206. Xenophobia

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Xenophobia: an undue or irrational fear of foreigners or outsiders

Okay,  some will say, but this is a natural human fight-or-flight response, stemming from the days when outsiders were a threat to one’s very survival; for that matter, they still can be, and are.

Fair enough; but allow me to make just three points.

First, note the “undue” and “irrational” in the definition:  a natural instinct to be a little wary of outsiders at first encounter is understandable; but a paranoia that persists even after the outsiders are a known quantity is unreasonable.

Second, ask yourself if you know who these outsiders are. Do you mean the people who come from outside your community or country or who speak a different language from your own? I submit to you that any of us can feel like or be perceived to be an outsider, even if we share the same nationality and language as our peers and have lived in the same community from birth. Once you recognize the impossibility of knowing who the outsiders are, xenophobia becomes all the more irrational.

The third point is the kicker. I propose that the fear of foreigners or outsiders often stems from the secret knowledge that you are an outsider yourself.  A story from my own experience, not a pretty one, may serve to illustrate.

When I was at boarding school in India two new students, a brother and sister, thirteen, perhaps fourteen years old, joined us. It might have been mid-year, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that they had just come from England where they had been living for a time, their parents having returned to India. Naturally, everything was new and strange to them, and they couldn’t help but compare much of what they were encountering with their experience in England.  It seemed to us, though, that every five minutes they were saying, “In England this” or “In England that.” We claimed to find it intensely irritating and started jeering, “In England,” whenever they opened their mouths.

They were pleasant, quiet, and good-natured, those two. The problem was ours, not theirs, but we made it theirs by the way we treated them. Why were we so unkind and intolerant? The obvious answer is that in the 1960’s, barely 20 years since Independence from British rule, we didn’t take kindly to anything Indian getting compared negatively to its English counterpart. But if I search my own motives, a still more troubling—and telling—explanation emerges. I was arguably at least as much of an outsider as the two newcomers were, perhaps more, in that I was half-English, had been born in England, and, at 13, had lived outside of India for almost half of my life. Of all people, I ought to have had some empathy for them, to have been able to reach out and make them feel welcome. But I didn’t, however ashamed I feel about it now. If they ever read this story, I hope they will be able to forgive me.

I could attempt to justify my behavior with the protestation that at the time I was unaware of the personal motivation for it, for the fears about my own belonging that made me challenge theirs all the more vehemently. But that is precisely my point: I contend that many of those who engage in xenophobic behavior are unaware that what drives it is their own insecurity about their status as insiders.

We are all foreigners. And it is our human task to help one another feel a little more at home.

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121. The Taste of Home

Living as we do outside both the countries where we and our parents were born and which most of our extended family still call home, we miss out on most of the rites of passage that punctuate and solemnize the important stages of life, especially births, marriages, anniversaries, and deaths. In all the forty-plus years that we have lived in the United States, I have been able to attend only two family weddings in England and one in India. Particularly in India, these are the occasions that bring the entire family together, even those who don’t see each from one year to the next.  Of course we have celebrated joyous occasions right here in the States, notably my son’s name ceremony, my sister’s wedding, and my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. I was never much for ritual anyway, having got married in a registry office, in the tradition of my parents before me. But when a close family member dies thousands of miles across the world, we feel the loss all the more keenly because we cannot participate with the family in the rites that mark the dear one’s passing.

Each in his or her own way, my parents had to learn to live with that separation from their families. Both of them received the news of the deaths of parents and siblings in a distant country, after they were already gone. In large part it was the pain of this separation that spurred me to make regular travel to India and England a priority in my adult life. This is much more of a possibility for me than it was for my parents before international travel was easy or affordable for the middle classes. With inexpensive calling plans, e-mail, and social media like Facebook, I can also keep in touch on a daily basis in a way that was impossible for them in earlier years. But still, when death strikes and we are oceans and continents away, there is a feeling of desolation that cannot be reached by virtual communication. At such times, I find, words do not help. Only coming together in person can possibly offer any comfort.

courtesy of Jyotsna Shahane at thecookscottage.com

It is here that besan laddus come in, those golden, golf-ball-sized, melt-in-your-mouth Indian sweets, made of toasted chickpea flour, confectioner’s sugar, shredded coconut, and pure butter. My father has never been a fan of sweets, but besan laddus are different: they are the taste of home. Some years ago, after we had received the news of a death in his family,  I found myself making a batch and taking it over to my parents’ house. I offered them silently, with a hug, and we sat with them over a cup of tea and reminisced about the dear departed one.  Since then I have started making them about once a year at Christmas, and on sad occasions when nothing else will suffice.

A few days ago I received the terrible news of the death of my cousin Raja. Raja-dada was my eldest cousin on my father’s side, the first-born son of my father’s eldest sister, Tai-atya. Like all his siblings, he was born in our recently-sold family home in Ratnagiri, his mother traveling home to be with her own mother for the birth. At that time my father’s youngest sister Manda was only ten years old, so Raja, at ten years older than me, was a kind of bridge between the generations. His daughter Pooja—now a mother herself—was born in the same year as Nikhil.

