THOOMAR (তোমার, commonly tomar; possessive pronoun)
Yours; belonging to you. A Sylheti-inflected transliteration of Bangla, shaped by distance and time.
Spanning childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, this collection invites readers to witness the experience of a queer South Asian person growing up. It follows fifteen LGBTQIA+ Desi writers through the friction of becoming themselves. Their stories are hardly alike-two trans siblings disjointed at a Rakhi ceremony, a high-school friendship that means more to one girl than the other, an uncomfortable influx of DMs from closeted brown uncles-yet each contends with the same chaos and contradiction that, at one point or another, struck them all. How do I find love for a culture, its religions, its traditions, its people, that perhaps doesn't love me back?
Each story began as mine, written from a life lived by one person. Together, they became ours, knitted side by side into a constellation of community. And now, whether you find yourself within the mess we have and love, or are on an entirely different journey to make sense of your own, these stories are yours.