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Papa’s Email

I shared this project with my family, and this is what my father sent in response:

 

“Hi Jo,

      We have a writer among us! I am impressed by your writing and literary skills.  I like the way you have interacted with the South Asian Authors, namely, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rushdie etc. I am doing my best reading of books these days, especially books that are outside of my calling, work and interest. I must improve my reading ability, maybe I will keep reading your blog as you seem to succinctly capture the essence of many books.
      Thank you for prodding me to keep reading, don’t give up, it is doing a whole lot of good. I, am nearly finishing the book, ” A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry.  It brought back a lot of memories during my time in 70’s 80’s in India, especially growing up in a home where both my mom and dad were working for the government in a medical field.  I was aware of those, “family planning operations”. I was also reminded of a soap called “Cinthol” which was a family soap we all used to take our showers. Many still use it to this day.
      Certainly reading books written by South Asian Indian authors about the life in India keeps me and us in touch with our roots.  Keep exploring; keep up your writing skills.
Much Love,
Papa”

Writer’s Memo

Creative writing always comes with hours worth of writers-block for me. Years of literary analysis papers leave me lost when I don’t have to convince my reader of my thesis, when I don’t even need a thesis in the first place. The body of this writing project was a week-long process. I spent an entire Saturday re-reading my favorite South Asian authors, tucking sticky notes in their books for quotes that I wanted to refer back to. Sitting down to write that evening was not fruitful however. I needed more time. I took that week to allow their words to percolate in my head, and returned to the essay after talking with Professor Shapiro. This second time around I had more direction and vision. With creative writing, unlike analytical papers, I find myself doing a lot more micro-editing. I change a word, and then change it back, and then change it once again. I want the words themselves to be beautiful, not merely convincing.

The smaller subsections of my writing project were composed in more of a stream-of-consciousness style. They were intended as a personal chronicle of my inner thoughts and experiences with certain books. I am including them for the public website, but in my mind, they are less polished than the body of the work hopefully reads as.

What was the longest and most time-consuming part of this project was compiling all my disparate pieces of writing into a website format. I have never worked with a medium like WordPress before, so there was a steep learning curve in figuring out this technology. I went through a day’s worth of moving menus, changing backgrounds, and fixing broken hyperlinks. I had not spent so much time on a creative, visual project in a long while and I wanted it to be perfect. The minimalistic template that I ended up choosing after three different versions of the website allows my writing to stand alone and speak for itself.

This project was a unique challenge on multiple accounts. Firstly, I had to probe into my own psyche, asking myself hard questions about identity and my family’s past. I had to write without the helpful guidelines of a thesis or central question. Finally, my choice to incorporate media, something that I am thoroughly incompetent at navigating, gave higher stakes to the whole endeavor. I wanted to create website that I could share with former teachers, with my sisters, my mother, my friends. All together, I truly feel as though I “wrote beyond the classroom”. The normal expectations and limits that three years of academic writing have asked of me were gone and the freedom was exhilarating. I created a project that I am proud to share and one that I hope will be the first step in fulfilling my quiet desire to carve out a corner of the Internet for my own writing.

Bindi Babes

The first books I read with South Asian characters were Narinder Dhami’s novel series for pre-teens, The Bindi Babes. Dhami herself was born and raised in Britain, with a Punjabi father and English mother. The Bindi Babes told the stories of three sisters growing up in Britain in a Punjabi household. Their strict Punjabi auntie comes to take care of them when their mother dies, and a clash of cultures ensues. The fashionable, popular and confident sisters were my role models as a 10 year old. They were forever getting into hilarious scrapes, and navigated their multiple worlds with assurance and always with style.

Return to “Body”.

I love how the cover speaks to the multiple worlds that the three sisters have to live in.

Jhumpa Lahiri

On Reading The Namesake in the Netherlands

Yes, I almost had to close the book that Jhumpa Lahiri is best known for. I genuinely could not stomach it. Here was the problem; I started reading the novel, suspended mid-air, somewhere between America’s East Coast and Iceland. My family was on its way to visit our extended family in the Netherlands. My worlds were already shifting at an alarming rate. All of a sudden I went from summer camp-life to Dutch farm life in a matter of 48 hours. I was back in the house where we used to come all those years ago, as children. We’d travel from India for my parents to do fundraising in Holland and stay in my aunt’s farmhouse. This time around the house was smaller. Actually, no, we had all grown to our full adult sizes. The angst in my brain was potent. I was in the height of gloomy highschooler-dom, reflecting on summer vacations of my youth, realizing that time had moved so far forward. And then Jhumpa inserted herself into the picture. Her mournful reflections on foreignness, on loneliness, on migration and assimilation were heightened by the realization that the last time we were in Holland was on our way from India to America. In the eight years since, we had developed a life for ourselves in Massachusetts, but always with important chunks missing. Reading about Ashima’s lonely first days would have dragged tears from me even in Boston. But in the strange, liminal space of betweenness that Holland was for me, half-way away from both India and America, Lahiri’s words were crippling. I literally locked myself up in the attic-room to finish the book, refusing to be a social, happy member of my family. I heard my mother call her best friend on the phone, asking her if we could borrow a guitar so that “Joanna had something to do, I think she is depressed”. That was the first time ever, in my conscious adolescent memory, that my mother could call a friend for a favor without any hesitation or second-guessing. She was at home in Holland. I was not. Would I be “at home” back in India? No. In Boston? Probably not without the same identity issues as Gogol had.

 

Return to “Body”.

Chetan Bhagat

Here’s what Mr. Bhagat told me about…

…getting ready for work at the call-center (8:31 pm):

“ Winter in Delhi is a bitch. I brushed my teeth and used the steel plates as a mirror to comb my hair. Shyam had turned into Sam and Sam’s day had just begun …I waved good-by to everyone, but no one acknowledged me. It wasn’t surprising. My cousins are all on their way to becoming doctors or engineers. You could say I am the black sheep of my family. In fact, the only reason people even talk to me is because I have a job and get a salary at the end of the month …With money in your wallet the world gives you some respect and lets you breathe” (Bhagat, 18).

 

How would I have found work in a nation where so many young people are unemployed? I probably would have still been a teacher, but what a different world that would have been. Rote memorization, chalk boards, and “the Sun is a big ball of gas” repeated 25 times over.

 

About…conversations on nights out at the disco:

“ “Come on, Vroom. I thought you said money’s a good thing. That’s how we’ll beat the Americans, right?” Priyanka said with the confidence that comes from drinking a Long Island Iced Tea in seven minutes…

“Yes, doesn’t money pay for your mobile phones, pizzas, and discos?” I asked.

“Yes, but the difference is that I’ve earned it. These rich kids, they don’t have a clue how hard it is to make cash…it takes me almost a full night of two hundred irritation Americans screaming in my ear to earn 300 bucks…We get paid well, fifteen thousand a month. Fuck, that’s almost twelve dollars a day. Wow, I make as much a day as a U.S. burger boy makes in two hours. Not bad for my college degree. Not bad at all. Fucking nearly double what I made as a journalist anyway.” Vroom pushed his empty glass and it slid to the other end of the table.” (Bhagat, 111).

 

Return to “Body”.

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.