My father has always held a very soft spot in his heart for his sister, Raja’s mother, who also passed away too soon, and for all four of her children. I knew that the news would be very sad for him, and dreaded having to be the one to break it to him. So I made a batch of besan laddus and took it over to my parents’ house, where we sat quietly over tea and remembered dear Raja-dada. I showed my father the photographs from our most recent visit with Raja-dada in 2008 and gave him the blessed news of Pooja’s first-born son. And as I pushed the heavy stainless-steel container toward him, my heart leapt as he opened it and said, “besan laddus—my favorite.”

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117. Personal Space, Indian-Style

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Here in New England we don’t often need air-conditioning. At home, fans and the judicious opening and closing of windows and window-shades keep us quite comfortable, except for a few days in the height of summer when it is hard to sleep at night even with all the fans at full blast. We’ve been having that kind of a heatwave in Massachusetts these past few days, and last Thursday it was so hot that we turned on the ancient air-conditioner in one room and all piled into it together. We set up our laptops there, served the meals there, and enjoyed the unaccustomed pleasure of three generations sharing a crowded space. On our visits to India, though, we find that such togetherness is the norm; in fact, when offered greater personal space, Indians tend to feel lonely and isolated.

In June 1998 Nikhil and I were staying in Delhi with my cousin Jayant and his family during that seemingly interminable period of time when it is unbearably hot and although the monsoon rains are due “any day now,” no one is sure when or whether they will actually arrive. The time between when we took our morning baths and when our clothes were fully soaked with sweat was infinitessimal. The energy required to hail an auto-rickshaw and go about our daily business seemed impossible to muster. And yet life had to go on, and did—mostly on the large bed in the one air-conditioned room in the house. Every so often a power outage would drive us into the large central hall where we downed cup after cup of hot, milky tea, or into the stone-floored bathroom where we took more and more frequent cold-water baths. But most of the time we lolled in that air-conditioned bedroom, watching cricket, tennis (Wimbledon), football (World Cup), and an unending succession of Hindi films, emerging only in the relative cool of the evenings and for meals, where only Jaya’s culinary magic—and of course mangoes, the season’s chief compensation—could conjure up an appetite in us.

When Jayant came home for lunch he would change out of his sweat-soaked work clothes and stretch himself on the bed in a fresh cotton banyan and lungi, joining avidly in watching and singing along with whatever blockbuster happened to be blaring; after lunch we would all lie down for a little nap, somehow fitting three adults and three young teenagers on that same all-accommodating bed. After a few days my elder cousin joined us with his son, and now four adults and four children slept in that one blessedly cool room, three on the bed and five on mattresses on the floor.

Even when we visited Delhi in the winter we gathered in one room most of the time. My cousin’s children had their own spacious bedroom, but spent very little time in it, or in any other room of the house, for that matter. Why be alone when you could be together? It didn’t make sense. When I think of the small families in the United States who live in mansions with a separate room for each of the children, who spend much of their time alone behind closed doors, I marvel at the cultural difference in the need for personal space.

When Indian friends or family come to stay with us, it is the same as it is in India. In anticipation of one visit, we had bought a new bed and set it up in the den so that my friend and her mother would each have their own room. But when they arrived they far preferred to sleep in one bed together, so the new bed remained empty. Similarly when the wife of one of my cousins came to visit I had set up a bed specially for her, but she felt lonely and afraid. She had never slept alone and would have preferred to be in the same room as me. If they can’t share a bed, our Indian visitors prefer to sleep with their doors open, curl up or stretch out together on our beds and chat (preferably accompanied by a succession of savory snacks and cups of sweet tea), and generally feel that the more people sharing a space, the merrier. There is no shyness over women sharing beds with women, men with men, mothers with their children, children all together: it is all perfectly natural.

Of course this togetherness is not born solely out of love for people, but also of necessity, and of course it is not a trait exclusive to Indians. Growing up in cramped conditions, my English mother and her two elder sisters shared one bed and her three brothers shared another. But having emerged from poverty they did not continue this practice into their adulthood, valuing their privacy even as they I suspect that they were happiest when they were together. Perhaps as more Indians become affluent they too will begin to value their personal space over shared space; I hope not.

We shared a home with a group of friends until Nikhil was nearly six, so he grew up surrounded by people. When our nuclear family moved into a home of our own, he looked forward to visitors. Whenever someone came to visit whom he liked (and there were few he didn’t like), he would ask hopefully if they were going to stay over. And when he liked them a lot, he would ask if they were going to come and live with us. I like to think that this desire to live with others is a natural one for us humans, and that we should seek and encourage cooperative and collective uses of space, not just because it is the right thing to do in our crowded world, but also because it is so much more fun.

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113. Riding Like the Wind

My father used to carry me on the back seat of his bicycle and whistle as we whizzed downhill. When I asked if it was he who was making the sound, he would answer, “No, it’s only the wind whistling in your ears.” We both knew that he was teasing me, yet I always asked and he always gave the same reply.

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When I was given my first bike at age five I quickly discarded the little training wheels that came with it because my friend Colin, who already rode without them, teased me mercilessly and I couldn’t bear Colin calling me a baby. Once I was rid of them I rode all over IIT Kharagpur’s Hijli campus, sometimes with Colin, sometimes completely alone, as free as a bird. There were very few cars on the campus in the late 1950’s and everyone knew my family, so when we were not in school it was safe enough for my parents to allow me to stay out all day, returning only for the evening meal. Colin, an animal lover, would frequently fill his bike’s front basket with some living creature, take it home, and insist on keeping it, prevailing easily over his mother’s mild protestations. As with everything else, we rode our bikes competitively, but although Colin liked winning and was bigger and stronger than me, he made a noble concession: “You first me first.” I liked winning too, but I could live with that formulation.

