Ironic, isn’t it? For someone who hates working in groups and being forced to work with people that rather be doing anything else but the task given to you, to be named "unity". She thinks being around people is fine and all but her name, it’s a… it’s… it’s a melody she could never bring herself to sing.

 

The name, the word clung to her like a shadow trailing her throughout the clamour of childhood and teen year’s sharp jagged teeth, waiting for a reason to bite. She had many reasons to be attacked, it was just another to the list. They have said it meant unity, a word her parents laced with pride and reverence. Yet to Uhinee, it felt solid as stone - solid, unyielding, impenetrable, and impossible to ignore.

 

In classrooms, her name became a mumble, an awkward stumble of syllables, an uncoordinated dance on the teacher’s tongue. The laughter that followed wasn’t cruel, per se, but stung nevertheless. Even the looks of pity, after all everyone was unique. She tried to believe it, she had grown up being taught to embrace her weirdness, her uniqueness; after all she was “Unique Uhinee” in all the icebreaker games. What else was different, you ask? Her foreign tongue when talking to her Maa. Not Mum or Mom, but her Maa. Or not Dad, but Baba. Yet she never felt uncomfortable with these names. It was only her own, that she despised.  

 

She envied the simplicity of others - their easy syllables, their unremarkable meanings. Names that passed unnoticed or unremarked. Not a burden. She desperately wished to be anonymous, away from the spotlight that showed everytime she met someone new. She wished she could blend into the stream but no she stood still as stone. Immovable and exposed. 

 

At home, she barely even heard the word that defined her. Always nicknames, as was the tradition of Bengali households. Nevertheless it was a thread tying her to the stories of ancestors, a reminder that ‘all was united as one”. But for her, it wasn’t a connection she had chosen, an expectation she didn't want to carry.

 

And yet she endured. The name endured, and she with it. No matter how she fought it, how she wished it away, it lingered as steady as the pulse of the blood running in veins. Constant and unyielding. A night came, she remembers it distinctly, a night unlike any other. It was a starry night, they pressed themselves against the glass window. Uhinee sat with her name. She drew the “U” and ended with the
“E” in her odd slanted half cursive, half chicken scratch handwriting. The window had condensation and with the moonlight falling right in. She saw the words settle into her hands like unfamiliar soil. Tracing each letter on the window, she wrote “uhinee” once again. Uhinee thought of all the stories tying her name to her - their weight, their worth - and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, she didn’t feel resentment. 

 

She let the sound linger in her mind, soft, and unspoken. uhinee. The burden no longer feels heavy with stones but light as a feather. What had felt like a demand, a pressure for perfection and holding things together. Unity was the quiet acknowledgement of being woven into the world’s fabric, imperfect but necessary

 

At that moment, she no longer felt so alone. So isolated because of her name. She didn’t feel the need to fight it. In that moment she was truly with herself, all of it; even her name. 

 

It was simply her name, and that was enough.