Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

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  We had another type of neighbor whose homes were all but invisible to kids of my social class. We knew of their existence, but we refused to even walk near their homes. Near our middle-class residential neighborhood was a slum. We called it the basti. The maids who came daily to clean our floor and fetch our drinking water from the tube well, the low-caste jamadar who cleaned our toilets and disposed of our rubbish, and the man who ironed our saris all lived in the basti. I never actually saw the slum. I had a vague notion of the area in which it was situated. There was a giant rubbish heap of construction waste and household trash at the end of one street. My friends always whispered that the basti was on the other side. I am not sure if this was correct, but the rubbish heap was a convenient boundary wall—one which no one really wanted to scale. Anything that lay on the other side of such a foul-smelling hill of rotting garbage was surely a dismal place.

  Children the same age as me lived in that unseen slum—children of the bastibashi, the unlucky progeny of slum dwellers. I did not play with these children or even acknowledge their existence. I went to school, freshly bathed, liberally dusted with talcum powder, hair oiled and combed, in a starched and ironed uniform. I repeated the Lord’s Prayer, curtsied to Sister Josephine, and learned to read and write in three languages and three scripts. The children of the basti were grimy, their bellies distended from malnutrition, their hair reddish brown from dust and sun, clothed in tattered garments, or perhaps not fully clothed at all. Some of the children had an amulet tied with a black thread around their waist or their arm. What more degradation was to be feared that a mother had tied an amulet to keep the evil eye away from her half-clothed child?

  I remember the shade of paint on every wall of our flat. A pale peach living room. A seafoam green bedroom. I have no memory of the basti. I saw some slums in Hindi movies. And later, when I came to the United States, I saw more slums in Hollywood films about India. When I lived in India I was blind to them. The greatest division in a society is one that makes an entire group of humans simply invisible to us. When my friends and I chased cricket balls, soccer balls, and badminton shuttlecocks around our neighborhood we ran past these other children, just as we ran past the stray dogs and the rickshaws. We avoided them with the same practiced maneuvers as we did potholes in the streets or cow dung on the sidewalks. I wish I could tell you a different story. It would be much nicer to speak of myself as the noble protagonist of a feel-good American movie set in a colorful Third World country—the middle-class girl with a heart of gold who befriends the kid who sleeps on a sidewalk. I am not that noble character in a Third World story. I was neither the melodramatic villain who tortured the poor, nor an exemplary heroine who rescued them.

  The daily violence we perpetuated on the children of the invisible slum was of a more insidious nature—all the more dangerous, for it was casual, perpetuated without premeditation, leaving no visible bloodstains or fingerprints on the crime scene. We pretended not to see those children. We pretended that they were not quite human like us. We kept our distance from them, never touching or speaking to them, lest their degradation infect our bodies like a deadly virus. Did the bastibashi and their children see us? Did they adjust their bodies so that we could run past them more quickly to catch a cricket ball or an errant shuttlecock? Were they hungry when they saw us reaching through our barred windows to buy a Kwality ice cream in the afternoon? Did they experience rage when I walked out of our Dover Lane house each morning in my school uniform, my canvas rucksack bulging with books, my black Mary Janes shining, the elastic edge of navy blue socks fitting snugly against my calves? Did their knees hurt from squatting as they swabbed our terrazzo floors each day alongside their mothers? Did they feel nauseous when they had to clean our plates piled with oily fish bones and caked with streaks of yellow lentils? These questions—questions each human owes another—I can only ask from the safe distance of time. As a young girl, I did not ask them.

