My last name in its original Bengali form is Mukhopadhyay. Mukhya means primary. Upadhyay means teacher. My ancestors — the men of my lineage — ran a Sanskrit school in their village — Bohor, in Bikrampur (now Munshiganj), in what is now Bangladesh. They were not just Brahmins, they were the crème-de-la-crème of Brahmins — the Kulin Brahmins. They taught the sacred language and religious texts to those they deemed worthy of receiving it.

I did not choose this name, or this lineage. It chose me, the way all inherited things do — arriving before we have the language to question or refuse them.

The school is gone now. The language scattered. My family left Bangladesh before partition — partly because they were driven out by British-inflamed religious strife, and partly because they had themselves made their own corner of the world uninhabitable. The Brahmin entitlement, the caste hierarchy, the quiet violence of deciding who is pure and who is not — these too are part of what I carry. Perpetrators and refugees, sometimes in the same generation. I hold this without resolution because it does not resolve.

What I know is this: something in the lineage was true. The impulse toward the sacred. The conviction that language matters. Correct pronunciation, correct diction — matters. The willingness to sit with a student and attend to what they are trying to say. These things crossed the water with my grandparents, arrived in Kolkata and Cuttack, then Delhi, then New York, and found their way — somehow — into me.

But the masculine transmission model could not survive the crossing intact. Knowledge-as-property, wisdom-as-hierarchy, the sacred-as-exclusive — these shed themselves somewhere over the ocean, or in the laboratories of a premier medical school, or in the moment I first sat with a spiritual companionee and understood that my job was not to teach but to attend, and to follow the movement of their own soul.

What emerged instead: a practice of entering questions together. Of treating the not-knowing as the most honest place to begin.

My ancestors would not recognize this as teaching. I think they might, if they looked closely enough, recognize it as something older than their schools — something that was already alive in the villages before the Sanskrit was introduced, before the hierarchy was imposed, before the idea that some knowledge should be withheld from some people took root in the soil of Bengal.

The Goddess was always there. In the Bengali household of my childhood, the face of god was feminine by default. Durga arriving each autumn in her ten-armed splendor, Kali presiding over the cycle from womb to tomb and back again. The festivals — sarbojonin, open to all comers regardless of caste or religion or class — were the democracy my Brahmin ancestors could not practice in their daily lives.

I grew up knowing the divine as fierce and tender simultaneously. It is only later, living in the West, that I understood what a gift this was — and what a rarity. Here the mother-goddess is mostly absent or domesticated. The fierce face of the feminine is feared, pathologized, suppressed.

I have spent my adult life bringing her back. Not as a theological project — as a devotional one. She arrives in the morning when I light the candle at my altar. She arrives in the sermon when something fiercer than I planned comes through. She arrives in the poem, in the dream, in the confocal image of a cell that suddenly looks exactly like a mandala.

She was never absent. She was waiting for someone to stop being afraid of her.

There are two rivers I have lived beside.

The first is the river system of the Bengal delta — the Padma, the Meghna, the Brahmaputra, the hundred unnamed tributaries that make this the largest river delta on earth. I stood at its edge only once — when I arranged a trip with my father so he could visit the site of his ancestral village, which has since been claimed by the constant negotiation of water and land. My family left two generations before I was born. But I carry this delta in my body as a pull, an orientation, a direction that the compass of the soul returns to.

The second is the East River, which is not technically a river but a tidal strait — brackish, flowing both ways, neither fully fresh nor fully salt. I have lived beside it for decades now, on Roosevelt Island, watching it change with the light and the tide and the season.

The East River does not know it is in conversation with the Bengal delta. But I do. Every morning when I look out at the water I am standing at the confluence of two rivers — the one I live beside and the one that lives inside me. A different river, and yet carrying the same questions. What does the water remember? What does it carry that has no name? What does it mean to be exiled from a place you have visited only once, as a tourist?

I came to the United States at twenty-seven. I arrived with a doctorate and an accent that most pegged as British. Oh, the legacy of colonization — although I was born in Independent India! I have been here long enough that the American idiom has become, for most purposes, my primary language — the language I think in, and write in. Dreams are another matter altogether. The language in my dreams, to this day, changes based on the context and location of the dream. This is its own kind of exile. The tongue that carries your prayers is the tongue that was taught to you by those who colonized the land on which you now stand.

I hold this too. Without resolution.