by Sejal Shah
My grandfather, a labor activist, social worker, and (I learned after he had died) also an English teacher, taught my cousin and me three chapters of The Bhagavad Gita. Every day after school, we walked home with our red Tupperware lunch boxes, ate our snack, and our grandfather would teach us one verse or sloka. I remember somersaulting on the wine-colored carpet, trying to remember the verse. For us it was a game. Still, we learned over a hundred verses in Sanskrit. We never learned what most of the words meant. Even now, I can recite them. The cadence of this language that I do not speak in, do not think in, do not even understand, and which belongs to a culture that is mine, but not fully mine is part of what made me interested in language. At that time, our grandfather (Dada) transliterated the verses into English. Transliteration. Resignation. Regeneration.
In “Imaginary Homelands,” the title essay of his book, Salman Rushdie writes, “To be an Indian writer in this society [British] is to face, every day, problems of definition. What does it mean to be ‘Indian’ outside India?” I have wondered about the answer for as long as I can remember.
In two separate years, I was invited to twelve weddings and attended six—a number of them Indian. The rituals of weddings engage us in a play of culture(s). How is culture performed and created in language? How can the English language be molded and modified to reflect the cultures that inhabit it, that it inhabits. For example, look at the word “desi,” and its emergence in popular culture, in youth subculture, in art forms such as festivals and films. It is an insider/outsider term: one that has been claimed; one identified with a particular cultural, political, and progressive agenda. I love the title of Meera Syal’s book Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee because of its Indian English bent, its particular flavor. The title, to me, is a reminder of how accommodating English can be of other tongues, even as I encounter its limitations.
When my mother calls me, she speaks half in English, half in Gujarati.
My father leaves messages on my voicemail in Gujarati. He forgets that it is not an answering machine and repeats my name several times, to see if I will pick up.
One of my grandmothers learned to drive in this country. This means she took the written test. (Neither grandmother speaks much English.)
In a poem about my mother I wrote, “The book she is reading lies open, but it is written in a language I cannot read.”
Translation (1997–2002)
During those years in graduate school, the language changed. The culture changed. 9/11 happened, and what it meant to be brown in the United States changed. In all those years, I was never in a fiction workshop with another Asian American let alone Indian American. Nearly everyone was white. So much of learning to write in an MFA program meant translating, and that’s just what I didn’t want to do. That’s what I resisted. Why must I give context for my characters? Who is my audience? Why should I explain myself to you? How do you make it through a program without giving another’s point of view and references more weight than your own?
Weddings on those long weekends punctuated the long days and white spaces of graduate school and the academic year. They reminded me that there was a wider world out there—multilingual, vibrant, layered—every riotous color, each ephemeral dance. Just because it didn’t exist in Western Massachusetts didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
[2002, 2019]
*“When those who have power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective understanding—to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. And to make yourself visible, to claim that your experience is just as real and normative as any other” (Adrienne Rich, “Invisibility in Academ”).
Who’s Indian?
A South Asian friend of mine born in Guyana, raised in Canada, and living in England once said to me, “It always comes down to the same one question: ‘Where do you come from?’” . . . In time I began to see that it is actually the question, not the answer, which is problematic. Exclusionary and ultimately racist through its denial of self-definition, this question imposes criteria on its respondent: you must come from somewhere. Some one where that is most probably not from here.—JASBIR K. PUAR
A few days before leaving for a nine-day trip to Sicily, I met a young man in a bar in Northampton, Massachusetts, who asked me what my nationality was. I wanted to walk away from him.
“I’m American,” I said.
He had the grace to look embarrassed. “But where are you from originally?”
“From Upstate New York,” I said. Anticipating his next question, I launched into a version of my stock story: “My father was born in India, my mother was born in Uganda and grew up in Kenya. We’re Indian; I’m Indian.”
I felt I had earned the right to ask him the same question. When I asked him what he was, he answered, “American.” So then I asked it: “But, where are you from?” He named a town in central Massachusetts. But before that? He was a quarter Sicilian.
The enthusiastic karaoke singers and crush of people made it impossible to have much more of a conversation. He was a nice enough guy trying to buy me a drink; still, I felt annoyed that the “Where are you from?” question was one I was expected to answer on a Friday night. I wanted what lots of people want at the end of the week—a chance to forget, to blur the edges a little, to be around some friendly faces; to lose myself in some music, in a drink, in an evening. To be a little anonymous in our small academic community. Not to have to explain who I am, where I come from, why my face looks different from the one who’s asking the question.
I think many of us travel for the same reason—to feel the edges of ourselves simultaneously sharpened and blurred. We are sharpened by the contrast of another language, a new place and culture, and softened by a willingness to see and be open to the possibilities of different selves while on vacation, in a time bounded by parentheses—by our inevitable return to the familiar.