  The children of the slum entered our homes only under one circumstance. They came as their mother’s assistant. Some of the part-time maids brought their young children along to help with the sweeping or washing. We always knew the names of the children of our maids, even if we rarely exchanged a word with them. It was customary to address a maid using the name of her child. Prakasher Ma, the Mother of Prakash, was one of our maids for a while. Prakash was her young teenage son. Sometimes he accompanied her on the job. For reasons unknown to me, I liked to watch him work. I remember a particular afternoon when I watched him clean the bedroom. It is a movie scene I can play endlessly in my mind. I am wearing a sleeveless cotton frock and lying on the bed. I pretend to read a comic book, but I am actually watching Prakash sweeping the floor around me. I do not know why it is both thrilling and soothing to watch him. Once he is finished sweeping, he switches the ceiling fan back on and brings in a bucket of water and a rag. Then he squats on the floor and starts swabbing it in hypnotic semicircles. His skin is browner than mine, sunburnt and rough. The soles of his feet and the palms of his hands have a yellowish tinge. Prakash must be thirteen or fourteen. I am around ten. Etiquette demands that I leave the room when it is being cleaned. But I stay in the room. I know I am breaking a minor rule. Prakash knows this too. Every few seconds he lifts his head up and our eyes meet. I do not know what he is thinking. I sense he is angry. And I am not angry at all. I like watching him. After a while, Prakash stopped coming to work with his mother. I do not know if he ever attended school. I do not know what sort of job he found eventually. All I know is that for a while we were two Bengali children, a boy and a girl, in a room in Calcutta, less than two feet away from each other, who never exchanged a word because there existed no language to scale the wall that separated us.

  The basti’s invisibility was an inverse function of its significance in our lives. Nowadays slum tourism is popular all over the world. People visit Dharavi in Bombay, favelas such as Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, or townships in South Africa. Only those truly confident that they will not become slum dwellers themselves can go on such tours. I lack that confidence. The basti was a silent reminder of where I would end up if we slid downward. If I did poorly in school, if I married the wrong man, if my father lost his job, or if the Indian economy tilted in the wrong direction, we could end up on the other side of the garbage heap. I could be swabbing the terrazzo floors daily while another child would lie on a bed with a book in her hand, watching me silently. The electric current that ran between Prakash and me was not simply a product of systematic inequality, of an unfair society that allowed me a fancy education and condemned him to illiteracy and a life of backbreaking labor. The electricity was also generated by a child’s fearful sense of economic instability. Knowing that the color of a banana is yellow might have opened one set of doors for me, but the limbless beggars, the slum children, and the refugees who lived on railway platforms were daily reminders of the fragility of my comfortable life.

  There was nothing antiseptic about my life in Calcutta. If I have recounted pleasant memories, do not imagine that I lived in a cocoon. As a child I read that when Prince Siddhartha was young, his father made sure that he never laid eyes on sickness, old age, or death. The Buddha became enlightened only after he gazed upon the sufferings of human life. I do not know what was required to keep all things unpleasant hidden from a prince in ancient Kapilavastu. My own eyes saw all manner of unpleasantness in the city of Calcutta. Corpses were carried to the cremation ground on biers through the main thoroughfares. Bolo hari, hari bol. That was the traditional chant of Hindus taking the dead to be cremated. Married women had their feet reddened with alta, a cosmetic dye traditionally formulated with lac, after death. Seeing the red feet on a bier always made me nauseous, even though I knew that it was a wife’s great fortune to die before her husband. Widows were doomed to a life without pleasure, and allowed no color other than white. Yet, those red feet of corpses gave me the chills. W
hen my father’s Lambretta scooter took us past a particular open-air crematorium in south Calcutta, I always held my breath.

  I saw children with wounds, missing limbs, blind eyes, and stunted growth begging in traffic stops for a few coins. I was always told that if I let go of my parents’ hands in a crowd, I would be kidnapped, maimed, and turned into one of those beggar children. The kidnappers were called chheledhora and they were the bogeyman of Calcutta. Hindi films of that era often used these kidnappers as a plot device—in a crowded fair, a child is separated from his parents and is forced into a life of crime. The lucky sibling who did not let go of his mother’s hand grows up at home and becomes a respectable citizen. In some of the Hindi movies of that era, lost children were raised by members of other communities. A Hindu boy might be raised as a Muslim or a Christian, be given a new name, a new destiny. Ma dug her nails into my wrist when she led me through Calcutta streets, fearful of losing me in the crowd that pushed up against us from all sides.

