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The bakshanam is a pile on the kitchen counter.

Amma is here from Madras bearing her trademark murukku, karasevai, badusha, thattai, theratipaal and thenga burfi. A week from now is tamizh puthandu.

Many years ago, one puthandu, we stood in court where a judge declared us family. It has traditionally been a day when I make do with payasam. In the first few years of being an immigrant, I strove to recreate the festivities I grew up with. Eventually, I gave up. I infrequently wonder if I am depriving my kids of the culture they come from. A decade ago, there was a trace of guilt. Now I see only the labor of the women who carry it.

This is the hyphen in practice. Not the one on the page between “Tamil” and “American,” but the one in the kitchen at six in the morning, where a woman who was born in India stands in front of a miniature idol and wonders, quietly, how much of herself to give it.

There is no clean word in English for what we are doing. “Preserving culture” sounds like canning. “Honoring tradition” sounds like a plaque on a building no one enters anymore. What I am trying to do is simpler and harder: I am resisting a calendar that began somewhere else.

Today, Amma held out an ornate silver plate for me. An heirloom. One I will cherish as I offer kumkumam during Navarathri. Ammu and Pattu look at it. To them, it’s just a shiny plate. Laddu inspects it, eyes already on the earrings her Paati bought her.

Puthandu and new beginnings. Spring equinox. A time when the light returns in places that have four seasons. I look out my window and the magnolia is in full bloom. The serviceberry trees that line our side fence could put cherry blossoms to shame. Amma and Paati heralded the new year with tender neem leaves and mango pacchadi. Here, I will have to make something new. The mango pacchadi will probably stay; our local grocer already has the first crate in. The neem stays in Madras.

Pattu speaks Tamil the way she does chores: with concentration and occasional protest. Laddu uses three words for everything and deploys them with great confidence. Ammu understands more than she lets on. She sits through my phone calls with Amma and Athai and Chithi with her eyes on her phone, and later she’ll repeat a phrase back to me with exact inflection, as if she’s been taking notes.

I used to believe I would carry it all across. The language, the rituals, the knowledge of which phase of the moon ushered in Deepavali, the recipe for rava kesari that Amma made every birthday. Some of it has arrived. The rest I am still holding, hoping it comes through by proximity, by insistence, by the force of Vishnu Sahasranamam on low at six in the morning before anyone has had kaapi.

Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments on birthright citizenship. I read the coverage the way I read most things that touch my daughters’ futures: scanning for the part that names us. The advocates who filed briefs talked about H-1B families, green card backlogs, children who would arrive stateless into a country their parents helped build. My daughters were born in America. Their documents say so. But I know what I know about which questions get asked and of whom, about the distance between a legal guarantee and a life.

Puthandu arrives anyway.

We will mark it in our own way. The rava kesari will stay, though.