This Is One Way to Dance

by Sejal Shah

  The dance floor welcomed everyone: the music spanned what we listened to on FM radio and what we listened to on weekend nights in a high school gym for Navaratri, the Hindi film music we also heard on the tape player, and the second language our parents spoke at home. To catch all of the references, you had to be Indian, you had to be Indian American—you had to be us. It was the first time in my life (outside of four incongruous weeks spent at Hindu Heritage Summer Camp in the Poconos) I didn’t feel foreign or an outsider in the country in which I had been born and raised.

  The DJ, a South Asian American named Mihir, called himself Magic Mike, and specialized in Indian weddings—he later deejayed several family friends’ receptions. I’d never seen any evening glitter like this wedding—or been to such a large celebration other than Navaratri. Nothing that day exoticized or historicized Indian culture—it was not the India of James Bond’s Octopussy or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or Masterpiece Theatre’s The Jewel in the Crown. It was not the historical biopic, Gandhi, released ten years earlier in 1982. We were right here, right now. The only thing that seemed over the top was a sleek ice sculpture of a swan: northern New Jersey took everything to a different level than western New York, even back then. The evening felt magical, a bright spectacle, larger than any life I’d seen. I didn’t want the night to end.

  The scripts for Indian weddings are established and standardized now: an entire industry caters to these celebrations. Hotels know that South Asian weddings are big business—often two or three days of events, an entire community invited and fed. Of course, there is no one “Indian wedding” or “South Asian wedding” (consider entirely different religions and significant regional and cultural differences), but there have been enough celebrations by now that those in the industry (and even some wedding-goers) know about the component parts of a Hindu ceremony: the tradition of having a sangeet or garba the night before the ceremony, whether or not a horse would be involved (as is customary in parts of North India, western India, and Pakistan) for the baraat, or groom’s procession, the bride’s mehndi party, and so on. When I married more than two decades later, David, the coordinator at the convention center in Rochester, knew more about Indian weddings than I did.

  The Diwali Episode (2006)

  My brother’s wedding took place five years before DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra dance nights launched on the Lower East Side and ten years before Bollywood films hit the mainstream, both profiled in the New York Times. Think back: no South Asian Americans on prime time or in the New Yorker or elected as governors of southern states. It was before we existed on screen or in the pages of a Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of stories about interpreters, maladies, and Bengalis in New England, an accepted and integral part of visible American culture. It was a different world then. It was before comedians Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj, Hari Kondabolu, Aziz Ansari, and Kumail Nanjiani; before the Sri Lankan singer MIA; before the Diwali episode of The Office; before Jonathan on 30 Rock; before an actual Indian doctor appeared on ER; before Obama celebrated Diwali in the White House. In 1992, week after week, Americans watched Apu on The Simpsons, the Indian Kwik-E-Mart owner voiced in an exaggerated, stereotypical accent by Hank Azaria, a white actor. We watched The Simpsons, too.

  If you judged by our representation on television and in books, we had mastered almost nothing in the public sphere. According to newspapers and the networks’ nightly news, we didn’t even exist yet. But we did. I did. Still, when I heard the reporters on NPR—Lakshmi Singh, Chitra Raghavan—every time I heard their voices and their names, I always stopped and looked up. I heard their voices and the nerves in the back of my neck constricted, attentive to the sound. I took notice every time.

  Monsoon Wedding (2002)

  Ten years after my brother’s wedding, I watched another wedding unfold, bursting onscreen into petals and song. My friend Anita and I had gone to see Mira Nair’s film Monsoon Wedding. Friends in New York had already seen it, so we had heard about it, but everything comes later to the provinces. We lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, graduate students at the University of Massachusetts. I remember it still as a bodily sensation, the visceral pull toward the screen I felt that day, when watching the film. I can still feel the electric current when I hear the music—effervescent—when I write this. I wanted to fall into that blazing color during the songs. Bright orange and yellow marigolds, red saris, pink turbans, the sky streaked with color, laundry fluttering outside. Although not a Bollywood movie, Nair’s film acknowledged Bollywood’s influence with multiple dramatic storylines, singing, and dancing.

  Anita and I laughed without the rest of the audience joining in—we laughed at what seemed to be inside jokes for those of us who are Indian by birth or by affiliation, through diaspora. Neither of us grew up in India: Anita grew up in Papua New Guinea, and I grew up in western New York. We met in New England, hours from any major city. After watching Monsoon Wedding, we wanted to dance—we wanted someplace to unwind and expend the coiled energy built from listening to electronic dance music. But the only place I knew to go dancing on a Tuesday night was a salsa night at a local bar in Northampton. While I did do that often, that night a sadness surfaced, my wistfulness about the lack of spaces in which to simply be Indian in Amherst. I lived there for half of my twenties.

