There’s a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about the meaning of one’s name, or one’s country of so-called origin, or to explain that the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there’s been an assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand. When it comes to my identity, the ways in which it confuses or interests others has consistently taken precedent, as if I am expected to remedy their curiosity before mediating my own. In this way, I’ve caught myself disengaging from myself, compromising instead of building aspirational stamina. While uncertainty about my future is of course not unique to me, I do marvel at the bounty of hesitation I have acquired over the years because I surreptitiously presumed potential was a dormant thing; that it only functions as a trait others see in me.
One response has been to blend in. When I was very young, I used to have a running tab of Indian names that were, I perceived, not so Indian. That could pass as what, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that they seemed more accessible. Anita was one of those names. Kiran too. Looking back, this kind of quiet yearning was not something that preoccupied or pained me so much as it was an element of some deeper and unmined sense of disorientation: that I am first-generation and, in turn, proficient at splintering who I am in order to accommodate everyone else’s environment. I’m in awe of people who appear immediately comfortable on a stranger’s or new friend’s couch because I am the friend who is always encouraged to take off my coat, to “make myself at home.”
To be first-generation means acquiescing to a lasting state of restlessness. It’s as if you’ve inherited not just your family’s knotted DNA but also the DNA acquired from their move, from veritable mileage, from the energy it took your parents to reestablish their lives. I grasped early—perhaps one February morning as I warmed my feet inside the car while my mother scraped snow off her windshield, her rosy cheeks emerging through icy diagonals on the glass—that my parents were not from here but from there: Kolkata. There she was, removing snow with great purpose and rhythm as I spasmed with chills until I was toasty and warm. There she was, my Anglo-Indian mother, Dolores. She from there but now living here, wearing winter boots and a puffy coat. And me, her daughter, who is from here but also, in some conveyed manner, from there too.
That distinction is one that accompanies me every day but one that I have been careful to never overly indulge. What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I’ve only experienced through photos, visits, food. It’s not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I’ve always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.
While in some ways my name is one of the smallest kernels of who I am, I now know that something far more furtive is at play when one’s name is misheard. The act of mishearing is not benign but ultimately silencing. A quash so subtle that—and here’s what I’m still working out—it develops into a feeling of invalidation. Nothing will make you fit in less than trying, constantly, to fit in: portioning your name, straightening your hair, developing a wary love-hate fascination to white moms whose pantries were stocked differently than yours, who touched your hair, admiring “how thick” it was.
Swapping between the varied pronunciations of my name had its effect too. When I was growing up in Montreal, my French teachers would sputter the D with a tsk, and at home, my father’s Bengali accent would round the Dh-oor sound. In my mind I always imagined his articulation written in felt marker; in bubble letters. But the North American way of saying my name is the one I’ve come to know and use. Durrrr-gah. Like the hum of a machine capped by the gleeful sound a wiggling baby makes after knocking over her bowl of Cheerios.
The first-person essay is not one that comes naturally to me. Who is this “I”? Am I entitled to her? Is she my voice, or is she the voice that is expected of me? One editor has urged me to claim the “I” instead of exhausting my rhetorical crutch: “One might say…” When I have a point to make, I’m tempted to sideline it or deceive myself of its ownership. To delight in anonymity. The way I see it, these admissions are everyday to anyone who was born accommodating—who’s read enough “I’s” in enough essays but has never seen “me.”
To want and to write in the first person are two actions that demand of you you. But this long and lanky “I” has never arrived at me freely. How can an “I” contain all of my many fragments and contradictions and all of me that is undiscovered? Is this “I” actually mine to own? If you are someone whose first-self intrigues others, writing in the first person necessitates that you grow fascinated with yourself.
The very desire to write it all down, to trust that my experience and what I might share of it has merit, is a foreign prerogative. Often, I’ll be thinking aloud with friends or deliberating on ideas that have been simmering or, on luckier occasions, ideas that have been connecting, and a friend will excitedly chime in, “You should write about that.” But the impulse to write it all down is at most secondary or tertiary, and generally not even on my radar. “Everything is copy,” Nora Ephron famously said. While those three words inspire, in my case, being held accountable for a voice that is perhaps not my own but is inferred because of my name or the color of my skin can be stifling. My first inclination is to let ideas sit. To overthink and wrestle with them. To feel outpaced by them. Or grow impatient with this odd affair I have with writing. And then maybe, just maybe, I’ll draft an email to a friend where I blunder the original purpose of my note: to seek out a single-person audience.
And so at twenty-eight, here I am working hard to unlearn. A couple years ago, my friend Sarah and I followed a group of friends to a bar after attending a panel organized by a magazine we’ve both contributed to. At some point a guy approached us and asked our names. “Sarah,” she said. I followed, only to be asked what I’ve now deemed the token follow-up question: “Where are you from?” Before I could answer, Sarah snapped back at him, “Why would you ask her that?” Sarah’s barbed inflection when she delivered her you and her that entirely delegitimized him. She not only rebuffed his question but the entitlement he’d likely subsisted on his whole life, unchecked. I was mortified at the time. It’s possible I recoiled into the collar of my coat. Sarah! Really?! We were new friends, and her sharp takedown of this stranger seemed unjust to me. Briefly I thought, Poor guy. That is, until the next morning when I woke up feeling light and unburdened.