Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

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  • • •

  Cinema was the great window to the world beyond Calcutta. Metro, Globe, Roxy, Lighthouse, New Empire, Priya, Menaka. The names of these cinema halls promised three air-conditioned hours of thrills, comedy, tragedy, and most importantly, travel. Hindi movies nearly always included song sequences that transported us to lakes in Kashmir, deserts in Rajasthan, beaches in Goa, tulip fields in Holland, or snowy slopes in Switzerland. James Bond films—a favorite of my parents—were a world tour in themselves. And Bruce Lee had already taken me to Hong Kong.

  As a child I needed an adult to take me to the cinema hall. But I could roam all over the world unchaperoned when I had a book in my hand. Phantom and Archie comics, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Agatha Christie kept me company during the evenings when load shedding darkened Dover Lane. I read by candlelight even though my parents said it would ruin my eyes. I devoured everything the controversial British children’s author Enid Blyton ever wrote, and had no idea of her shabby reputation in her native country. I read Bengali books with great gusto as well. Raj Kahini (Royal Tales) by Abanindranath Tagore, brother of Rabindranath, took us children on a quasi-historical journey through Rajasthan. Aam Antir Bhepu by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (translated into the Apu Trilogy films by Satyajit Ray) made us weep. We sat beside the young Apu in a train carriage, as he sped away from his ancestral village. His dead sister, Durga, pleaded with us not to be left behind. Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon), written by the same author who gave us Apu’s tale, took us to Uganda in search of diamonds.

  Bengali children had their own homegrown Sherlock Holmes in the detective stories of Byomkesh, Feluda, and Professor Shonku. We collected Amar Chitra Katha comics, modeled loosely on the Classics Illustrated series published in the United States between the 1940s and the 1970s. Hergé’s Tintin comics were very popular—in both English and Bengali—but high prices kept them out of the reach of children whose families lived under straitened circumstances. The lucky boy or girl who had a few Tintins lying around at home was cajoled regularly by other children to share those coveted comics. You should hear Captain Haddock swear, Bianca Castafiore sing, and Snowy bark in Bengali. We knew that English cows moo and English dogs woof and English guns go bang bang. We also knew that Bengali cows say hamba and Bengali dogs say bhou bhou and Bengali guns go gurum gurum.

  While television was still a rarity in middle-class homes in the 1970s, radio was ubiquitous. On Sundays, we listened to popular radio dramas and quizzes sponsored by Bournvita, a brand of chocolate malt drink manufactured by Cadbury. The news, in Bengali and English, and Hindi film music programs were the background score to our daily lives. During test match season, cricket commentary on the radio could be heard in every home and at every corner shop. My grandparents owned a large radio that was lovingly covered by an embroidered cloth when not in use. My parents owned a smaller radio. As a child, I spent hours staring at it while listening to various programs, imagining miniature beings talking and singing inside the machine. The visual feast of the large Hindi movie screen whisked me off to colorful Dutch tulip fields where lovers ran toward each other in slow motion; the tiny beings who existed within our transistor radio showed me other realms, and other lives, solely through the magic of sound.

  Between 1975 and 1977, India was besieged by the Emergency, a period of twenty-one months when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi canceled elections and suspended many civil liberties. During the 1970s, when the very freedom our grandparents and parents had realized at great cost during the 1940s hung in the balance, children’s books transported us to the Aravalli Hills in Rajasthan, to the Richtersveld in South Africa, to Archie, Betty, and Veronica’s Riverdale High School in America, to the English boarding schools of Cornwall where Enid Blyton sent her fictional characters, and to Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad of the Arabian Nights. The detective fiction, adventure stories, boarding school novels, science fiction, and comic books—in both Bengali and English—sharpened the blurry edges of Dover Lane. Reading a boys’ adventure story set in Uganda made me scramble for our well-worn family atlas. When I looked up Uganda, my finger traced the distance between my own city and Africa across the gutter of the book. When I read about the romantic Rajasthani past, I understood that India stretched far beyond the borders of Bengal. When I laughed along with Archie, Reggie, and Jughead, I had a vague notion of American life and began to measure my own distance from it. A promiscuous reader, I was a true fan of Enid Blyton stories, Tintin comics, and Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries. I also sensed—with a child’s clumsy shrewdness—that the characters on the page belonged to the West and I did not.