My trip to Sicily was the travel component of a photojournalism course I took at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the spring of 2000. I had twice traveled to mainland Italy, and I loved how I felt there—how Italian sounded in my ears, how the Italians I met saw me as an American, how I didn’t have to explain where I was from. At twenty-seven, explanations tired me.
In Sicily, in the seaside village of Porticello, I dawdled, staring at the ocean, and lost sight of my classmates, who were eager to explore the area. I tried to stay calm. Some sidewalk vendors off to the side caught my eye, because one looked Indian. They stood waiting behind their tables of wares, at a flea market, not unlike what you might see on the main street of a small New England town, in the summer neighborhood festivals in Upstate New York, outside famous temples and ruins in India, at the weekend flea market in Park Slope. I strolled over and found myself at one of the tables.
Although drawn to traveling, I have always had an intense and irrational fear of getting lost, and this pushed me to seek out someone who could help me find my way, someone who maybe looked like home, someone who looked safe to ask. I grew up in a city where my family knew nearly all of the other South Asian families in town; these families formed an extended network of aunties and uncles, any of whom instantly and freely offered food, gathering places, admonishments, stories about back home, and rides to each other’s houses to all of the children of the community.
At the row of tables, a man in his thirties or forties, with an open and welcoming countenance, smiled at me in an expectant, shopkeeperly way. A few feet behind him stood a woman who glanced up before returning to smoothing her daughter’s hair. She
wore a salwaar kameez—a marker of ethnicity, of origin. Many of my mother’s saris and my chunidars quietly trumpeted that deep, prototypically Indian purple, and I knew the color would bleed—it was a hand-wash-only garment. She also wore a yellow-gold nose ring, to me a familiar sight and a welcome contrast to the thin silver nose rings ubiquitous in Northampton, land of the uniformly hip white girls.
I stood at the table, trying to say more than hello. The shopkeeper began to speak in Italian. Then he stopped.
“Indian?” I asked.
“Oh, Indian, si, si!” He nodded and smiled. “Parla italiano?”
“No,” I replied sadly. “Parlo un po. Parla Gujarati?”
This is my language of regret—a language that I grew up speaking but now only barely retain; the language which, interspersed with English, signifies an intuitive recognition and marker of “home.” I am a mute in Gujarati, easily comprehending everyday conversations but unable to wield phrases fluently, confidently, correctly.
He shook his head. “Hindi?”
I understood a few words, but not enough to carry a conversation or even fully understand. We discovered that the language we shared was English. Sokhi was his name, he told me.
Throughout all of this, I smiled at their little girl. Kids don’t care what language you speak. My mother tells a story I’ve always loved, about my brother and a neighbor boy. Samir lived in India with our grandparents until he was three and a half, and didn’t speak any English when he joined our parents in the United States. My mother says that the two small boys played together, chattering away. They understood each other, though each spoke only a language the other did not.
Although I was not entirely comfortable with the fancy camera I had borrowed from my sister-in-law for the trip, I decided it would be good to get a picture of this family, of these Indians outside India. I could envision using this photo for a final project, but more than that, the interaction was already shaping itself into an anecdote that I could imagine recollecting to my family and friends. It would be one more piece in that stash of what we collect when traveling: ticket stubs, postcards, the products of obsessive photo taking of moments and people that in my own neighborhood I noted only in passing and almost never recorded. This wanting: the desire to carry back something—a shell, an overload of the senses, the espresso buzzing beneath my fingertips, even the salt air crinkling my hair.
My sister-in-law, who had bought the camera to take photos of surgical procedures, had generously lent it to me for the trip. I felt and still feel more comfortable recording my impressions with simpler tools: notebook and pen. Opening a camera case, taking off the lens cap, adjusting the many dials of the expensive-looking piece of equipment I borrowed emphasized a primary identity as a tourist I longed to shed. I wanted to be invisible, to fit in, to blend.
I lifted my camera to ask if I could take a picture of their little girl.
“Yes, yes,” Sokhi said. Then he conferred with his wife, who turned to their car and fished out a thermos. “You like milk?”
I guessed that they were probably going to offer me some Indian tea (chai: a word that needs no italicization now that it has entered the vernacular, due entirely and somewhat disturbingly to Starbucks.) “Umm, yes. Thank you,” I said.
I was surprised then to see his wife pouring what looked like slightly yellowish milk from the thermos into a plastic cup for me. She held out the cup and smiled. I felt obliged to try it, even though I’ve hated warm milk since I was a child unless it’s flavored with chocolate or Ovaltine.
The couple looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. I had gotten myself into this mess.
I took a small sip. Couldn’t tell anything. I took another and swallowed gingerly. It tasted like milk sweetened with cardamom and a little sprinkling of saffron, not unlike the drink my mother fixes as prasaad for her morning prayers. It was good. I smiled again, relieved to find out that I could be both polite and enjoy a hot drink. The couple smiled back and held out some biscuits to go with the drink.
