But perhaps this gap is itself the illusion.
In my mother's village in India, in a hut that seems to be located at the very center of the crossroads, lives a person born male, who never married and who refers to herself exclusively in the feminine. Gujarati is a gender-inflected language, in which even the simplest sentences reveal the speaker's sex, require a choice. Duliyaa, as she is called, lives with her mother and has never married. She seems to have a soft spot for children; the day we met, she was holding a small child, and she remembered my mother, who was seven years old the last time they had met. And they embraced warmly.
Far from any queer movement or urban politics, far from academic theories of gender, lives a possibility, a true heritage of tolerance and integration. Among a people who can and have absorbed so much, whose gods are many-limbed and multigendered, whose lives are filled with all manner of suffering, sexual identity is the least of it. I do not know how Duliyaa would "identify," were it even possible to translate and define the terms from my world—gay, queer, queen, transgender, transsexual, let alone the newer and more exotic "genderqueer" or the brilliantly cynical "genderfucked." All I know is that this tall, lanky, biologically male exterior holds a being who somehow, for more than sixty years, has quietly asserted, in a place as remote from radical gender politics as we can imagine, the truth of her own pure being.
Where are you from? asks the white woman at the bathhouse, March 2005.
It is a first, natural question.
Here, I say, San Francisco. I was born here, have lived here many years.
Oh? In her voice I hear a faint rise: disbelief, wonder, a set of questions she does not ask. Steam rises from our bodies in the cool city night, towels wrapped around us like layers of stories we aren't willing to release. The conversation moves on, but I am thinking of all the times I have faced this question—dozens? hundreds?—and how, even now, I feel I must defend or explain my answer. Often San Francisco is enough; but equally often, my questioner wants more. No, I mean, where are you really from?
I might list all the other places I have lived, from New Zealand to suburban Michigan to Silicon Valley—but none of these would give a clue as to either ethnicity or character. I find myself resisting the expected answer: India. For just as my questioner suspects by the looks of me that San Francisco is an oversimplification, that there must be more to the story, I know that India is too easy an answer. I could describe my parents' series of migrations, including Fiji, but I would have to go back another generation to match up a landscape with my phenotype: skin tone, hair, features. My extended family lives in nine countries at this writing; am I not in some way from all of these places? Within India, too, we have a deeper history than a simple region or village name. We are, if legend is to be believed, from royalty, from mud, and from fire.
But yes, India: a foreign country to me, the place where all four of my great-grandmothers bathed in lakes and streams, six yards of cotton wrapped around them for modesty. A hundred years ago they would not have conceived of a daughter stepping naked and free of shame into heated pools and saunas, with women of all the world's races for bathing companions. Puzzling over a question whose answer they knew in their bones.
And yet, as far as I travel from my family, I am never lost.
There are moments now when the wall, the one that grew up so strongly around me in childhood, seems to have dissolved entirely. Or I have absorbed it into myself; it is no longer made of brick, but of skin, and is perhaps no more than the boundary each of us has, our simple sense of self. It is a hard-won unity, not to live in compartmentalized fragments; easier sometimes to avoid explaining the rites and vocabularies of one tribe to the other. Yet the moments when I have felt truly integrated shine brighter than suns in my memory; I would not trade them for a princess's ransom.
It was only when I began traveling among my relatives for this book that I came to understand how each life is a tangle of push and pull; how each migration opens up future directions; and how my own journey, which I had come to believe and been made to feel was so unusual as to be selfish and freakish, was in fact continuous with a long heritage of moving from the known to the unknown, from tradition into modernity, from village India into a cosmopolitan world. In my interviews I found not only success stories but also secret shames, sometimes one buried within the other: illegal border crossings, whisperings of second wives and concubines, stories of abuse and survival, turn-off-the-tape-recorder moments that I knew I could not retell but that I absorbed nonetheless. As I unveil a piece of the vast silence about sexuality in order to tell my own story, I know these other secrets are the context.
Shame is bone-deep, says my reiki-shiatsu healer, as her brown hands massage my muscles, tense from typing. I close my eyes, and an image arises: a grid of fishbones under my skin. Interconnected, sharp-edged, like the history of all of the women in my family, the bones are flexible and nearly translucent. I try to describe this new spine, its compelling, almost mathematical beauty.
My name means fish, I tell her. Where am I from? This is my body, this is where I live.