While my parents could afford to be permissive, they still warned me not to talk to strangers, and especially not to go off with one, even if he said that he knew my father. But one day, when I must have been nearly six, the temptation proved too strong for me to withstand. I was out on my own that day and had ridden past the market, past the student hostels, down the broad, shady avenue to the main building of the  Institute. Hanging around outside, I met an IIT student who recognized me, though I didn’t know him. He said that he was going in to see a film and asked whether I would like to see the cartoon that preceded the main feature. If I hesitated it was only for an instant: I readily accompanied him inside. “Never take food from a stranger” was another oft-repeated admonition, but when he offered me a snack during the film I accepted that too, fully aware that I was breaking yet another of my parents’ cardinal rules. After the film I hightailed it home as fast as my short legs could pedal and arrived in the gathering dusk, just in time for dinner. I never told my parents where I had been and fortunately, they never asked (for I was a truthful child, if not always an obedient one).

My first big bike was a combined birthday and Christmas present when I was ten. It was a full-size woman’s model, Indian-made I’m sure, though I can’t remember the brand. Like clothes made a couple of sizes too big so that the child will grow into them, my bike was meant to last. Its handlebars were almost shoulder-high on me and I couldn’t pedal while sitting on the seat, but had to pump up and down furiously. Fortunately I had tremendous amounts of excess energy, so I was not in the least put out, but rather, proud of myself for being able to handle an adult-sized bike. When my legs were just long enough for my feet to reach the pedals, I remember my feeling of mastery as I steered a course as straight as an arrow, controlling the bike with legs alone—no hands.

My bike had several special features of which I was extremely proud. It had a kick-out stand, a back seat with a hinged clamp, and a headlight powered by a dynamo. The faster I pedaled, the brighter the headlight shone. And I was able to carry my little sister around on the back seat as my father had once carried me.

After coming to the United States where the culture and the roads were geared to automobiles, I never again used a bicycle the way I had as a child. In the 1970’s all the U.S. models seemed to be ten-speed racing bikes with hard, thin tires and seats higher than the handlebars, so that one had to ride with one’s bottom in the air and head down, craning one’s neck uncomfortably in order to see ahead. Then in the 1980’s came the low-riders, which my son rode and stunt riders used to perform elaborate wheelies but didn’t feel right for me; and by the 1990’s  when the bigger, sturdier mountain bikes came into fashion, I had lost the habit of riding altogether. Now we have two or three long-neglected bicycles out back, all tangled up in old grape vines, flat-tired and rusty.

Life has a way of coming full cycle. Our town prides itself on being bike-friendly and conservationist. It has a Public Transportation and Bicycle Committee, a beautiful bike path, and designated bike lanes on many of its roads. Perhaps it’s time to refurbish one of those old machines and hear the wind whistling in my ears once again.

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112. Хоттабыч in India

Children’s books were hard to come by in India during the 1960s, and I was always hungry for more. In those early years after Independence, the government was spending its resources on infrastructure like steel plants, and, where books were concerned, indigenous replacements for British colonial textbooks. Outside of school, aside from animal fables from the Panchatantra (the original source for many of Aesop’s fables, as my father always reminded me) and mythological tales from the epics and puranas published either in comic form by Anant Pai’s Amar Chitra Katha or inexpensive blue-and-white editions by K.M. Munshi’s Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, we had to rely on foreign books. Once every few months I was allowed to order a batch of Puffin paperbacks from the catalogue of a Calcutta-based bookshop which arrived in a delicious brown-paper parcel that I tore open and devoured greedily, and on birthdays and at Christmas Sally and I would each get a precious new hardcover Tin-Tin book to add to our collection. While English books were expensive and hard to get, books from the U.S. were nowhere to be seen. The only other books that were both readily available and affordable were Russian books published in and subsidized by the Soviet Union, translated into English and numerous Indian languages.

We had at least three of these Russian books. There was a collection of poems for children, including, I remember, one about a “tearful Ganya” (no it’s not a moo-cow’s moo/it’s tearful Ganya’s boo-hoo-hoo) and another about a little girl who refused to bathe, claiming that the dirt was “only sunburn, can’t you see?” We had a picture book of the Ukrainian folktale of the old man’s lost mitten—in Hindi, as I recall, and lavishly illustrated in the Russian folk art style. But by far our favorite, a handsome hardcover which we must have read and re-read dozens of times, was The Old Genie Hottabych, by Lazar Lagin. My Dad loved it too, and he used to read it aloud to us. Many of the repeated phrases in it (“your every word is my command”) became family sayings that are now part of my vocabulary. Our edition was in English, but quite recently I learned from my cousin Prasanna that he and his sister Vidya had read it in Marathi and similarly loved it as children.

Old Hottabych (and he is old—all of three thousand seven hundred and thirty-two) is a real-life genie, accidentally conjured up in Soviet-era Moscow by the twelve-year-old Volka Kostylkov when diving in the nearby river one morning before school. The genie he liberates is Hassan Abdurrakhman ibn Hottab, who had been imprisoned in the lamp by none other than “Sulayman, Son of David (on the twain be peace).” Who is this figure? As Hottabych himself brags, ask any genie, or ifrit, or shaitan, and he will tremble with fear at the very mention of his name. He has

a  beard down to his waist and [is] dressed  in an elegant turban,  a white coat of fine  wool richly embroidered in silver and gold,  gleaming  white silk puffed trousers and petal pink  morocco slippers with upturned toes.

