My parents used to spend hours before road trips burning songs onto CDs.
This was 2010, 2011, maybe 2012 — before streaming, before playlists, before you could just hand someone your phone. My dad would sit at the laptop for what felt like the entire evening, and I’d stand behind him genuinely fascinated, not understanding what he was doing or why it was taking so long. Different CDs for different moods. Emotional ones. Upbeat ones. Party ones. He’d label them in his handwriting and stack them in the center console, and then we’d drive — to Yosemite, to Big Sur, to Half Moon Bay — with the music playing and my parents in the front seat and me in the back, not really listening.
The songs were in Hindi. They always were, in our house, in our car, on every road trip. They were just the air. I didn’t hear them as music exactly. I heard them the way you hear a ceiling fan — present, familiar, not quite registering.
Seventh grade, my mom gave me her old phone as a hand-me-down. No SIM, but it had storage. I took my dad’s earphones without asking and started building my own taste. The first song I chose for myself was Shawn Mendes. It was bad. I knew it was bad even then. But it was mine — chosen, deliberate, separate from the backseat and the CDs and the music my parents had curated before I knew what curation was.
My mom noticed. She was quietly offended, not in a joking way. Why aren’t you listening with us? I didn’t have a good answer. I just wanted my own soundtrack.
What I was really doing, though I wouldn’t have said it this way then, was individuating. Pulling away from the water I’d been swimming in. The Hindi music went into the background — still there, but no longer mine.
Around this time, I was in a classroom watching a boy listen to Bollywood songs while he drew. He was completely in the zone. Unbothered. Peaceful. The kind of absorbed you only get when the thing you’re consuming is exactly right for your interior. Someone laughed. I laughed too, or something close to it — the social reflex of a girl who had just learned that Hindi music was something to manage, not something to inhabit. I looked at him and felt bad almost immediately. He wasn’t performing for anyone. He was just listening.
It would take me years to understand that he had something I didn’t.
In high school, I started coming back to Bollywood music quietly. Not publicly — that would have been too much to explain, too much to defend. But privately, with earphones, in my room. The embarrassing part wasn’t the music itself. The embarrassing part was that I couldn’t listen to it around my parents. When I play an English song around them, the words pass through them without landing — they hear melody, not meaning. But Hindi? They’d understand every word. And I was sixteen, listening to songs about longing and love and heartbreak, and I couldn’t have that witnessed. The language that felt most intimate was also the one that offered no privacy.
So I kept it to myself.
College changed something. My own space, my own speakers, nobody to explain myself to. I started playing the music out loud again. I started sharing it with friends who didn’t grow up with it, who heard it fresh, who would ask what does that mean and I’d translate and hear the words differently in the act of explaining them.
And then something shifted that I don’t know how to fully account for.
The same songs I’d heard from the backseat my whole life — I started actually hearing them. Not as background. Not as air. Word by word, image by image, the way you read a poem slowly instead of scanning it. Songs about presence and absence. About love that doesn’t get to be. About rain as a feeling, not a weather. About being ruined, completely, by something worth being ruined by. About longing that has no earthly object.
I’d always known Hindi. I grew up speaking it, dreaming in it, thinking in it alongside English. But knowing a language and hearing it are different things. There’s a moment — I don’t know when exactly it happened — where comprehension became feeling. Where the words stopped being information and started being sensation. A good Hindi lyric doesn’t just tell you what someone feels. It unfurls it. It opens something up in your chest that English, for all its precision, reaches toward differently.
I’ve read that the language you dream in is usually the one you think in most deeply. I dream in both. But I feel in Hindi in a way that has no equivalent. It’s not that English songs don’t move me — they do. But they move me from the outside. Hindi moves me from somewhere older. Somewhere that was already there before I knew what music was.
I wonder sometimes if there’s a neurological explanation — something about how the mother tongue is stored differently, how emotional memory lives in the first language, how a word you learned before you could read it carries more than its meaning. Maybe. But the science doesn’t quite account for what it actually feels like. It feels like meditation without trying. Like returning to a room you’d forgotten you loved.
My mom loves a song we both grew up with. I found this out recently — that one of my favorite songs has always been one of hers — and something small rearranged itself in my chest. The words she was feeling on those road trips while my dad burned CDs and I sat in the backseat not listening — those are the same words hitting me now. We arrived at the same song from opposite ends of time. The language carried her to me, or me to her, I’m not sure which.
But it’s more than the music. The older I get, the more I see her in myself — in the way I move through a room, in the things I reach for when something hurts, in the specific texture of how I love. She used to say, do it for yourself before you have to do it for someone else. I heard it as instruction growing up. Now I understand it was something she was still learning too.
My mom had me at 25. I am about to turn 20. The distance between those numbers keeps shrinking. She wasn’t a fully formed person handing down wisdom from somewhere above me — she was young, figuring it out, becoming herself and a mother at the same time. We grew up together, in a way. I used to see my parents as parents. Now I’m starting to see them as people who were also once exactly where I am — uncertain, reaching, trying to build something that would last.
And in coming back to it, in finally hearing what they heard, I came back to them too — not as the people who raised me, but as the people they actually are. Flawed, tender, still becoming. Just like me.
I am so grateful my parents made me keep it. I know people who grew up in the US and lost their mother tongue — who can understand but not speak, who can speak but can’t read, who were discouraged from it entirely and now reach for it across a gap that’s hard to close. I still speak to my parents only in Hindi. It would feel wrong to switch — like using the formal register with someone you’ve always been informal with, like putting on a coat inside your own house.
The boy in art class was listening to Bollywood music while he drew. He was completely at peace with it. I laughed and then felt bad and then forgot about it for years.
I think about him now when I put my earphones in. When I let a Hindi song unfurl me in a way I wouldn’t have admitted to at thirteen. When I sit with the music my parents sat with, finally hearing what they heard, finally understanding that the language was never background noise.
It was always the foreground. I just had to grow into it.