  Since childhood, we knew that books were sacred and paper was precious. Books were rarely thrown away. They belonged to the realm of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and music. In the early spring, when Saraswati puja—the special day for worshipping the goddess—appeared on the Hindu calendar, young children and students were unmatched in their devotion. All of us, wearing yellow-hued outfits, would lay our books at the goddess’s feet and repeat the mantra chanted by the priest. To this day, the only Sanskrit mantra I know is the one we offer to Saraswati, the divine one who carries a pustak, a book, in her hand. Orange and yellow marigolds are the traditional floral offerings for Saraswati. We would collect the flowers, blessed by the goddess, and press them between the pages of our books. If one was falling behind in a particular subject at school, the relevant textbook would be liberally stuffed with marigold petals. Years later, pressed, pale orange marigold petals occasionally flutter out of my few remaining childhood books.

  I never let those marigold petals fall to the ground if I can help it. I rush to catch them midflight before they are defiled by my feet. The goddess of knowledge has a vast domain. Her flowers are enchanted. As are all books and all printed paper. I can never let a book touch my feet or fall on the ground. If such an inauspicious accident happened, I would immediately press the book to my lips and forehead. The written word cannot be disrespected, for it might anger the goddess of knowledge. Since infancy I had been taught that we could not risk Saraswati’s departure from our lives.

  Paper was valued for another reason. It had monetary value. We did not recycle because we were environmentally conscious. We recycled because it had direct economic benefits. The Bengali version of rag-and-bone men were regular visitors to middle-class homes—looking to buy old glass bottles, newspapers, books, writing pads, and torn saris. We watched money exchange hands every month when old newspaper stacks, notebooks that could no longer be reused, and empty glass bottles were taken away by these rag-and-bone men. Simply putting these items in a recycling bin would have been unthinkable. Besides, the city provided us no such bins in those days.

  During the 1970s, the information highway that connected me to other worlds—European, African, American, and Asian—was made of sacred and valuable paper.

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  • • •

  India has a much longer recorded history than the United States. Yet, the Indian city from which I departed was in fact a little bit younger than the American city where I settled. In the late 1600s, three villages situated at the mouth of the Hooghly River in eastern India—Kalikata, Gobindapur, and Sutanuti—began the journey toward urbanization that would result in the city of Calcutta. It has been renamed Kolkata in recent times in order to shed its colonial orthography. For Bengalis of my age, it is hard to stop calling it Calcutta when we speak in English.

  The city where I arrived as an immigrant, Cambridge, is located north of Boston, across the Charles River. Cambridge and Calcutta are both cities that were founded in the 1600s. Cambridge is approximately sixty years older than Calcutta. That makes it one of the oldest cities in the United States. Calcutta, on the other hand, is one of the relatively new Indian cities, far younger than Delhi, for instance. Both cities were once part of the British Empire. One could say I was simply traversing the old routes left behi
nd by a dead empire when I arrived in Cambridge from Calcutta as a twelve-year-old.

  Air travel leads us to see the world as a place of absolute differences. As a girl, I boarded a plane in Calcutta and landed in Doha, the capital of Qatar. The plane that took off from Qatar dropped us off in London. A final flight took us across the Atlantic. India. Qatar. Britain. The United States. These are nations with clear boundaries, distinct from each other. One would be forgiven for thinking that human beings change abruptly when we cross an imaginary line on the ground, the line we call national borders. Languages, religions, tastes, beliefs, hair color, skin color, and even the shapes of bodies change when we cross borders. Except they do not.