  Weddings (1991–2011)

  Throughout those years, I found those spaces during weekends of weddings—the weddings of family friends I’d known since I was a kid. For two decades, long weekends meant returning to Rochester for weddings; our Gujarati friends were our other cousins, our extended family. Through all these weekends, we celebrated how we had grown up in Rochester—the close community our parents forged—a parallel universe to the public schools in which we were one of only a handful of Indians. We saw each other on these wedding weekends: garba and raas on Friday, the ceremony Saturday morning followed by lunch—you have to feed your guests, of course. Nothing more important than food. Then home to nap and get ready to dress in a different sari or chuniya chori for the reception, dinner and speeches and all kinds of dancing. On Sundays, those of us who had come home for the weddings would meet for brunch before heading back to New York City, Madison, Albany, Hoboken, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Amherst, Washington, DC.

  During those weekends, I felt such relief! My first trip to India took place when I was nineteen, a few months before my brother’s wedding; I did not grow up going to India, and while a student and then a professor spent years in college towns hours away from a major city, or from any visible South Asian population. I cherished these gatherings and looked forward to when my childhood friends would unite and we could talk and dance together. On the dance floor, we could reach back to our younger years, revel in seeing each other and the launching of one or the other of us into a new stage of life.

  I have always felt happy dancing. A few American friends have noted over the years that they can see something Indian in how I dance. Sometimes it seems as if one must perform one’s Indianness for it to be seen and acknowledged. I didn’t need my culture (diasporic, floating, race, language, food) to be acknowledged, but it does differ from those often around me, from those I am often around. And other times, later, race seemed only too inescapable: one will be expected to serve on the diversity committee for one’s primarily white institution and therefore required to provide additional, invisible labor without compensation. I knew who I was during those years in graduate school, even if Indian culture wasn’t around me. Still, dancing was an important part of how I understood myself to be Indian. It allowed me a space to interact with friends and strangers without speaking—no “Where are you from?” on the dance floor.

  Come on Dance (2002, 2018)

  While watching Monsoon Wedding in 2002, I felt engulfed by a nostalgia for an India I have never known, although I had attended many Indian weddings (Hindu-Hindu, Hindu-Christian, Sikh-Sikh, Hindu-Jain, Hindu-Muslim), mostly in the United States but als
o in India. The film created an almost palpable sense of how a wedding is a family event, a huge undertaking; how it (literally) filled the screen: the people coming and going, the costuming, the pageantry. I nodded at the bits of Hindi I understood, at tics and gestures I recognized as particularly Indian, desi, particular to Delhi and to Punjabis. The film centered on Delhi, Punjabi culture, and the ordinary reality of speaking more than one language. It did not see itself as foreign. The rest of the world existed (Australia, the United States), but we were off to the side. It showed the cosmopolitanism and multilingualism of India and also the presence of returned family from places like the United Kingdom. The movie also referenced common Bollywood tropes one can read only if familiar with the genre.

  When I watched Monsoon Wedding again it was 2018, and I tried to understand why this film had seared itself into my memory. I remember that I listened to the soundtrack endlessly for a time, which for me meant listening to two songs on repeat. I even bought the CD as a present for each faculty member on my thesis committee; I wanted to convey some of what I attempted to create and represent in my writing—context, aesthetic, multiple languages. I tried to create a diasporic backdrop for my work, for how I hoped my writing might be read and situated.

  On Facebook I asked, “Who remembers Monsoon Wedding?” Friends from all parts of my life weighed in, a stream of comments. It did mean something particular for those of us who are South Asian—many noted that. But friends of all backgrounds had something to say. It was a landmark film, both in how it presented Indian culture in India and in diaspora, and also in how well it did at the box office.

  When I watched it again, I realized all that stayed with me is one song that kicks in with only eight minutes left in the film—the electronic music, the rain, pink turbans, ecstatic dancing—a kind of transcendence at the end of the film. Spirit rising! Imagine my surprise to learn “Aaja Nachle” (“Come on Dance!”), the song carrying the memory for me all these years, is such a small part of the film. By the time we hear the song, the plot has unfurled, the story line played out. I loved the exuberant, spontaneous dancing at the end of the film more than the whole rest of the film. Hindi words and then “Can you take me?” and the song does just that—it transports me even now back to the film, to the joy of wedding revelry.

  Before Monsoon Wedding, the Indian character would have been a sidekick in a mainstream movie: the geek, the exotic girl, the older wise woman off to the side, advising the heroine but not equal to any screen time, a supporting character—a decoration for the stage set for other actors. In the final scene of Monsoon Wedding, it is the grandmothers who kick off the dancing, and then the young Indian guy arrives from Australia or the United Kingdom and he’s walking in the rain; in another movie, he’d be cast as an IT stereotype, but here he is handsome, a hunk, a potential future love interest for one of the single characters. Monsoon Wedding and Nair’s earlier film, Mississippi Masala, said to me, Look: you can be a main character. You can take up space.

  I watched Mississippi Masala at a movie theater in Harvard Square a few months before my brother’s wedding. Before this, I had never seen any representation of my family history (Indians in East Africa) on a large screen (or any screen) nor a South Asian American protagonist. The film follows the romance between Mira (actress Sarita Choudhury) and Demetrius (Denzel Washington’s character) in Mississippi, where Mira’s family eventually relocated after being forced to flee Uganda. Though I had my critiques of both the storyline and the stereotypes of Indian immigrant and black cultures, I also remember how liberating and extraordinary it felt to watch South Asian American and African American leads, their families, and stories centered in a mainstream film.