Hottabych is loyal and generous to a fault, but also extremely hot-tempered, and thousands of years of imprisonment have done nothing to improve his mood. When he is angered, he is liable to flare up and turn the hapless object of his wrath into a toad or worse, and Volka is always having to intercede and beg for mercy on behalf of Hottabych’s wretched victims.

The humor in the book derives from the culture clash between the old-world Hottabych, whose worldview is shaped by a feudal monarchy and the upstanding young Pioneer (akin to an Eagle Scout, perhaps) Volka, who believes in Science, state ownership of property, and a classless society. Hottabych is always wanting to shower his young savior with riches beyond the dreams of avarice, but the prospect of such wealth appals Volka, who only wants to turn it over to the state. Hottabych is always towering over waitresses and shop clerks in a rage, ordering them to get down on their knees and speak respectfully to him and his young master, but they only laugh at him pityingly and tell him that, as a fellow-citizen, he should be ashamed of himself.

Hottabych first comes into Volka’s life when he is late for a big exam in Geography, one of his weakest subjects, though—as in India in the 1960s—not as important a subject as Grammar or Mathematics. By means of his magic, Hottabych transports him to the examination hall and proceeds to ventriloquize the answers to the Geography questions through Volka’s mouth, to the boy’s horror and mortification. The questions are on the country about which he knows the most, India, but his answers describe it as it was understood in Hottabych’s time:

“India, 0 my most respected teacher,  is located close  to the  edge of the Earth’s disc and is separated from this  edge by desolate and unexplored deserts, as  neither animals nor birds live to the east  of it.”  

When Volka’s teacher, Varvara Stepanovna, asks in disbelief what he means by “the earth’s disc” (Volka being an active member of the Moscow Planetarium’s astronomy club), the helpless boy replies:

“I presume  you are making fun of your most devoted pupil! If the Earth were  round,  the water would  run off it, and then  everyone  would die  of thirst and all the plants would dry up. The Earth, 0 most noble and honoured of all teachers and pedagogues,  has always had and does now have the shape of a flat disc, surrounded on all sides by a mighty river named ‘Ocean.’ The Earth  rests  on  six  elephants,  and they,  in  turn,  are standing  on  a tremendous turtle. That is how the world is made, 0 teacher!”

Fortunately for Volka, his teacher concludes that he is suffering from work-induced exhaustion and the school doctor orders a period of complete rest followed by an opportunity to retake the exam at a later date, but thereafter Hottabych is always ready to turn the unsuspecting teacher into a toad for disrespecting his young master, so Volka is perpetually terrified lest they run into her.

At one point in the novel, Volka even travels to India with Hottabych, in search of his best friend Zhenya, whom Hottabych has consigned to slavery in one of his rages. But instead of slavery, what Zhenya finds in India are friendly villagers who greet him with “Hindi Rusi bhai bhai” (Indians and Russians are brothers), treat him to an elephant ride, and regale him with song, including a rendition of Katyusha, a beloved Russian song from the Second World War. As children we too were familiar with the slogan, knew the Russian professors who were visiting faculty on our I.I.T. campus, and were aware that the U.S.S.R. was a friend of Independent India. At ten, I was also dimly aware of the different system of government in the Soviet Union, but saw no contradiction between the ideals of democracy and of socialism.

As children, we delighted in Hottabych’s unashamedly, nay, flagrantly retrograde political views. He was like an old grandfather who doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks of him and seems to delight in shocking people. Although, as young democratic-socialist nationalists of independent India, we sympathized and identified with Volka, we also found The Thousand and One Nights, from which Lazar Lagin had also drawn his inspiration, endlessly fascinating, perhaps in part because of the sterility of a scientific outlook shorn of all “superstition” and fantasy. Like Volka, we were proud of our scientific knowledge and technological accomplishments, but we wanted more magic and fewer exams in our lives as well.

It is only recently that I have learned more about the publication history of The Old Genie Hottabych and the biography of its author, Lazar Ginsberg (pen-name Lazar Lagin), who was a Jew from Belarus. He had to lie low for a time inside the Arctic Circle to escape Stalin’s purges, and the book was revised more than once to serve the political exigencies of the time. I do not know which version we read as children: no doubt it was one that had been approved by the government for export. But it is that version I love, propaganda and all.

Today, I still speak to my loved ones in the flowery superlatives of the old genie. After attending a soccer match with Volka, for instance, Hottabych addressed his beloved young savior as “O goalie of my soul” and “O stadium of my soul.” I have found myself addressing my son similarly ever since his earliest youth, substituting the word appropriate to the occasion, and completely forgetting whence that inflated turn of speech came, until I sat down to write this story.