Part Four: Destiny
2001
Estimated size of the Indian diaspora: 11,510,644
Countries with more than 10,000 people of Indian origin: 47
1. USA
2. Saudi Arabia
3. England and Wales
4. South Africa
5. Canada
6. Mauritius
7. Trinidad and Tobago
8. Guyana
9. Fiji
10. Oman
11. Singapore
12. Kuwait
13. Réunion
14. Netherlands
15. Australia
16. Surinam
17. Qatar
18. Bahrain
19. Kenya
20. Yemen Arab Republic
21. United Arab Emirates
22. Tanganyika
23. Thailand
24. Italy
25. Portugal
26. France
27. Jamaica
28. Indonesia
29. New Zealand
30. Hong Kong
31. Israel
32. Guadeloupe
33. Philippines
34. Germany
35. Madagascar
36. Spain
37. Nigeria
38. Mozambique
39. Zimbabwe
40. Russia
41. Switzerland
42. Zambia
43. Libya
44. Uganda
45. Austria
46. Lebanon
47. Sweden
Vaasudeva kutumbukam.
The whole world is one family.
—Ancient Sanskrit mantra
IT IS OCTOBER and the women are dancing. All around the world we put on our long skirts and tight bodices, wrap ourselves in gauzy shawls, fasten jewels at our throats and bells around our ankles. We dance barefoot in temples, where we have temples; or community centers, high school gymnasiums, even bare fields. The dance is what remains the same: a sacred circle.
Garbaa, the word for the Gujarati folk dance, comes from a Sanskrit root, grb, for womb. Round and round we twirl to celebrate Navratri, the lunar festival of nine nights of dancing in honor of the goddess. I have danced the garbaa with my cousins at a newly erected temple in New Zealand, where Indians are running more and more corner stores ("dairies") and clustering together in new neighborhoods. In Fiji, I have danced it with my aunts at a temple whose walls slide away to let in the tropical night. I have swirled and sweated it with relatives and friends in London, New York, Toronto. And as a child in Michigan, I twirled round a fluorescent-lit multipurpose room in the Plymouth Cultural Center, whose hallways we shared with white-robed tae kwon do students and bulging ice hockey players.
Always it is the cusp of seasons: harvest, or planting. The soundtrack booms from live singers and musicians, or only a precious cassette tape (now CD or iPod) reco
rded (downloaded, bootlegged) from the old country. Always the oldest women cluster around the edges, on bleachers or folding chairs or the floor, gossiping or watching silently as they clutch knees and hips long past dancing. Every generation has its place, and gives way to the others. Middle-aged women form the outer ring, moving slowly to the 3/3 beat, clapping their hands three times: once at the earth, once at the waist, once at the sky. The circle advances, counterclockwise. In an inner ring, younger women and girls who are just becoming women show off fancier moves; wrists and hips swivel with a grace and vanity befitting their age, as if they know that this is their time on earth. At the very center, the littlest girls run around and groove to their own beats, wild foals dressed up for a few nights as princesses.
At midnight we chant the praise-song of prayer. We pass around a tray with the small flame whose grace we accept one by one; we make offerings of coins and bills; we share the sanctified food. Then we emerge sweating and sated, bundling up in winter coats to cross the tarred parking lot, or walking down hot dusty lanes to an ancestral home.
If diaspora is defined by the phenomenon of dispersal, then bringing together the stories of a diaspora may be a task as wisely undertaken as that of piecing Humpty Dumpty back together again. And trying to look into our diaspora's future, as I want to do in this last chapter, can feel like examining a cracked mirror. It can never be fused into smooth glass again; better, perhaps, to construct a mosaic.
But what is it that glues us together, across time and space? Each generation grapples with a new set of circumstances, inheriting some traditions and discarding others. The choices of what to change and what to continue are made not once and for all, but daily, yearly, life by life. What, then, is the fabric of the shared identity that seems to persist, though in places it frays? Is it still, after so many generations, India—or the memory of India?
INDIA
The first time I met Jaydeep, he was running, as if for his life.
This is the impression I will always have of him: desperate, determined, out of breath. In the dust and heat he was chasing our car, to guide us—the lost American relatives—to his house. Once indoors, he had barely caught his breath when he jumped up again and went to a corner of the single room that served as living room and bedroom for him, his parents, and his younger brother. From the cupboard he took out a folder, which he presented to my father. "I want to come to America," he said.
Jaydeep's mother is my cousin Bharati. Among my thirty-six first cousins, she and her brother are the only ones who remain in India. Their mother, Sarasvati, my mother's eldest sister, is the only one of my parents' eleven siblings who never migrated out of India. While Bharati's brother still lives near the ancestral villages, Bharati and her family have moved to Kalyaan, north of Mumbai (formerly Bombay).
To reach Kalyaan we had followed the massive above-ground water and sewage pipes that wound through the last choked suburbs of the city, past the failed utopia of New Bombay, past factories of handmade bricks drying in uneven red piles, past miles of diesel-colored weeds and children squatting by the roadside, past gated communities where overseas Indians spend their new U.S. dollars on private parking and swimming pools and views of the swamps where no slum-shacks can stand—and at last into a town. Our driver, who came with the rented car, stopped for a fifth time to ask directions. As he rolled down his window, a face pushed into the conditioned air.