  Before flying on a plane, I traveled many miles on trains. Each year we visited my maternal grandparents in Allahabad, a town in northern India. We took the Bombay Mail from Calcutta in the late evening and reached Allahabad around lunchtime the next day. It was one of my favorite journeys. My mother packed us a special dinner of luchi and alur dom. Little disks of fried flatbread and potatoes cooked in a tangy yogurt sauce. We ate dinner after we passed Bardhaman station. Then I climbed onto the top bunk of our three-tier carriage and prepared to fall asleep listening to the chatter of our fellow passengers and the rhythmic thumping of the carriage as we sped westward. The train stopped at Gaya, a city in Bihar, usually after I had fallen asleep. Occasionally, drowsy with sleep, I heard the voices of people getting on board at Gaya. Bengali slowly gave way to Hindi with a distinct Bihari accent. The next morning, I awoke as the train pulled into Mughalsarai junction. It meant we had crossed from Bihar into Uttar Pradesh. This was when my parents drank their morning tea. Small clay cups of milky tea were purchased through the train’s window. Chai garam! Garam chai! The tea seller’s voice was the sweetest of alarm clocks. Now I knew we were getting closer to our destination, where my grandparents, uncles, and cousins waited. The Hindi of eastern Uttar Pradesh slowly filled my world, as I climbed down from the upper bunk and started watching the fields and small towns roll by. The station names were written in different scripts. The familiar coconut trees and toddy palms of Bengal gave way to other trees. I could tell which state we were in by detecting the exact shade of green outside the train, by noting the way in which a woman wore her sari as she walked along a mud path, and even by watching cattle grazing on fields as our train sped toward Allahabad.

  I knew we Indians from different states were unlike one another. I saw this on the train journey every year. I also knew that changes did not occur abruptly. There was no sudden difference in language, dress, or food when the Bombay Mail rolled across a state line. The slow accretion of minute changes—the subtlest of variations in how we pronounced a word, or shaped a letter, or spiced the samosas—added up over a day until I could truly see the diversity of the subcontinent in its fullest bloom.

  The Bombay Mail connects Calcutta on the eastern coast of India to Bombay on its western coast. It was the ethnographic laboratory of my childhood. I relished our national diversity and internalized our hierarchies. I could not, however, imagine that there were yet other differences and hierarchies in the larger world beyond India and one day they would transform the girl who loved sleeping on the upper bunk of a three-tier Indian Railways train.

  Chapter Two

  The First Remove

  The first morning I woke up in America I could smell bacon frying. I was nearly twelve years old. I had spent the night sleeping in the living room of Baba’s childhood friend. This friend, an architect and the grandson of one of modern India’s most influential artists, was married to a white woman. She was cooking us breakfast in the adjoining kitchen when I opened my eyes. Their duplex apartment was right across the Charles River from Harvard Square. My parents slept in one of the two bedrooms on the top level, while our host and his wife had the other bedroom. The couch was allotted to me. It was a modest apartment. As a parochial Bengali girl, I had envisioned the wealthy West as the land of opulent overstuffed sofas, velvet drapes, crystal vases, and expensive carpets. This home was utterly confusing to my eyes. The dining chairs were made of metal tubes and woven cane; the lamps looked like crushed white paper balloons. I had imagined America was the land of rich people with air-conditioning, big cars, cities laid on grids, and skyscrapers. A new world, a young country where everything sparkled and smelled good, unlike Indian cities where ruins, rickshaws, crooked gullies, and the smell of oldness prevailed.

  When I opened my eyes that morning, the first thing I saw was a triangular neon CITGO sign. I had no way of knowing that this had been a beloved Boston icon since 1940. Being an immigrant child before the era of the Internet, Wikipedia, or Google, I was seeing America for the first time.

  It was a week of many firsts for me. I had flown on a plane. I had traveled outside India. I had bacon for breakfast. Even now, if I get too complacent about my sense of belonging here—my ability to speak, dress, look, think like an American—I only need to smell bacon frying and I am a newly arrived immigrant again. That morning, I smelled it, heard it sizzling and crackling, before I tasted it. It was a complex animal smell, making my mouth water and my stomach churn in revulsion at the same time. Today, my favorite sandwich is a BLT. I greedily search for those salty bits of bacon in a Cobb salad. Yet, the actual smell of bacon frying is a powerful reminder that I did not always relish these tastes, that there was a time when I struggled to train my palate according to the custom of this country.

