American by Birth, Bangladeshi by Lineage (2)
Ipshita’s parents are Bangladeshis at heart. They want to
expose their child to both cultures from a young age. They believe it will
enrich her as a person. The two-and-a-half year old Ipshita already knows two
languages. She is fluent in Bengali. She understands English but is yet to form
long sentences in English. Her pre-school teacher said that her spoken English
would improve by the end of the spring semester.
Ipshita wears both Easter and Western clothes. When she
visits Bangladesh with her parents she wears salwar suits. She sometimes wears
salwar suits at home too. She loves her South Asian fancy dresses. They are so
brightly colored! She has quite a few of them – she got a couple of them as
gifts from her extended family in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and her
parents’ city.
She visited Dhaka twice in the last two years. The city was always too hot and humid for her. Although she did well during her first trip, on her second trip to Dhaka last September, she was ill most of
the time with an upset tummy. Nonetheless Ipshita wants to visit Dhaka again.
They will skip 2015 and will perhaps visit Dhaka again in 2016.
The journey to Dhaka has so far been stressful for Ipshita.
They fly from the Dulles International Airport, which is almost a 2-hour ride
from their home in Wilmington, Delware. It takes some long 14 hours to fly from
there to Dubai, where they have their stopover if they fly Emirates. From Dubai it takes another 5 hours to reach
Dhaka. Ipshita dislikes being in any confined space so plane journeys are never
pleasurable for her. She loses her appetite too, so her parents have to return
untouched trays of food to the cabin crew during mealtimes.
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