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109. Hindi Lessons

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When my family left India for Greece in 1960 I was six and a half, and we had just started learning a second language in school. By the time we returned I was nine and a half and my peers at school in India had not only been studying a second language for some time but had started a third. Since I was enrolling in an English-medium school in West Bengal, according to India’s Three Language Formula (TLF) the second language would be Hindi, the national language, and the third, Bengali, the official language of the state. Upon entering St. Agnes Convent School in Kharagpur I had to take examinations in both languages; to my shame, my Hindi score was a resounding zero (a big laddu) and my Bengali score, for some inexplicable reason, a whopping six percent. Fortunately I was not very far behind my classmates in Bengali (at least those whose mother tongue was not Bengali), but catching up on Hindi was another matter.

Because my father is a perfectionist, he refused to teach Hindi to me on the grounds that he might pass on incorrect grammar and usage, even though he could speak Hindi reasonably well (and, of course, it shared a script and much of its vocabulary with his mother tongue of Marathi). So it fell to my English mother, who of necessity was entirely self-taught, to introduce me to the language. Mum made a large alphabet chart and posted it prominently, so that I could learn the characters and recite them aloud daily, memorizing them line by line: first the vowels— a-aa-i-ee-u-oo-ri, etcetera—and then the consonants: ka-kha-ga-gha-nga, cha-chha-ja-jha-nya and so on. Next she labeled every item in the house with a piece of paper proclaiming its Hindi name. And finally she engaged a Hindi tutor to come to the house weekly, after school.

My tutor was a very thin, quiet man who went over some basics of Hindi grammar with me for a few months, until I was more-or-less up to speed with my classmates at school. He didn’t have many pedagogical or even conversational skills and certainly not much creative imagination when it came to teaching a new language to a nine year-old, but he took me through simple drills, such as case signs and verb tenses. He must have taken on extra after-school tuition not out of any special vocation, but out of sheer economic necessity. All I remember about him are his shoes, thin, stiff leather lace-ups that were always polished to a shine and kept in meticulous condition. When I asked him about them once, he told me, to my amazement, that they were several years old. As a slapdash child who scuffed my shoes and stained my clothes on a daily basis, I could not imagine taking such care of something so well, and my rather nondescript tutor rose several notches in my estimation. Even at that age I must have felt sorry for him, because that small detail of his life gave me a glimpse of his pinched existence and made me realize what a struggle it must have been for him to hold on to middle-class respectability.

Our Hindi primers at St. Agnes, the Saral Bhasha (or Simple Language) series, were textbooks produced in the first decade after Independence and, as such, sought to inculcate in us the fundamentals of Indian citizenship, which included lessons in democracy (a story on Abraham Lincoln), in history both ancient and modern (tales from the Indian epics and biographies of Bapu-ji (Mahatma Gandhi) and Chacha Nehru), in cleanliness (a day in the life of an ideal boy), reverence for Mother, home, and the cow, and national pride (stories and poems about flag and country but also in praise of our geography and seasons).

I do not mean to mock or belittle the sentiments in our Hindi textbooks even though I look back at them now in recognition of the dominant ideology embedded in them; at that time some of the old British textbooks still lingered, and the newly independent nation was trying to produce home-grown texts to replace the paeans to daffodils, apples, snow, and other, more alienating elements of a foreign culture and value-system that had been imposed upon Indians through colonial education. The new nationalist ideals were duly inculcated, but neither the readings nor the pedagogy succeeded in awakening in me a love of the language itself.

At Mount Hermon our Hindi teacher was obviously a master of the language but seemed to resent having to teach it to us. I couldn’t understand his contempt until much later, when I was able to look back and gain some insight into his predicament. In post-Independence India, the Urdu and Persian words were expunged from Hindustani, reducing it to modern Hindi, a language created by politicians and used by bureaucrats, but not the living, spoken language of real people or the rich language of poetry, and not even the lyrics of Hindi film songs, that were almost all in Urdu, the language of love. It must have been Hindustani or Urdu that our teacher really loved, hence, I would guess, his disgust at the ungraceful prose that comprised most of our reading material and his frustration at our daily massacre of the language. As I recall, he became animated only when he taught us a short story by Premchand, who was the one Hindi writer on our syllabus for whom he seemed to have any respect. I’m afraid that I didn’t learn very much in his class and did barely mediocre work, excelling only in dictation, and then only because Hindi is a perfectly phonetic language and our teacher had perfect pronunciation.

As an adult I have sought to make up for my unsatisfactory Hindi lessons in childhood, lessons that left me with a crude approximation of the language that equips me, only a little better than my mother before me, to give directions to a rickshaw-wala or shop for goods in the market. I have studied Sanskrit at university in the U.S., bought Hindi dictionaries and comic books whenever I go back to India, and follow the BBC news headlines in Hindi on Twitter. However, because, with only one exception, the Indian side of my family lives in Maharashtra and speaks Marathi with great pride and proficiency (as well as fluent English), I have little opportunity or incentive to learn the national language over a regional one. In the 1990s I taught Nikhil the Devanagari script and attempted to find Hindi lessons for him in Amherst, but in vain. During our all-too-short stay in India in his childhood, when we divided our time between Delhi and Maharashtra, he had time to learn only a smattering of Hindi and Marathi words and phrases (but he did master Indian English, which I came to recognize and respect as a language all its own).

