It is early Sunday afternoon and the sky outside is dark and gray; it has already rained three times this morning, repeated gentle mists that turn violent within ten minutes, rendering the dirt road that we live off of almost impassable. From the fifth floor, the road looks muddy and puddly and dirty and the rolled-up salwars and hiked-up saris of the people passing by is a reminder to me to do the same when I venture out later. I have spent the morning reading the New York Times online and for the first time, missing home a little. I am mercifully alone right now (although M is home but sleeping) and it is occurring to me that this may be the first time in 14 days that I have been by myself. I am wrestling with my day's plans as I have to pick up a salwar from the tailor and I want to go to "town" (South Mumbai) to the famed Crossword Bookstore to pick up some non-fiction that I haven't been able to find in the States. The thought, though, of braving the muck and the crowds and the trains to get there, and then the cars and buses and people in Colaba and Fort when I finally get down there is causing a spate of confusion. There are way too many people here. And this is hard for me to admit as I am a lover of cities. I like noise and people and bustle and energy but this city, with its 18 million people crammed into 169 square miles may be my upper limit of comfort. It is almost too much for me. I know this is true as I fall asleep quickly every night and sleep hard here, dreaming vivid Larium dreams that I can't shake after waking, always feeling like I could have slept a little more, as if my mind needs more rest than it normally does in my less-crowded life back home.
Last night, the five of us went out to a fantastic dinner with new friend, Amritha, a very funny, cultured, Westernized daughter of a well-known Indian musician, who runs a dance therapy program for children who are either at-risk for or living with HIV. She is a riot, beautiful and smart, with plenty of opinions and an easygoing manner (and a love of shopping) that has quickly made her one of my favorite people here. Dinner was at a restaurant that "would be money in the States," according to Deepti; she's right. It was the perfect first-date place, small and intimate and cozy and clean, with beautiful tapestries on the walls and brocade-covered chairs and intricately carved walls. The meals (Punjabi food) were served in antique, burnished brass thalis (plates) and glasses, and the blessedly cold servings of kulfi at the end of the meal came in tiny clay matkas (bowls shaped like little pots). Amritha loves Mumbai and India, and the India that she shows us through "her Mumbai" is one that I love as well; it is a place where my clothes get washed every morning by our two cleaning ladies, where my dishes are always cleaned by someone else, where food is cheap and plentiful, where tailors rush to make my clothes to my exacting specifications. At first I was weirded out by our cleaning lady on her hands and knees washing our floor, as I always am when I first come to India, and now I don't even see her there, engrossed as I usually am in the Times of India every morning.
Life here, I'm beginning to realize, is ONLY good if you have money. With money, you are afforded solitude (and a fast internet connection as I have now) and luxury and time. I have always known that my father left here looking for a better life, and only now do I grasp the importance of the distance that he traveled to avoid what well may have remained out of reach for our family here in India. My father grew up poor in an altogether different India, one without a tangible middle class as there is now, where "rich" and "everybody else" were effectively the only classifications that existed. He went to school at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), a school that last year had over 150,000 applicants take its famously difficult qualifying exam for 4,200 open spots. After graduation, he married my mother and left almost immediately to pursue a doctorate in the States as India's closed socialist-influenced economy did not provide the opportunities that existed on the other side of the world. Three years later, my mother joined him and since then they have been a formidable team, strong and thoughtful and open-minded with endless amounts of love for their family and friends and countries (both of them equally).
When I told my father that I wanted to come to India this summer but I was worried about the practicality of doing so, he insisted that I go and insisted further that he buy my ticket. My conversations with both of my parents have always been open and free, and all three of us kids in my family have always worked during our education and after. We are unlike a lot of other Indian-American children in both of those ways. In our short working lives, my brother and sister and I have been waitresses, gift-wrappers, paperboys, lifeguards, hostesses, delivery drivers, ice cream scoopers, tour guides, research assistants, and factory workers. My father listens to tales of boy heartache from me and my sister, and my mother and brother watch "Gilmore Girls" and "The O.C." together. Despite our distance from each other, we are a close family. Perhaps because of this closeness, or as a result of it, my brother and sister and I have been always been disengaged from the larger Indian community in which we grew up, where kids don't work until their education is completely finished and parents are in the dark about anything that my be perceived as below-board behavior. I had made my peace with that disconnect long ago and had somehow thought that coming to India alone would add some clarity to my slowly-solidifying identity questions.
And it has, yet not at all in the way I imagined. I look around this teeming metropolis and see my own internal chaos reflected in the variety of my everyday actions. In the poor neighborhood where I work every day, I buy a 16 rupee dosa (less than 40 cents) for lunch at a tiny restaurant; that night, I pay 400 rupees (around 10 dollars) for entrance and drinks at a swanky nightclub with leather divans hanging from the ceiling, minimalist furniture, plush pillows spread throughout, and where English is the only language spoken by the Mumbai elite inside. The next day I argue in Hindi until the rickshaw-wallah gives Katie her 1 rupee of change that he's hoping she (as the obvious foreigner) will forget; that night, easily spend 140 rupees on for my share of dinner with my roommates. They are both validly and solidly India, I am coming to realize, and I am my own little brand of Indian within it, an American version that laughs too much and walks too tall with white iPod earbuds firmly in place, listening to Interpol and the
Bunty aur Babli soundtrack, Coldplay and Abhijeet Sawant's horrible new album, staring too intently at the mess and the chaos outside the door of the train as it speeds smoothly along.
But this country isn't my home. That is the gift that my parents gave me all those years ago when they left here. My home is in sunny Colorado where they live in the house where I grew up, in Boston where I still stare at the now-familiar skyline on the Longfellow Bridge, in Cambridge where we barbecue the minute the temperature hits 60 degrees outside, in the United States where I never argue with anyone over the price of anything, in Hindi or English. I dig my little corner of the world, where Michael Jackson was really big news, where Brad and Angelina provoke speculation, where politics are argued loudly and openly, where I find solace in temple and churches and mosques and any house of worship as I'm sure that peace resides in all of them, where I look different and like everyone else, and where I am sure that I will achieve all the things that I want.
So to my father, on Father's Day, who imagined another life over 35 years ago, thank you. And thank you also for giving me the gift of seeing the truth of it with my own eyes this summer. I love you more than you will ever know.