  I saw dogs run over by buses. I saw cows, crows, and naked children eating scraps found in the same garbage heap. I saw the ropey, sweaty muscles of rickshaw pullers straining to carry me and my family from one neighborhood to another. Calcutta was one of the last big cities in India to allow hand-pulled rickshaws to operate when most other cities had moved on to cycle rickshaws. I saw these rickshaw pullers hunched over their noontime meal on the sidewalk. There was a rickshaw puller “restaurant” near our home. Every afternoon half a dozen men ate chhatu on dented aluminum plates on the sidewalk. Their skin was dark brown from constant exposure to the sun. Dressed only in a lungi, a simple piece of cloth wrapped around the waist like a sarong, their bodies were thin and bent with hard labor coupled with too few calories. The rickshaw puller’s noonday meal consisted of a portion of chickpea flour that a roadside vendor sold them. The humble chhatu—sometimes called sattu in other parts of India—was formed into a soft dough with some water and salt. To add a bit of taste, sometimes the men ate it with a green chili and a chunk of raw onion. After they finished, they washed their own plates and lay down for a bit of rest in the shade of their rickshaws. If a paying customer suddenly materialized, the rickshaw puller would be off again, tugging people like us through traffic snarls and unrelenting heat.

  I saw all of this. I saw the bodies that labored to keep me in comfort. I saw the animals we ate. In fact, as a treat, I was allowed to choose the hen that we would eat for lunch. In Gariahat market, my mother would ask me to choose the bird from the coop. I always chose the prettiest one. A boy would grab the fluttering bird, take it to the back—whack whack whack—and he would hand us a still-warm parcel wrapped in newspaper a few minutes later. Freshly slaughtered goat carcasses swung from hooks, waiting for the butcher’s block. Live fish were killed, scaled, skinned, and chopped. And all this would go into our plastic market basket, along with fresh vegetables, fruits, and other provisions. The turmeric, cumin, and coriander were always freshly ground. The garlic-ginger-onion-chili paste was prepared daily. Occasionally, a coconut was chopped open and its milky, white flesh was scraped using a special metal instrument reserved only for coconuts. Our kitchen emanated all sorts of aromas—spicy, herbal, vegetal, animal, fishy. And it also smelled of sweat. The sweat of the maid who ground the spices. The sweat of the maid’s boy who cleaned up after her. The sweat of a girl who watched all this calmly and carried within her a small lump of terror—one slip and her world could be rearranged. Ours was a society built precariously on deep inequalities. These inequalities extracted sweat from all our glands, the winners and losers, the bourgeoisie and the slum dweller, the bhadralok and the bastibashi.

  The bent body that pulls the rickshaw and the well-groomed one that sits atop it. The callused hands that grind the spices and the soft fingers that delicately mix a fragrant fish curry with rice at the lunch table. The one who extends a malnourished hand to beg for a coin or a piece of bread and the one who is carried off to Chinese restaurants on Park Street to feast on Hakka noodles and tutti-frutti ice cream. The refugee who lives and dies on a railway platform and the girl who sits at Flury’s cake shop enjoying a petit four with her father as a reward for doing well on an exam. The line between these two groups is fragile and requires precise maintenance at all times. Young Siddhartha may have been shielded from all scenes of suffering, but I was not. Yet, I never took full measure of my own privileges until one day, in another country, I became the one who looked on enviously as others rushed past me to seize a dazzling prize, immersed in the sweat-soaked thrill of their own game, barely taking notice of my presence.