It occurs to me that my own unsatisfactory experience is comparable to the nation’s  experience with Hindi since Independence, during which time it has not succeeded in making it a truly national language, let alone in phasing out English, which remains the language of higher education and the law after nearly sixty-five years; if anything, a mastery of English has grown even more essential, with the rise of English as the dominant language of the Internet. But Hindi—and I mean official Hindi, not the living language as it is spoken in the regions where it is a mother tongue—is still the poor relation, the clunky currency of officialdom without either elegance or power. Perhaps it will remain so until it embraces its mongrel heritage and reclaims the beauty and riches of its multiple roots. But nonetheless I am grateful for the Hindi lessons I received in my youth, for without them I would be even further cut off from the culture and sensibilities of a country which will always remain a part of me. 

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108. Climb Over the Wall!

January, 1984: Andrew and I were on our honeymoon trip to India, visiting each and every one of my relatives, who welcomed Andrew into the family with open arms. We were now trying to meet up with Tai-atya, my father’s eldest sister, who we thought was in Delhi, staying with my cousin Jayant. But when we reached Delhi, Jayant was out of town and so, it seemed, were Tai-atya and Banawalikar-kaka. So instead, we got a hotel room in Delhi, visited the family of our dear friend Subhash, and made train reservations for Kanpur (not an easy task back in those days), where our elders would be staying with my cousin Vijay. Everything was set, and Vijay-dada was to meet us at the station; but that night everything seemed to go wrong.

The train was late. We arrived at Kanpur Central Railway Station quite late at night and couldn’t find Vijay-dada anywhere. (Later, it turned out that he had been there looking everywhere for us but in vain.) Wearily, we hailed an auto rickshaw, whose driver, upon hearing the address, had to be talked into accepting us: apparently, the Sales Tax Office was in a distant suburb several kilometers away.

Indian addresses, many-layered palimpsests of history and culture, can be difficult to decode. Even now, nearly sixty-five years after Independence, there is often the British street name, paired with the new(er), or newly restored Indian one, followed by a nearby landmark, such as “behind Odeon Cinema). In this case it was “opposite Sales Tax Office.” Some half-an-hour later the rickshaw-wala, tired and visibly irritated at the prospect of his long return journey, told us that we had arrived at the address we had given him. We were in a pitch-dark residential neighborhood with high walls enclosing the compounds. He made to offload our luggage, but we pleaded with him to wait until we could be sure that we were at the right place. He pointed impatiently to the Sales Tax Office and then to the walled compound opposite, but there was no sign of life anywhere and no identifying names on the gate—or indeed, any of the gates of the adjacent compounds. By now the rickshaw-wala was skeptical about us. I had told him that my cousin-brother lived here, but since neither I nor my husband looked Indian to him, he seriously doubted my word. He just wanted to get paid and out of there as soon as possible. Finally he threw down the gauntlet: “If you really are his sister, then climb over the wall!”

I looked helplessly at the forbidding wall with nothing but silence and darkness on either side and then back at the rickshaw-wala, but he was adamant. If we were not to be abandoned with all our luggage on an empty street in a remote neighborhood of a strange city, there was nothing for it but to take up his challenge. So I screwed up my courage, throwing fear, caution, and womanly modesty to the winds, and climbed.

I dropped to the ground on the other side, fully expecting to be lunged at by a pack of snarling dogs. Thankfully, dogs were nowhere to be seen, but neither was anything or anyone else. As I began to get my bearings and my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw a flickering light beside and to the back of the big house and made my way towards it. Finally I came upon a small group of men, servants probably, squatting comfortably round an open fire, chatting. I stepped out of the shadows and spoke to them in my halting, schoolgirl Hindi, explaining that I had come from Amreeka, naming my cousin, and asking if this was his house. They all started in terror as if they had seen an apparition. It  must have seemed to them that I had just materialized from nowhere—perhaps straight from America itself. At first they seemed unable to process the sounds emanating from my mouth as words, but finally one of them recognized Vijay-dada’s name, led me to the big house, and hammered on the front door. Eventually my cousin and his wife opened it, rubbing their eyes in sleepiness and surprise, but welcoming us lovingly nonetheless. After a light meal and a warm, milky drink, we dropped into the bed that had been made ready for us and fell asleep instantly. What a relief!

RBTB Hospital Compound, Delhi

It turned out that Tai-atya and Kaka were not in Kanpur after all but back in Delhi. So in the morning we made reservations for a return journey to Delhi the very next day, where at last we met up with them and had a lovely visit. Tai-atya plied us with her delicious home cooking and Banawalikar-kaka regaled us with stories over endless rounds of tea (I am a teetotaller, he chuckled jovially—totally tea!).

It turned out to have been fortunate that we returned to Delhi at that time, because soon after our return to the United States, dear Tai-atya passed away, carried off by a sudden brain fever. I remember the visit in every detail, from the terror of facing the climb over the compound wall to the tiny smudge of turmeric on my sari blouse from Tai-atya’s haldi-kumkum blessing, hastily pressed on my forehead as we took our leave from her. In this case I am grateful that turmeric leaves a permanent stain: I would not wish it otherwise.

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103. Holi, Water Play, Rites of Spring

During the long summers as a child in Athens I joined the other children—mainly boys—in the streets of our neighborhood playing with cheap, brightly-colored plastic water pistols. They held less than a cup of water, sprayed only a short distance, and had to be refilled frequently—from where I don’t remember, probably our mothers’ kitchen taps. Despite having only two moving parts they still broke frequently, but that was part of the fun, too—running to the kiosk at the bottom of the hill clutching a handful of small change, selecting the color of a brand-new model, and racing back to join the fray. Running about joyfully, shouting and screaming, and getting wet: this was the point of it all.

