Baba,
That is what I call you in my head although I never actually call you that. I call you what you taught me as a kid: Daddy, the anglicized homophone a vain attempt on your part to make us into something we are not. You named yourself, Daddy. With a name that you gave you only gave me half of yourself, and I have been living in halves ever since. We are a bastard generation, born of two languages, of a culture torn into itself. We are divided somewhere deep inside our cores, I find it easier to write in English although the syllables sometimes twist around my tongue when I try to speak. I know some things mean more in Bangla, laced with a certain tenderness which only comes from home, or the illusion of it, and that is why I can never bring myself to let the words out of my mouth fearing that they would give away some part of me that I had kept safe till now, only for myself. I am a student of English literature, living in Kolkata, India. That itself should be an anomaly, a blight of 300 years of colonization that has estranged us from our locations, from language, from our own bodies and from our identities. It is difficult navigating two languages, especially when all of them come with their own wounds and bruises as language often does. It is difficult having to translate yourself to others all the time just to exist. It is difficult knowing your father with two names and not knowing which one is true, or truer, than the other, because names are but illusions, cages that hold our the shape of our bodies together so our fragile forms don't overspill into the air.
