “d” and “t” sounds in my name into harder, harder sounding words more familiar to the English language. Now, on top of the loss of the vowels, the consonants of my name had been modified as well, rendering it completely different from the way I thought of it in my head.

I didn’t correct my teacher that day, and eventually before I even realized, while introducing myself, I was saying my name the way I thought would be the easiest for others to pronounce. Thinking back on it now, everyone else I knew at ISK with non-western names barely pronounced their own names correctly while others did the same. Softer consonants and rounder vowels were always sharpened until their edges could be used to hurt. Living in Kenya, I learnt more about other cultures and more people from different countries than I ever had before and felt myself become a part of a fast growing community of global nomads. However, it is only near the end of my school life that I finally began to acknowledge the largely Eurocentric nature of the so-called “international third culture” I prided myself on being a part of.