Scented Name

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Long before he was a friend, I had tasted the pork pickle

he had transported trussed up in layers of plastic and news

paper pages. My mother stripped layer after layer, prying

away pieces of words that stuck to the jar as though closing

around an open wound. We knew his wife was a mother

with hands of a deity. My mother had saved the pickle for us.

You cannot buy this with money, she said. We blessed the hands

that made it, the unknown wife of the man I did not know.

When I did finally ask him for his name, twenty-five years later,

he described the villages his parents were born in. He paused

to correct himself, adjusting his memory, in a follow-up message

on WhatsApp. His name: the name of all those who came before

him in the villages across Dege, Nangchen, Zurmang.

There are many Chemes he said, even among us. I know

what he means by “us.” It’s not the same as the “us” he describes

in an interview a week later with a historian. The boundaries of us.

What’s lost, what’s recovered, what we cross daily to sing. In return,

my mother sent scented soap for his wife. The fragrance

of distant gardens; red rose, gardenia. She turned the world

in her palm. International. Classic. Red rose.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is Associate Professor at Villanova University. Her parents fled Tibet in 1959. Raised by her mother in Tibetan communities in Dharamsala, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, Dhompa earned a BA and an MA from Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, an MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks In Writing the Names (2000) and Recurring Gestures (2000). She has published the full-length poetry collections Rules of the House (2002), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011), which was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012. She is also the author of Revolute (2021). Dhompa’s non-fiction book based on her life is called A Home in Tibet (Penguin India, 2013), published in the United States as Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging (2016). Her latest book The Politics of Sorrow is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2025.