There is a word in Tamil that English has no equivalent for. Idam. It means place, but also space, but also belonging. You say it when you are looking for where you fit. You say it when you have found something.
Lakshmi Iyer has been asking idam enge, where is my place, since she left Madras at twenty-five with a suitcase and an arranged marriage and landed in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the winters were grey and the nearest temple was a Sunday drive away. The Smudged Hyphen is what happened next: twenty years of building a life between worlds, gathered into a collection that moves from the private to the political and back.
The essays range across marriage and its long negotiations, the silence around money in adoption, the bewilderment of raising white daughters as a brown woman in America, the body's quiet rebellions in midlife, the grief that arrives when a parent dies and keeps arriving. Iyer writes about vibuthi and K-pop, the politics of joy and the labour of festivals no one else in the house understands, the moment she looked at her father, the man she had idolized for his silence, and understood that his silence had a different name.
She does not resolve these tensions. The hyphen in the title is smudged, not erased. The essays hold contradictions: love and clear-eyed reckoning, rootedness and restlessness, the home you carry and the home you keep making. For anyone who has stood between two places and wondered if the space between counts as somewhere.
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Lakshmi Iyer
Some questions follow you. For Lakshmi Iyer, they have always been the ones about belonging — where it comes from, how it’s made, whether it can be chosen.
Lakshmi writes Belonging, Mostly, a newsletter of essays at the intersection of adoption, Indian-American identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about family, culture, and home. Her writing moves between the personal and the political, the intimate and the expansive — tracing the fault lines of diaspora, the tender complications of adoptive motherhood, and what it means to raise children who are becoming themselves in a world that doesn’t always know what to make of them.
When she is not writing, she is watching the sky, losing herself in Korean and Chinese dramas, and being quietly astonished by her kids.
