the short version

Three letters. Smooth as a key. Light as a cup passed hand to hand. A name that enters without removing its shoes, A name that’s free of ceremony.

San.

My friends called me that years ago, Worn warm across years, close as marrow Until I came to a new country, and gave it to strangers Made it easy for the room to swallow.

Nobody put a knife to its neck, Nobody said: cut it down, trim it thin, Make it quick, make it clean, make it slick

I did it myself, call me San, I said Before anyone could stumble, Before any well-meaning mouth could fumble, Before the little embarrassed laugh, the apology, before the third try, The flustered south of silence, the question: am I saying that right?

And owned it I did, loved it cleanly, to the core, But I loved Sanyukta too, which still carried more.

Unity, it meant. Joined. Braided together.

A little Sanskrit hinge, a yoking, Of meaning at the fringe My mother anointing it before my first breath, Blessing my tiny hands to hold the world in all of its breadth

Before I could read it, the name had a start Without me, it traveled ahead, apart From itself, through every room it entered Stretched by aunties, by schoolteachers splintered Sweetened by cousins, scolded by mothers, In kitchens smelling of oil and rice, Answer sheets with the spelling wrong but twice My own, in passport queues, pujo crowds, Called from balconies through monsoon clouds, In airport sleep, half-prayers, full fevers No surname, yet one word too large for any single life to keep

I entered America, and the immigration office taught me Faith Its gods had no faces, only case numbers and a wraith Of automated emails and its hymns: bank statements, Passport scans, proof of funding, arrangements Of evidence I would not become A burden on my dreams.

Pending, in process, said the portal.

Purgatory dressed in sans-serif. I was not an immigrant, no. That’s too settled, Too certain of staying Neither visitor. Too brief, too soon betraying “Non-resident alien” I was assigned, My straying astronomical, like I’d drifted in from aphelion

The aphelion being the farthest reach of orbit from the known, They helped me chart my slow perihelion back, please take it one document at a time The oblation, I accepted. The antiphon: allow additional time. This was mercy, this was the grand design This was the call to grace: the holding, the benign.

When someone asked how are you and kept walking, I learned the permitted weather, the talking-point of “fine” I folded my long answer flat, trained the tongue to stand in line I learned to smile with no spillage, To carry whole cyclones in a paper cup and, say, The coffee is nice.

Back home, grief had no indoor voice It sat on the balcony and made its noise. Kheyechish? Have you eaten? Yes. Yet asked again, And it came with more rice. It fussed over your weight, your choices, your closing door, With someone opening the door before they knocked, And wounded to the core that you’d want it closed.

Bhaat, aabar. Rice, again, I’d complain. White, soft, ordinary, everywhere Rice on the plate like a duty. Rice in the pot like a verdict. Rice I pushed around with the arrogance of a child who thinks anything daily cannot be sacred.

Now, in an American kitchen; rice, I rinse, like an apology Water clouds white around my fingers. The cooker clicks. Steam rises, And suddenly there is a small Bengal inside the room, Not the grand Bengal of songs and speeches and revolutionary cigarette smoke, But the Bengal of starch, steel bowls, damp hair, and my mother saying eat before it gets cold.

But do not make me so pure now. Do not turn me into a homesick saint with a suitcase and a soft-focus past I packed. I planned. I prayed for distance to last. Bereft is not the word. I complained about the heat That wet animal of a yellow afternoon, its beat The dust, the traffic, the relatives, the imperatives Of a city I was glad to leave.

Calcutta was never gentle. Never will it be. Big talk, argument-sick, Tram-wired, rain-rotted, book-drunk, historic, thick With poetry under its nails, sewage at its feet. A city of goddesses and girl-children in the street, Of communists and of romance, Of milk-tea in cups of clay, Of walls peeling their hammers and sickles into the kalboishakhi’s grey A city where beauty did not cancel brutality’s face, Where love did not cancel suffocation’s embrace, Where intellect did not cancel its decay’s disgrace.

I have earned the right.

And I loved what came, the Wisconsin winter’s exact grey, The snow that muffles everything, the laughter Of an American summer’s long, bright day. For America did not cancel what I carried, It merely had it labeled, sorted, married to one word; Like the word at the back of every grocery store An aisle where all of us arrive, this one exile shore

International, the label says.

Where the mustard oil lives beside the mole paste, Alive under the same fluorescent patience of myriad tastes, The same curated, accounted-for arrangement For all of us others, these nations on a single consignment. What I once called kitchen, oil, and brine. What I once called mine.

So I have been making myself here, I’m grateful For what I brought in and what I found And the long, mouthful of a word between, Sanyukta Unity, it meant. Joined. A confluence of two rivers running to find each other, And having found each other, having found a ground.

So I carry Sanyukta in one hand, San in the other Both real, both mine. The long one like a spine. And the short one: a door I open easily. I have opened it before. And somewhere behind it is a little room Where no one else has been in, where I’m learning to bloom.

Jiggesh korechile kemon achi? You asked how I was? This time, don’t just move on.

I am pending. I am processing. I am portal-is-experiencing-high-volume. I am, officially, outside-normal-processing-time.

But I am joined.

Joined, not seamless. Joined, like how gold enters the crack And refuses to apologize for the light it gives back Joined, by scar, by steam, by syllable, by winter, by witness, visa, rice water, red hibiscus splinter I am the girl who left and meant to I am the girl who misses what she mocked I am the braid and the braiding I am the face my family hasn’t seen in a few years long

I am the heat I cursed and the snow I chose I am Durga and the river that swallows her at the close I am a mother tongue that knew Rabindrasangeet before prose And an English that has now learned to wear its shoes indoors. I am the but after love. I am the love before but.

And if you ask me how I am,

Wait.

Will you wait?

I have the long answer this time.