by Eboo Patel
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, The Discovery of India
Before boarding the plane on my previous trip to India, when I was fifteen, I asked my father if they had Frosted Flakes there. “I don’t think so,” he replied. Then how could I be expected to stay for six weeks?
I was openly contemptuous of India during that family trip. Thumbs Up Cola didn’t taste at all like Coke, and the paper straw I sucked it through was too small to get a good gulp in. There was no shower in my grandmother’s home. Bathing was a primitive affair that consisted of putting water in a bucket and pouring it over yourself with a pitcher. The air conditioners made too much noise. The fans just blew the heat around. India was a land of filth, nuisance, and backwardness.
In Bombay, where my extended family is based, I spent my days inside my aunt’s apartment reading Ayn Rand novels and outlining my college application essays. My cousins offered to take me out at night but soon got tired of my attitude. “Remember, tell them not to put ice in your drink,” Bathool told me at a juice bar on Chowpatty Beach, doing her best to protect my American stomach from a case of the runs. “What the hell is wrong with this place that you can’t even have the ice?” I responded.
When we went touring in the north, through Agra and Jaipur, the only hour I didn’t complain was when we were at the Taj Mahal. My white friends at school had asked me to tell them what it was like; I paid attention so I could report back. The rest of the time, I cursed the searing heat; the sticky dirt; the stinking, heaving crush of brown bodies around me. I threw a tantrum when I discovered that we had been bumped from our original flight and would have to wait an extra two days before returning. “I just want to go home,” I whined like a five-year-old to my parents.
And now I was going back to India. Six years separated the journeys. I was embarrassed by my behavior on my previous trip, but most of all I was angry at America. After all, it was America that had seduced me into adopting its styles and its scorn, forced me to sacrifice my true heritage in a devil’s bargain for acceptance, and then laughed viciously when it slowly dawned on me that I would never be anything but a second-class citizen there. But I had become wise to the ways of the empire. Who says the master’s tools could not dismantle the master’s house? In the very universities and bookstores of the superpower, I had discovered its malicious trickster methods. My return was a reclaiming of my lost heritage, a reuniting with my people and my land, an inhabiting of the identity that had remained in my bones even when I had tried to scrub my dark skin white. I read about Gandhi’s rejection of the European mindset in favor of all things Indian and fantasized about wearing homespun and walking barefoot through rural India. I thought about Malcolm X meeting with his dark-skinned brothers in Africa and beginning his movement toward Pan-Africanism, and I wondered whether, after this sojourn to my motherland, I might not do the same.
The servants were awake when Kevin and I arrived in the middle of the night at my grandmother’s place in Colaba, a bustling neighborhood in South Bombay. They were huddled around the television, watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes dubbed in Hindi. They cried when they saw me, the two older ones taking turns kissing and hugging and reaching up to touch my face. “They took care of you when you were a baby, and now they are seeing you grown,” my grandmother explained. “That is why they are crying. They have been with our family for nearly fifty years. This one, Nassir bhai, he would take you on walks at night when you wouldn’t sleep. And that one, Amin bai, she would sit and feed you your food and be so patient when you refused to eat. They did the same for your father when he was a little boy.” My grandmother then put a garland of flowers around my neck and welcomed me home: “This is your city; this is your apartment. Sit, be comfortable.” My cousins came; my aunts arrived. More hugs, more tears, more cheek pinching and head patting. I was home.
After breakfast, Kevin and I were ready for India. “We want to go buy Indian clothes,” I told my family.
“But the best blue jeans you get in the States,” my cousin Saleem said. I didn’t quite understand what he was saying.
“Blue jeans,” he repeated, as if I hadn’t heard. “That’s what everybody wears here.”
“I want Indian clothes,” I repeated. “The kind my father used to wear only at night because he was too embarrassed to wear them out in America because it is a racist country.”
“You mean pajamas?” Saleem asked. I gave up on him and made the same request to my grandmother.
She also looked confused but gave instructions to Amin bai to take us shopping. Kevin and I climbed into the back of a hired car with her, and off we went. It was my first encounter with the Other World.
“Watch out! Watch out!” I said, alarm rising in my voice as the driver barely missed a bicyclist on the right. Then I realized that he had swerved to avoid the bus careening down the street on our left. There were three similar near misses before we reached the first traffic light, at which point there were about three more because none of the cars, trucks, bicyclists, pedestrians, or various animals followed the signal. Each time we nearly grazed another vehicle, I let out a little yelp. The driver calmly chewed his betel nuts and spat them out the window. “American?” he asked Amin bai.
“Mmm,” she grunted, and wagged her head side to side—Hindi for yes.
I decided my best strategy was to try to ignore the road and concentrate on Amin bai. She had taken care of me when I was a baby; the least I could do was find out what was happening in her life. “How are you?” I asked.
It took a moment for her to register my question, both because it tested the limits of her English and because Indian servants are generally not asked about their lives. Amin bai seemed delighted to catch me up and launched into a stream of colorful Hindi. I didn’t understand a word, but I didn’t want that to stop me from making a connection with my past, my people. I nodded vigorously whenever I thought it was appropriate. Amin bai must have taken it as a good sign because she kept on talking. At one point, she pointed to her mouth and smiled widely. I smiled back and nodded, overjoyed at the thought that our connection had overcome the language barrier. Amin bai paused, and her face changed from pure happiness to slight confusion. I didn’t want to lose the energy, so I smiled even wider and nodded even faster. Amin bai shrugged, popped her fingers in her mouth, removed her teeth, and placed them in my hand. “Brand-new,” she said, the only English she had spoken all morning, and smiled gummily.