"Why, it's Jaydeep!" said my mother, and the face grinned, a door opened, and he squeezed in next to me. My first impressions were: thin boy in thin shirt, head too big for body, age twelve to fourteen. Panting, he told us cheerfully, "I've been chasing you for ten minutes." He guided the driver back toward the one-room apartment we had missed, on the sandy lane whose name no one knew, in the unnumbered building with its back to the dry, wide stream. My father asked, "How are you? How old are you now?"
"Twenty-two," he answered. "Yesterday was my birthday. Here we are; park here."
We emerged from the car's tinted interior into the bright Indian sun, blinking. His mother stood at the entry to the sandy lane. It was almost noon.
Inside, Jaydeep perched on the edge of the bed where we were all sitting, and his legs trembled with nervous energy.
"Let them rest a little first, Jaydeep," his mother admonished, telling us, "He hardly slept."
So we sat awhile in the narrow room with its two windows, small and high, shuttered against the midday heat. A small television suspended from the ceiling transmitted a staticky color picture, though the sound was turned off. The walls were painted bright blue, and a fake cockroach climbed up one of them—the work of Jaydeep's brother, Pradeep, who was sixteen going on ten. A twin bed was pushed against each wall, and we sat on these, with a narrow coffee table between us.
The sons and their father, a thin, white-haired tailor, sat and talked with us as Bharati busied herself in the kitchen. It was the size of an American closet, with a few open shelves bearing pots and dishes, and a wood-eating contraption that sat on the floor and served as both oven and stove. Next to the kitchen were the bathrooms: one room housing a tiled pit toilet, the other a walled-off area with a tap, a bucket, and a drain, for bathing and for washing dishes or clothes. From this triangular area Bharati emerged shortly with a full meal of vegetables, rotli, rice, daal, and sweets.
Pradeep, who had an interest in cooking, had made the mattar paneer. My father complimented the dish and joked, "You'll be in America faster than your brother," and Jaydeep piped up, "I can cook too!"
"Only kidding," said my father, but Jaydeep was still talking: "I'll do anything, any kind of job—" As he spoke and we ate, every muscle in his wiry body seemed to be straining. I had the odd idea that he was making a great effort, in fact, not to fall to his knees and beg us for help.
I had never met Jaydeep's family, though I knew something of their story. Bharati's mother, my aunt Sarasvati, was named for the goddess of learning, but she did not finish even elementary school. Unlike my mother and the other children, Sarasvati grew up in India with neither parents nor siblings. As her father, Narotam, was struggling to gain a foothold in Fiji, Sarasvati was raised by her grandparents, was married at a young age, and became a mother of four. Eventually she and her family moved to the outskirts of Bombay, in the great rural-to-urban migration that was transforming, and was a result of the transformation of, India's postwar economy. But they remained poor; millions of other rural émigrés were packing the cities as well, driving down wages and clustering together in slumlike conditions. Sarasvati's husband wanted her to ask for money from her rich relatives overseas, and under duress she wrote letters to her father in Fiji. My mother remembers one letter from Sarasvati's son arriving in the 1950s: Ma has been burnt, please send money for treatment. The boy had drawn a rough sketch of her face showing how the burn covered a third of it. Narotam did not know whether the story was true or just another ploy for cash, but his heart was soft and he sent money. For decades my mother remembered the sketch, one of the only likenesses she ever saw of her eldest sister in their years apart. Sarasvati died in 1982 of cancer. Twenty years later my mother had a chance to ask her nephew about the burn, and learned for the first time that the sketch was real: a kitchen accident.
Of Sarasvati's daughters, one migrated by marriage to Fiji and later to New Zealand. Another lived in India most of her life while her husband worked as a tailor in Kuwait; by a most circuitous route of family sponsorship, through their own daughter's in-laws, they arrived in the United States in 2003. And Bharati inherited her mother's character, qualities I recognize from our grandmother: quiet temperament, gentle smile, hard work, stoicism in the face of suffering. As we visited, Bharati was caring for her ailing father-in-law, who lived nearby and in addition to being so ill that he needed almost constant care was so ill-tempered that he berated her for providing it. Bharati did not seem to resent her fate.
It is no coincidence, I think, that the poorest members of my family are those who still live
in India. They are not dirt poor; they work, they eat, and they even manage to accumulate some money. Bharati's brother had told us, for example, that after two decades of working for a chemical factory, he was glad to have saved up enough to pay for the wedding of his daughter, who was just coming of age. They have small luxuries: television, perhaps a telephone. But they lack the large ones that we in the diaspora take as necessities: cars, computers, microwave ovens.
Leaving India Page 40