As a girl in Kharagpur I remember hiding under the bed on the day of Holi, the spring festival of colors, as a noisy, exuberant crowd of my father’s students marched inexorably towards our bungalow. It was exhilarating but frightening, that day when everyone abandoned their customary restraint and soaked each other from head to toe with colored water. Our hair and skin were stained with the powerful dyes for days afterward and people who had only one or two changes of  clothes had to wear the brightly stained garments all year. Everything was all right once the students actually arrived and my mother had plied them with sweets; it was listening to the drumming and the wild shouts and cries of the approaching mob (or so it felt to me) that was so terrifying. Wearing my oldest clothes, I too went out with my friends, doing the rounds of the neighborhood with our buckets of colored water and plastic water squirters, delighting in spraying as many people as we possibly could while getting drenched ourselves.

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During the half-year we lived in India when Nikhil was eight, we were living in Pune when Holi came around. In the days leading up to it, while my kaki and cousins  prepared modaks and other seasonal delicacies, Andrew and Nikhil ventured into the Tulsibag market on a quest for the traditional piston-like water squirters, or pichkaris. One afternoon, when I had woken up from my afternoon nap and was having a quiet cup of tea with my cousin, they returned with their arms full of parcels, grinning from ear to ear. Besides several packages of water balloons, they had found two gorgeous specimens, antique pichkaris made of heavy brass, which they promptly proceeded to take apart, put together again, and test out on anyone within range. That Holi they stationed themselves on the roof with their new pichkaris,  several buckets of colored water, and dozens of water balloons at the ready. I must admit that I hid out for much of the mayhem, but Nikhil and Andrew entered fully into the carnivalesque spirit of the day. The blistering heat of summer came on cue immediately after Holi and poor Nikhil was stricken with a dangerously high fever for the next week, which I still l blame on the amount of dirty water he must have swallowed inadvertently. But I suspect that if you asked him he would say that it was all worth it.

Back in the United States super soakers had come into fashion. No longer simple little water pistols with reservoirs no bigger than a tea-cup, these were massive, multi-barreled, and powerful. They were to the puny plastic water pistols we played with in Greece what machine guns are to single-shot pistols. Nikhil and his friends would have summer parties featuring super soakers where they  broke into two teams and raced around the yard getting each other and themselves as wet as possible, pausing only to fill their reservoirs from a 55-gallon drum. My father purchased a super soaker for the sole purpose of scaring the squirrels off his bird-feeder. When I went over to with Nikhil, Dad would call Nikhil aside conspiratorially and take him into the bathroom, where they would fill the bright-yellow plastic contraption and he would station Nikhil just inside the house, ready to take aim through the sliding doors if he spotted a troublemaking squirrel climbing up the trumpet-vine to the bird-feeder.

Thankfully, Nikhil was no longer interested in such things by the time Paintball came on the scene, although he enjoyed playing Laser Tag for a short period in his adolescence (probably because it involved a trip to the mall with a group of his friends). Somehow Paintball crossed a line for me and I found it—still find it—disturbing. It’s too much like hunting down a human being. Why is it that people seem to become jaded with simple pleasures? Why keep upping the ante, moving on to play that requires ever-bigger and more menacing paraphernalia? As a child, it didn’t even occur to me to think of our water pistols as weapons but, for me at least, Laser Tag and Paintball are too closely associated with war games ever to be just harmless play.

In recent years people in India have become more aware of the toxicity of the artificial dyes used at Holi and are urging the use of environmentally-friendly ones, which is entirely a good thing. Holi, traditionally a holiday that gives people a once-a-year license to let loose, can become threatening, especially for women and in large crowds. Harmless play can suddenly turn to violence, and many people opt to stay indoors, as I found myself doing instinctively when I hid under the bed as a young girl. But while there’s always a fine line between joyful abandon and dangerous loss of control, every society needs its rites of Spring. To echo today’s greeting from an old classmate of mine on Facebook, I wish everyone a happy, colorful and safe Holi!

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99. Paharganj, January 1984

When Andrew and I first arrived in Delhi on our honeymoon trip to India in late January 1984, we stayed for two or three days in a small hotel in Paharganj, in a room that was inexpensive, quite clean though altogether luxury-free, and respectable though perhaps not altogether secure. Almost everything worked, the people at the front desk seemed a little bemused by us but were helpful enough, and none of our things were stolen, though we made sure to carry our passports with us at all times.

One peaceful Sunday morning we emerged from the hotel into the square below. We were in a Sikh neighborhood and it seemed that all the men had just washed their hair and were out drying it in the weak January sun. Their long damp locks strewn over their shoulders, they lazed on string cots, talking quietly among themselves or simply basking in silence. With their hair down, they looked completely relaxed. In Indian English, open, when referring to hair, means loose; and with their hair loose, they looked completely open. Secure in their manhood and in the bosom of their community; allowing themselves to be vulnerable.

The scene made an impression upon me at the time because the men looked so natural and at ease, and there was an abandon in them that outsiders might never see. Sikh men are usually so well-groomed, their turbans tightly pleated, not a stray hair escaping. There was something almost sacred about it. I felt myself to be an intruder on their privacy and made sure not to stare as I walked by, but also felt happy and privileged to have glimpsed such an intimate scene.