  Immigrants are supposed to be delighted when they arrive in America—huddled masses who have reached their final destination. But in 1982, I was sad when our British Airways plane landed at Boston’s Logan Airport. Baba, who originally trained as a geologist, and spent most of his working life in India as a sales representative for pharmaceutical companies, had been unemployed for many years. Since the late ’70s, our middle-class life in Dover Lane had been sliding imperceptibly toward the unseen basti behind the garbage dump. My bharatanatyam classes ended because the fees for the dance school had become a luxury we could no longer afford. The number of maids we employed dwindled as the household budget shrunk. Fish and fowl appeared fewer times on the menu until one day they disappeared completely. Ma went less frequently to the tailor to order new dresses for me. Instead, we waited for the autumn, when my aunts sent us the customary gift of new fabric—a few meters of printed cotton, enough to make a dress for a young girl—for Durga puja. We began avoiding family weddings because we could not buy appropriate presents for the new couple. We stopped going to the nicer cinema halls of Calcutta and began to patronize the shabbier ones where ticket prices were lower. Those trips to Park Street restaurants such as Waldorf or Sky Room became a distant memory. We went there only when a better-off friend or relative treated us to a night out. The blue Lambretta was brought indoors and stowed away in our hallway as a reminder of happier times when we could afford the price of petrol. The sofa and coffee table vanished one day and instead of buying new furniture, we began renting it. Because new school uniforms were expensive, the hems of my blue school skirts had been taken down one too many times. I used to rub my finger over the light blue line, the part of the fabric that had been bleached with repeated washes and ironings. Each time the hem was taken down, the faded line of the old edge became a token of my precarious status as a member of the bourgeoisie. I began to ask girls who were older than me if I could buy their old school textbooks because new textbooks were beyond our budget.

  As it happened, our downward mobility coincided with a meteoric rise in my grades at school. The more we moved toward the unseen world where Prakash and his mother lived, the better I performed in my examinations. In our brutal Indian school system of ranking students, I used to be ranked among the bottom five girls in a class of forty. That was when I was six or seven years old. Baba became unemployed when I was nine. Suddenly I was appearing in the top ten, then top three, and by the time I was eleven, I was consistently ranked first in my class after our exam
ination marks were announced. Yet, I had to ask around school for a set of used textbooks as each new school year approached. I was no longer able to invite all my classmates for my birthday party where a cake from Flury’s, decorated with marzipan roses, would have pride of place at the table. No matter how hard my mother tried to keep my uniforms clean and ironed, my blouses were never as white as those of the girls whose parents bought them new uniforms each year.

  I became friends with the school bus driver’s daughter, who was enrolled as a scholarship kid. She was one of the girls who received a free loaf of bread during tiffin time. I never ate bread that tasted so delicious, when she began sharing them with me during the bus ride home. Other girls might go home to daintier snacks. I saw such homes in advertisements. Tidy middle-class Indian homes riding the wave of upward mobility. Homes with televisions that children watched with their parents; with refrigerators filled with rows of soft drink bottles; with toaster ovens in which beaming mothers baked cakes for their kids who returned from school looking as dewy-fresh as they had left in the morning. But children in downwardly mobile homes know that an atmosphere of fear, resentment, anger, and dejection awaits them at home. One wrong move, and the whole house can explode. One mention of extra money needed for a field trip, or the cost of a new dress for the school chorus, or an art assignment that requires costly materials, and everything can go up in flames. As much as I hated the crowded, hot school bus, I was in no rush to return to Dover Lane. The bus driver’s daughter and I enjoyed the free bread at the back of the bus, and she tantalized me with promises of fluffy kittens. My new friend seemed to have an endless access to kittens and each afternoon she promised that she would sneak one into school for me. She strung me along in this manner for months, describing the kittens in great detail.