Body

My mother, my sisters and I have a long-term project, one that has been underway for years. We are working to turn my father into a book-person. After dinner, while we all pull out our various novels, he retires to the TV room to watch CNN and old Telugu films. If one of us happens to interrupt him during the Indian movies, it takes him a moment to switch worlds. He has to return from the dusty movie-theater floor of his early 1980’s adolescence, back into the present where teenage daughters pester for cash and field-trip signatures. In the brief second of vertigo between realities, his eyes have the far-off glaze of a world I will never know. Recently, I realized the flaw in our project of turning Papa into a reader. We had been giving him the wrong books. Ray Bradbury, Dickens, and Chaim Potok were authors that we all had loved, but what would connect with my father? It was time to introduce Papa to South Asian literature.

*   *   *   *   *

My relationship with Indian authors has been complicated for some time now. I think that this is in part due to my relationship to India. India was home for the first nine years of my life, but today plays such a marginal role in defining me. It is because of this distance from my birthplace that I ask too much from Indian authors. I want them to tell me about the life I could have lived. I want to know what being an adolescent, a teen, then a university student would have been like if my parents had made the decision to stay. We had bought a plot of land and everything. What would it have been like to grow to maturity alongside childhood friends? To have a house that was ours, on land that actually belonged to us? To be able to travel to see Tatagaru and my Aunties for Easter and Christmas? Every now and then I get a Facebook request from a kid in my elementary school in India. Most of the girls went to St. Mary’s for high school, and then stayed in India for university. A lot of them are aspiring med students, engineers, and business majors. They dutifully followed the path set out for them. What if I had continued on it with them?  Chetan Bhagat’s book One Night at the Call Center chronicles the lives and work experience of young professionals in early 2000’s India. When I read the book for the first time, although it was a full 10 years after it was written, I tried to imagine that the six call-center agents in the novel were my group of friends. I asked Mr. Bhagat to tell me what dreams the call-center agent dreams. What ambitions, regrets, and secret desires do they harbor? What do they do at work, after work? What would I have done at work, after work? Here’s what he told me. I love the thought experiments that Indian authors force me into. I love and I hate them. They are a never ending whirlwind of what-ifs/what-could-have-beens/what-thens. Books like Chetan Bhagat’s give me a tantalizing and supremely frustrating glimpse into what the life of some of my old classmates might look like now, what mine might have looked like too.

I ask even more from the South Asian authors who write about the immigrant experience. I want them to show me that they know the loneliness of settling in the West. But wait, they’d better not make it too desolate, or my stomach will go queasy as throat-wrenching memories of our early days in America enter my headspace. Jhumpa Lahiri, you came very close. I almost had to shut The Namesake. Reading about Ashima’s first few days in the States was unbearable. Her musings while pregnant with Gogol, wishing she could give birth at her father’s house and not in the sterile, Western hospital, were heart breaking. But the Ganguli’s found nice Bengali-Boston friends. They were okay. Yes, Gogol had all sorts of identity issues but Jhumpa, thank you for redeeming the story for me. Here’s more on reading The Namesake. I want to, no I need to, believe that “real” Indian immigrants found community more easily than my strange, hybrid Dutch-Indian-American family. If I can believe that, then I know where to put the blame for our rocky road to assimilation. While we were having solitary Fourths and Thanksgivings in Malden, MA, the Ganguli’s and their Bengali community were enjoying a cookout with kebabs and samosas a few towns over in Cambridge, MA. Reading South Asian immigrant narratives allows me to imagine what-could-have-been if both my parents were Indian, if my first name was Sundari rather than my middle name, if I didn’t look more Hispanic than South Asian. Indian literature is then just a series of what-ifs for me. Those authors writing about the sub-continent tell me what going to St. Mary’s could have looked like. Those writing about the British-Indian or the Indian-American experience tell me what growing up in Sharon, MA, or some other Indian heavy community might have been like. 

Of course, there is the complicated bit. The majority of South Asian authors I have read are expatriates themselves. They too know the perilous position of being both an insider to Indian culture and an onlooker as well. Even as I rely on them to fill in the holes of my memories of India, they write to fill in those very holes for themselves. I have trust-issues when it comes to Indian authors. They write about the flavors, colors, scenes, and heartaches of the sub-continent, but Rohinton Mistry, can I trust you? Can I trust the descriptions of your Canadian educated self? How do I know that you too are not romanticizing the past like I know I surely do? I love how Salman Rushdie describes the tensions of being an expatriate writer. This is what Anuradha Dingwaney says about Rushdie’s relationship to his own writing, in Nelson’s Writers of the Indian Diaspora sourcebook:

“[Rushdie’s] “physical alienation” from India means that he cannot reclaim “precisely the thing that was lost” and is “obliged to deal in fragments”, to created “imaginary homelands; Indias of the mind” (76). However, in a characteristic Rushdian move, the migrant writer’s “long, geographical distance” from the culture he writes about and his access to “imaginative” and”partial” truth are turned into strengths only the migrant writer possesses” (Dingwaney in Nelson, 366).

The sub-quoted bits are taken from Rushdie’s speculations in “The Indian Writer in England”. The problem of rootlessness that the migrant writer has does not need to be the reason I turn away from their works. What I might need to do however is learn to ask just a little less of these authors. Yes, books have the power to transport, to teach empathy, to share experiences with new audiences. I am a Literary Studies major. I would not dedicate so much of my education to reading if I did not believe this. But, there is a divide between fiction and reality. I need to realize that these authors, migrant writers and native Indian writers alike, can only tell a fraction of reality. Their works can never represent the full picture of what it means to be South Asian, if there even is one full picture of Indian-ness. I need to give these authors the grace to explore India in the same ways that I need to, and in the different ways too.

I need to learn that a South Asian author is not “good” simply when I can fully see all of my life experiences reflected in their pages. Nor are they “good” when they craft a world in which I would have liked to live had things been different. I need to grant the same permission for nuance and intricacy  to Jhumpa as I do to Joyce or Flaubert. Salman Rushdie’s imagery of stories as Indian pickles comes to mind. At the end of Midnight’s Children, the protagonist links his writing process to the pickling process. Strong and at times contradictory flavors are combined together in the pickle jar. Saleem says, “in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection” (Rushdie 442). Likening the South Asian narrative to the “intricacies” and “subtlety” of flavors in a Priya pickle bottle might help me account for the mix of emotions I feel as I read these stories, emotions that I can’t quite distinguish or disentangle from one another. Maybe I should be thankful to my World Literature class for not forcing me to analyze a South Asian author. The close reading of that class was something I enjoyed doing for Notes from Underground, but could I have done it with the complicated blend that Rohinton Mistry’s words are to me? The analytical lens that we would have trained on those words might just have sapped them of their flavor. You cannot so easily anatomize a pickle jar into its various components, not once these ingredients have been mixed and preserved in the bittersweet juices of time.

 

2 thoughts on “Body

  1. Geoffrey Forrest Hicks

    Wow, Joanna. This is an amazing piece of writing. It’s a true expression of that spiritual journey of knowing oneself. I am extremely amazed by your brilliant writing. You’ve always been a strong writer.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *