Sometimes, I have an identity crisis. Coming from Siliguri, Darjeeling district, am I or am I not from the North East? Am I a real Bengali? My dialect is totally different from the pretentious Calcutta Bengali, if I speak that, they look at me as if I am a junglee. My grandparents came from North-East of undivided Bengal. What am I? Does language give you an identity, or does your identity give you a language? At a friend’s sister’s Nikah, the sister’s in-laws from Muzzafarpur were suddenly discussing not the wedding but me- whether I was the only Assamese there. A relative had told me that my parents found me on the steps of the Mahakal temple in Darjeeling, because of the added skin above my eyes, my relatives and neigbours called me a “Nepali” kid. An SoBo ex-flatmate had remarked: you are from the North-east right? Seeing the Bengali novel on my desk: a Bengali from the North East! Two days later: your forefathers must have been from the Northeast! People in Delhi have bitched about Bengalis and their kaala jadu to me thinking I am a non-Bengali. In my hometown, random uncles to auto-bhaiyas talk to me in Hindi while they talk to my friends beside me in Bangla. While on a date in Chanakyapuri, seeing two Nepali girls strolling by, my date remarks: “Ye aapke waha se hain naa” Maybe, because my Bengali-ness has been denied to me since childhood, I am so vociferously Bengali. In reality, Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya all have emerged from Abahattha, the language of the Charyapada—the Charyapada which documents the Vajrayana tantric Buddhism in Eastern India. I would much rather go back to the root Abahattha, which documents the mystical tantric treatise of Buddhism, than just be limited to one of these identities. It is fun to confuse people, and I enjoy it quite a bit.
PS: In my childhood, I used to hate when people would call me Nepali for some odd reason. Now, in the K-pop era, I don’t mind any of that at all!
Clustering Thoughts 