Resurfacing

I always come back
to the work my grandfather did.
It lets me break
down
and it clears my
head
to gasp for grace.

I must give back, I must be here. 
Said his heart, to his ear,
Said the whistle of the train,
climbing the mound of his back,
climbing west, into the Himalayas.

I always circle back,
climbing west,
climbing west.

"Weeds Vs. Sidewalk"

In our garden, we grow weeds
in a cracked tub my parents keep by the sidewalk.

We chanced upon these weeds one spring, the ground so swampy,
the earthworms had beached themselves on the sidewalk.

My parents were so happy, in disbelief, collecting a prized Bangladeshi plant
from soil along American sidewalk!

I was young and imagined Bangladeshis as fourth friends,
braving puddles, just off the edge of the sidewalk,
Who followed me home, me alone,
only to sit in silence among the weeds.

Bengali Lessons

I is ami, rhyming with yummy.
You is thumi, rhyming with Rumi.

In Bengali, there are object pronouns.
As tu turns into te in Spanish,
thumi turns into thomakay,
which kind of sounds like stomachache.

Bhalo, in Bengali, means good.
It means satisfactory, proper, right,
well, nice.

Basha, in Bengali, means house or home
or where you're from.
My father uses the variation bari, when he speaks Bengali,
because up north in Rajshahi they speak Proper Bengali.
Rajshahi is officially
amar bari.
My ammu uses basha
because it's easier
on her southern dialect.
And by south, I mean Bhola,
which is a place
where I was born.

When we put the words together
for good
and
for home
we get the word for love: bhalobasha.

Bhalobasha is the noun and the root
that, when conjugated for ami,
is bhalobashi.

When we put the words together
(for good
and
for home)
Ami thomakay bhalobashi.

Radical Heritage

In Bangladesh, it's considered patriotic to be radically political. If you don't have any passionate political opinions, it's because you don't care about your country. If anyone's tried to kill you because of your provocative ideas, you are considered a hero in general consensus for having made people think. This basically being Humayun Azad's life story and him being my relative, no wonder my mom is wary of my literary and political leanings.

Though my literary aspirations are in vernacular English and my political aspirations are in American local government, I am after all, a Bengali educated in English and raised in America.

Azad wrote the Bengali equivalent of The Second Sex, was an anti-military, anti-religion satirist and wrote both adult and young adult fiction in addition to political criticism. He also wrote on and studied Bengali language linguistics. The political bent in his fiction is to be expected because Bangladeshis well know, as everyone should, that language is political. His form, therefore, suits his function, which is always a selling a point for me. Though I don't necessarily see eye to eye with him across the board, I have to admit that the man was a badass.

Bengali language is seeped in literary tradition well beyond Tagore (who Azad claimed to be a misogynist/chauvinist) and Arundhati Roy. Merely exposure to the language, apparently, can cause literariness, such as with immigrant Jhumpa Lahiri (and, I suspect, Rohinton Mistry although I'm not 100% positive on his first language). I'm just scratching the surface here. If I mention Bharati Mukherjee, I'm probably crossing into the realm of writers most people have never heard of, if I haven't been there for awhile already. I just wanted to add another person, Humayan Azad, to my readership's consciousness. If you had doubts about my writing capacity before, now you can rest assured that it's in my blood.