  The desire to see one’s self and community reflected runs deep.

  2. MATRIMONIALS

  I enrolled in graduate school in August 1997, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence from Britain. That year modern India arrived for America and its publishing houses, beginning with Arundhati Roy’s lauded novel The God of Small Things. When India hit mainstream America, I found myself ambivalent. The private subculture of Indian Americanness I grew up as part of had reached the radars of both the New York Times and Time. It was time, yes. It was past time.

  But which stories would be heralded and by whom? In 2002, the year I finished my degree, the headline of a lead article in the arts section of the Boston Globe read, “Nice to Meet You. Will You Marry Me?” Several people mentioned this article to me—about introductions or matrimonial personal ads, a modern twist on arranged marriages. Written by a South Asian American journalist, Anand Vaishnav, the article appeared soon after Monsoon Wedding’s release. I read the story and wondered what non-Indian readers were going to think.

  As a child, I remember my irritation when classmates or adults asked me about arranged marriages with an equal mix of horror and fascination splayed across their faces. Would I again be subject to comments about how strange it is to marry someone you don’t know well, or the other kind of comments, about how nice it would be if an analogous option existed in this country for Americans who don’t belong to a particular ethnic community? I braced myself against either kind of comment.

  Perhaps my favorite part of the Globe article: the matrimonials taken from India Today and India Abroad, newspapers targeting the diasporic Indian community in the United States, also called NRIS (Non-Resident Indians):

  Bengali Hindu parents looking for alliance from PhD/MD/Lawyer, Under 30 in NY/Washington areas; for beautiful daughter; 25/5'4", CS/Econ MS, may pursue PhD.

  Correspondence invited for Punjabi Hindu, 29/6'1", physician son, U.S. citizen, very handsome, cultured; prefers Engineering/Dentist/MBA/Pharmacist girl with family values.

  As teenagers, my brother and I loved looking through these marriage classifieds in the back of the paper. We teased each other, finding ads that came uncomfortably close to matching our backgrounds, and laughed at the language, a particular Indian English we both recognized. I was both troubled and amused to see these ads appearing in the Globe. It meant we existed, reading these matrimonials out of context in the Globe, on the light-colored newsprint of an American daily instead of in the coarsely printed back pages of a newspaper I have not seen for years.

  I look up recent listings from India Abroad, now online. The language persists, remarkably similar to what it was when my brother and I were young.

  PHYSICIAN SON.

  Handsome, very fair, athletic, MD doing fellowship in cardiology, 29, 5'7", U.S.-born, educated at top universities, raised with Indian values. Seeking MD girl, beautiful, responsible, good nature and family values. Email bio/photo XXXXXXX@gmail.com.

  Details for Hindu South Indian Business family Hindu South Indian Business family seeking educated/business professionals from USA/Abroad/India for never married medical doctor daughter 40s, issueless divorcees can respond; email: bio/photo: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX@gmail.com.

  Master of Fine Arts (2002)

  In the introduction to my master’s thesis, I wondered, “Have I introduced my stories or am I introducing me? What if I wrote my own matrimonial? It’s just writing a different introduction.” I wrote,

  Correspondence invited for 29-year-old 5'6" Hindu Gujarati (Nagar Vanya) slim, fair, writer girl; never married. Has MFA (not finance/administration; fine arts), like MS in English. Looking for professional boys, 30’s. Caste no bar. Northeast/California preferred.

  Don’t take it seriously.

  My brother might laugh.

  My brother might make suggestions.

  We speak to each other almost always in English.

  3. TRANSLITERATION

  After 9/11, my uncle sent me a T-shirt for my birthday, which falls in October. It reads, “Proud to Be American,” the words embracing an American flag. I thought about using a permanent marker and circling the image. A circle with a slash through it. Or crossing out “proud” and marking “highly ambivalent.” I talked to my uncle, and despit
e my hope to the contrary, he had sent the T-shirt in all seriousness. Did he think I would wear it? I didn’t bother to ask. It was a shirt large enough to be a sleep shirt, anyway—not one I would wear outside. Then I noticed, after visiting my brother, that he had taped a computer-generated image of the American flag onto the rear window of his wife’s car. My father told me that he dressed a little more sharply (shirt, tie, good shoes) when he flew in December. I had done the same thing when I flew in October. An American gas store owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was killed in Mesa, Arizona, a few days after 9/11—in a racially and religiously motivated hate crime. His attacker wanted to retaliate against the Muslim terrorists. Sodhi was not Muslim. He wore a turban as many Sikhs do. Understanding we are often read as foreign and therefore as a threat is another lived experience for many South Asians, Middle Easterners, and other brown-skinned people in the United States.

  I don’t write in Gujarati, a language I spoke before I started school. Can you be Gujarati if you don’t speak Gujarati? If you’ve only been to Gujarat twice? I can’t access it in an easy way, the way I admire in Junot Díaz’s stories, the Spanish words sitting next to the English. None of it explained.