In retrospect, though, the scene carries a much greater poignancy. In January, 1984 it was still possible for Sikh men to feel at ease in Paharganj; four months later, in early June 1984, the Indian Army, on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s orders, were to invade the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and four months after that, on October 31^st, 1984, Indira Gandhi was to be assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Over the four days that followed, the Sikh community in Delhi was targeted in an orchestrated orgy of violence that left nearly 3,000 dead (at a conservative estimate) and drove out tens of thousands more.

The peace of the scene that Sunday morning in Paharganj was soon to be shattered forever. How all the more fragile and precious it feels to me as I hold it carefully in my memory.

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Chronological Table of Contents

98. Oral Culture (so to speak)

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For me, a visit to the dentist is always a brush with mortality. I think of the gray wing and furred leg of Pappachi’s moth, Arundhati Roy’s chilling  image in The God of Small Things, brushing up against the carapace of my death-denying ego and reminding me as I grow long in the tooth that it is up to me alone to face life with courage and an open heart.

Sitting in the chair this morning I found myself musing on the different cultural practices pertaining to dental care and oral health in India, Britain, and the United States. In India, my father’s daily teeth-cleaning ritual included massaging the gums, and I learned to do the same. I mentioned this to the dental hygienist and she was polite but skeptical. She gave me a rubber-tipped instrument that she said would be good for my periodontal health but warned that although it advertised itself as promoting firm, healthy gums, “the research did not support” the benefits of gum massage. Still, whether or not the research supports it, gum massage can’t do any harm, and it certainly feels good.

Tongue-cleaning is another thing that Indians do daily (or used to do—perhaps I’m out of touch). It has always seemed essential to me and I wonder why Americans, who are such clean freaks when it comes to bathing and such fanatical flossers, have not taken to it. A pink tongue seems to me to epitomize good health, and I frequently notice with distaste the close-ups of the unsightly white tongues of American Idol contestants, mouths wide open in song (if you can call it song).

In India, dental cleanliness is very close to godliness. Every school primer drills children in brushing their teeth first thing in the morning. (Incidentally, in the U.S. one brushes one’s teeth, while in Britain the one cleans them. In India—in Hindi, at any rate—(daant saaf karna) the operative word is also cleaning.) My Indian family will not let a drop of food or drink—not even their morning cup of tea—pass their lips until they have done so. When I was growing up—and again, things may well have changed with globalization—it was quite common practice to pick one’s teeth with a twig  in company, something that in Europe and the U.S. is considered a social no-no, a practice that ought to be confined to the bathroom. I have always wondered why this is the case, finding it perfectly natural, not to mention health-promoting, behavior. Twigs from the medicinal neem tree were the instruments of choice in my childhood and, thankfully, are still used as natural toothbrushes throughout India, despite the growth in the promotion and sale of commercial toothbrushes. I remember that when he first returned to India some thirty years ago after completing his graduate studies in the States, my friend Ashok Jhunjhunwala started a campaign to encourage villagers to continue their indigenous practice of using neem twigs, despite the barrage of advertising exhorting them to take up the toothbrush.

White teeth are something which both Americans and Indians value; the British, not so much, fortunately for me. I was born with distinctly off-white teeth, and this natural disadvantage is deepened by my addiction to tea-drinking. When I return to India people regularly remark on the color of my teeth as a dead giveaway that I am not “really Indian”: apparently “real Indians” all have gleaming white teeth and they find mine distinctly untoothsome. Although this makes me wince, it is not rudeness on their part: there is just not the European–particularly the British—cultural taboo against “making personal remarks.” Still, it disturbed me enough that the last time I went to India I gave my teeth a home-whitening treatment beforehand; and sure enough, for the first time I received no comments about their color, to my relief.

When I first went back to India with Andrew after our marriage, we discovered Monkey Brand tooth powder—a coal-black powder in a bright red box claiming to be a healthy, Ayurvedic product. The idea of using black powder to achieve white teeth was appealing, and we still have a box of it on our bathroom shelf, but after a time we found it rather abrasive, wondered about its ingredients, and found ourselves switching to gentler toothpastes made of natural products. It may well promote dental health: if anyone can tell me more I would happily return to it.

One last toothy story: as recently as a generation ago, orthodontics was almost unheard of in India, except perhaps among the very wealthy, and it was quite common to encounter people with wildly protruding teeth, sometimes jutting out at near-ninety-degree angles. My parents told me a story of a relative of ours—or perhaps it was a family friend—whose daughter had protruding teeth, so much so that her parents had more-or-less given up on ever getting her married. This daughter, who was intelligent and spirited and wasn’t prepared to let herself be written off in this way, managed to get herself to the U.S. for further education, and once there, lost no time in having her teeth straightened. Marriage soon followed, as well as motherhood and a successful professional career. Today, looking at the perfect teeth of the younger generation and the celebrities and beauty queens increasingly prominent on the world stage, one would think that all Indians were blessed with naturally straight teeth as well as gleaming white ones; although perhaps economic status has as much to do with it as genetics.

In any case, the chill of my brush with mortality has now worn off enough for me to have consumed nearly half a packet of gummy bears, and I must go and brush my teeth before twenty minutes has elapsed—which, according to my cousin Jacky, is the grace period before tooth decay will begin to set in. Where is that neem twig when I need it?

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