Sokhi and I continued to speak in English. He told me he had lived and worked in Dubai for several years. I remembered reading about Indians living and working in the Middle East. The forces of history and immigration leave no place untouched, reflected James Baldwin, writing from a remote Swiss village in the 1950s. “The world is white no longer and will never be white again” (“Stranger in the Village”). This reality only rings truer today, challenging older ideas about borders, nationalities, and identities, and affecting every country.
Sokhi was one of several immigrants, migrants, and sex workers of color I noticed in the cities and small towns of both Sicily and the mainland. During the late 1990s, Italy began to welcome or at least accept more immigrants and other noncitizens. Two reasons for this turn in attitude were the changing internal demographics and the decline in birth rate that had begun after World War II. After decades as a source of economic migrants, Italy’s identity shifted to that of a nation that migrants sought to enter or pass through. More recently, in response to the migrant crisis and thousands fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa, Italy’s populist government has begun refusing to accept refugees.
However, the confluence of cultures on the island is not a new phenomenon. The story of Sicily includes a long history of conquerors and the inevitable cross-pollination of races and ethnicities that such a history produces. The island has always attracted immigrants. Sicilians’ complexions, darker than their northern counterparts, reflect the island’s ancestry, a crossroads where, among others, the Greeks, the Moors, the Normans, and the Romans settled, and erected monuments, only then to be unseated by the next wave of travelers and fortune seekers. And South Asians? Of course, South Asians live in Italy. I have been known to retort to those who remark on how unusual it is that my mother grew up in Africa that we are everywhere, you can find us everywhere.
I asked if I could take a photo of Sokhi and his family all together. They seemed happy to oblige. We attempted to coax a smile from their little girl. Sokhi asked if I would send him a copy, and I promised I would. He wrote down his name and address. Before I left, Sokhi searched through the jewelry in front of him and lifted up a silver bracelet. “For you,” he said. “No, no,” I said, “I can’t. Let me pay for it.” I moved as if to take out my money, but I knew that he wouldn’t accept it. I slipped on the bracelet. Their generosity touched me; they did not even know me.
It seemed as if a long time had passed. Fortified by the hot, sweet milk, I felt ready to keep walking and find my classmates. A fish market and fishing boats radiated their pungent smell from one direction, music drifted from a small outdoor carnival area from the other. The shouts of children playing rose above the din of the market. I walked toward the carnival.
I’ll admit I had some cynical thoughts. Had they hoped to develop a contact with a U.S. citizen? Had they desired an American present in return? Did they want to ensure a copy of the photo I snapped of their family? These didn’t seem like unreasonable things to want. The present of the bracelet seemed like a very Indian gesture to me: to press a gift upon a stranger. Was it because I had looked lost? Or because we had shared a conversation through many fragments of language? Or because we recognized a common past, a history?
After suffering through twelve rolls of photos and my pronouncement that I would keep my clutch of shiny receipts as a reminder of that happy week, my mother shook her head and said, “You must have some previous connection to Italy.” Someone would have to ask more than “Where are you from?” to learn about my interest in Sicily.
Is it OK to ask where someone is from? I think that most of us do ask it, in some way. Acquaintances remark that I ask people where they have gone to school; as someone who spent nearly twenty-five years in school, I recognize that it’s a way that I classify people—by what they study, by where they study, by how much they’ve studied. Although intellectually I realize that it’s a limited way of understanding where someone is
from, it’s shorthand I often find myself falling into. It’s a classification I despise as well; one of my parents won a scholarship to medical school; the other did not attend college. These facts are unable to convey what I find most admirable and striking about each of them.
How one is asked the question or how one asks it matters. We answer where we come from silently in how we speak, how we dress, where we purchase, if we are able to purchase, how we act, what music we listen to, what books we read. Perhaps it’s not entirely possible to answer the question of where we come from, nor is it necessary. I have come to realize that I answer it differently, as do others, depending on to whom I’m telling the story. Still, as a writer and generally curious person, I find myself wanting to know the answer to this question. After having been asked the question so many times, I sometimes think I’ve earned the right to ask it. That it is a different question for a person of color to ask. And perhaps I fool myself.
When I was younger, walking with my parents in a park or the mall, they would often comment out loud to each other if they saw someone who looked Indian. “Do you think he’s Indian?” they would ask each other. And usually, the two families, the other family and my family, would exchange a nod, and a look of recognition might pass between us. It is an old look. We might even stop to talk and say hello. The mall then became a street corner, the roads branching out from cities in the other country. Often, they would ask in Hindi or Gujarati or English, “Where are you from?” Meaning where over there. I used to be slightly annoyed by these exchanges. I was clearly from over here, in my knock-off Forenza sweater and my short hair; in the way I let my parents answer, and looked around, balancing on the outside edges of my sneakers. These days, I find myself longing for these exchanges, even waiting to see whether or not there will be such a moment, even initiating them.