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  I had never seen a sandy beach or snow before I left India. I had traveled to the foothills of the Himalayas only once with Ma and Baba on a family trip to Mussoorie, a hill station in northern India. Ma and Baba had never left India before we came to the United States. None of my four grandparents had left India. Two of my grandparents were born in a part of Bengal that is no longer in India. Their birthplaces were part of Pakistan from 1947 to 1971 and are currently part of Bangladesh. We did not count such accidents of geopolitics as “having been abroad.” One of my great-grandfathers was born in England to Indian parents and arrived in India later in life. He never left India after he settled down and married an Indian woman. My foreign-born great-grandfather, George Banerji, makes a single cameo appearance within a minor chapter of British Indian legal history—the 1916 case of George Banerji vs. Emperor. My great-grandfather was discovered using a bicycle with a motor-wheel attachment without a license. I can only imagine the story of a young Indian barrister, born in London and newly arrived in India, who had to appear before a British judge at the Allahabad High Court for the seemingly comical crime of riding an unlicensed motorized bicycle. By the time I was born, my great-grandfather had passed away, the British colonizers had departed, and the streets of independent India were congested with millions of motorized two-wheelers.

  One of my cousins lived in Japan during the 1970s. Her visits were highly anticipated by our family. She seemed very glamorous to me. She traveled regularly on an airplane, spoke Japanese, and had tasted exotic foods. My cousin brought me two pairs of white socks from Japan during one of her visits to Calcutta. One was a pair of white ankle socks with a lace edge. I wore this pair on the plane when I first came to America. The other was a pair of kneesocks with two cherries on them. Both pairs were made of nylon. I wore the cherry socks to school once, defying our strict uniform rules. I was proud of those cherries decorating my calves. I thrilled at the tightness of that elastic band cutting into my legs. In my imagination those Japanese socks gave me a tenuous connection to the sophisticated world beyond India. My cousin who lived in Japan also gave me a plastic pencil box with an American football player on it. The box’s magnetic closure was especially satisfying. I loved to open and close the box repeatedly, and listen to the metallic sound of the magnet clicking the lid into place. The Japanese pencil box was too special to take to school regularly. On exam days, I took it to school as a good-luck charm.

  Baba’s older brother had immigrated to Texas when I was still a baby. When his family visited us occasionally, we caught glimpses of the United States. My aunt’s makeup, the fabric of my cousin’s pants, the small gifts they brought us—they were signs of prosperity and modernity. One year my uncle gave us a bouquet of white plastic daisies and a buttery yellow breakfast set made of “unbreakable” melamine. The flowers were displayed permanently in a brass vase on top of our fridge. No visitor to our home could miss the daisies that never wilted in the Calcutta heat. The yellow breakfast set was never opened. It seemed like a sacrilege to do so. I knew of no one who owned a set of dishes just for eating breakfast. The United States seemed like a fairy-tale place where breakfast required its own special set of unbreakable cups and plates.

  Once a cousin flew to Britain to visit a relative. She brought me back a wide-tooth plastic comb and small plastic do
ll. It was not a Barbie, but I did not know that at the time. It was the only doll I had with dainty pointed feet always ready for tiny high-heel pumps. I was fascinated by the smell of that plastic doll—a whiff of vanilla and something faintly medicinal. The smell often tempted me to take a nibble on the plastic limbs. I imagined England smelled like that. Ma’s brother went to Nepal on his honeymoon—it was quite a daring and stylish thing to do in the mid-1970s—and he brought me back a red nylon T-shirt. Suddenly my cotton frocks, blouses, and skirts seemed very frumpy next to the nylon T-shirt.

  All these materials—the nylon, the plastic, the melamine—were associated with upward mobility and the West during the 1970s. Our own Indian cottons and silks were suddenly passé. Indian women started wearing nylon saris. Indian men sported nylon shirts and polyester pants. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Gandhi had urged Indians to boycott foreign goods as part of our struggle against British rule. The spinning wheel and handloom cotton were the symbols of freedom from Western imperialism. Our grandparents wore cottons, silks, and wools. The cloth was woven in India. The garments were stitched by local tailors, darzis. But now it was fashionable to wear factory-made synthetic clothes, imported jeans and T-shirts. Baba had a pair of navy blue polyester pants. My mother acquired a few nylon saris. To wear polyester bell-bottoms, ride a Lambretta scooter, eat in Park Street restaurants, and watch the latest Hindi film in an air-conditioned cinema hall was my idea of living the Westernized good life in Calcutta during the 1970s.