The name you didn't choose
The first time a stranger calls you Swami, something small shifts. You are standing at a tea stall near Erumeli, still adjusting to the weight of the mala around your neck, and the man pouring the tea, older, rougher hands, a different world on any other day, looks directly at you and says it. Swami. Not sir. Not anna. Swami. And you say it back, because that is what you do now, for the next 41 days of deeksha. The exchange takes two seconds. The feeling it leaves takes longer to name.