It was Indian travel that convinced me that going native would be harder than I had thought. The eight-hour bus ride from Chandigarh to Kangra started off fine. We were amused to be sharing the vehicle with chickens in cages and a couple of small goats. The bus conductor kept on rolling and smoking funny-smelling cigarettes, and occasionally walking up the aisle to hand one to the driver. Kevin found a sadhu, a Hindu holy man who gives up all his possessions to wander and worship, in the back of the bus and did his best to have a conversation with him. The sadhu seemed delighted with his new pupil and began lecturing in a stream of mostly Hindi inflected with small amounts of English. I decided to play a little game with myself: how many minutes before one of them says a complete sentence the other understands?
We drank water. Lots of it. Gallons and gallons. It was the one piece of advice everybody gave us wherever we went. Unfortunately, they had failed to remind us of an equally important consideration: finding a bathroom. An hour into the journey, I felt myself needing to go. I surveyed the situation. The bus hadn’t actually come to a complete stop yet. People seemed to get on and off while it was still moving. Was there any way to communicate my issue to the driver or conductor? I had no idea what the words were. What about sign language? Hmmm, a dangerous idea. What was I going to do, wave at the conductor and point to my groin? Maybe that was the worst type of insult you could give somebody in India. Maybe the conductor would have to kill me to preserve his honor. I decided against it.
And now the slight pressure in my bladder felt like a river roaring behind a dam. We w
ere an hour and a half into an eight-hour journey. What had started off as a fun roller coaster ride was starting to take on dark overtones. Our bus driver insisted on passing every vehicle on our side of the road, which usually put him on a collision course with a Tata truck coming from the other direction. The two drivers would furiously honk their horns and then swerve away at the last second. The bus driver would calmly take another puff of his hashish, then prepare to do it again. This was beginning to wear on me. My ass was starting to hurt, because the seat was basically a strip of imitation leather over cheap metal. I tried to find a position that minimized the pressure on my bladder, but it hurt my back too much to stay in it. I decided I needed to involve Kevin. I interrupted his pantomime conversation with the sadhu and said, “Listen, the next time the pothead driver slows this bus down, I’m going to jump off and find a place to pee. Can you make sure the bus doesn’t leave without me?”
Kevin was skeptical, but I was clear with him that Plan B would displease all creatures on the bus except possibly the goats. We are living in a world of bad choices, I told him, and I needed his help to make the best of those bad choices work. Fifteen minutes later, I saw a few people pick up their bags, grab their children, and crouch by the door, waiting to jump off when the bus hit its slowest point. I crouched with them, absolutely gleeful at the thought of the relief ahead. We jumped together. I pulled my zipper down as I ran to a concrete wall where I saw several other men peeing. There were small pools of urine everywhere, with pieces of feces lying around. It could have been heaven. I started my stream, turned to my right, and saw my bus doing its best to avoid a herd of cows as it merged back into traffic. Kevin was frantically running up and down the aisle, trying to get both the driver’s attention and the conductor’s, pointing to me and then to my bags, doing his best to indicate that I was still hoping to be a passenger. I saw a row of faces sitting on the bus looking at me, with slightly amused expressions.
It took an almost spiritual willpower to stop myself in midstream, chase the bus down, and zip up at the same time. Thank God for that herd of cows, or I would never have caught up to the bus. When I climbed back on, the conductor didn’t even look up to acknowledge me. He just kept calmly rolling another joint.
Kevin was furious. “Don’t ever do that again,” he said. “They think I’m crazy here. This guy is never going to talk to me now.” He pointed to the sadhu. It was true; the sadhu appeared to be meditating.
I was forlorn. My back was killing me, my ass felt raw, and my bladder was still about to explode. I sat down again, trying to ignore the mocking smiles of my fellow passengers. “Why don’t you just focus on your fucking goats,” I wanted to tell them.
A very sad thought crossed my mind. I had done all kinds of reading on the nature of exile before coming to India. I had fancied myself in the class of people who were condemned to live in a land that was not their own, like Edward Said, the Palestinian in New York City. I had spent hours musing about the concept of “home.” I was especially drawn to Robert Frost’s celebrated line: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” Now I had something to contribute to that literature: if you cannot tell a bus driver that he has to stop the bus so you can take a leak, the land you are in is not your home.
I had deeper discomforts with India. To begin with, the very idea of servants. Three of them waited on my grandmother. They slept on thin mats in the living room and kitchen; ran to her when she rang the bell in her bedroom; swept the floors; cleaned the bathrooms; did the laundry and the dishes; cooked and served and took away the food. “Mama [our grandmother] lives very simply,” Saleem told me when he came over for lunch one day.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “She has three servants. Who the hell needs three servants?”
“You have no idea how the rich in this country live. They have three servants for every room, every function of the household. They have servants just to show off their status. And they treat their servants like nonhumans. These three aren’t just servants,” he said, gesturing toward Amin bai, Nassir bhai, and Gulshan. “They are almost a part of the family. Mama has saved their lives.”
I just shook my head. All I saw was three people waiting on one person, and I couldn’t get used to it. Every morning after prayers, the servants would set the table and bring us mugs of hot masala tea and plates full of fried eggs and chewy toast. After breakfast, Kevin and I would stack our plates and mugs and try to bring them to the kitchen. “No, no, no,” said Gulshan, the youngest and most educated of the servants, who could read and speak English. “Cleaning is for us to do. You relax, be comfortable.”
The servants never used the same bathrooms we did. They did not drink tea from the same mugs. After we finished our meals, I walked by the kitchen and saw the three of them sitting on the floor eating theirs. I couldn’t help but think of Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too, Sing America,” in which he imagines a day when the house slave is no longer banished to the kitchen to eat, but sits at the table with everyone else. It made me sick to watch such blatant inequality.
When Kevin and I went to the home that Mama owned in Nargol, a small village in Gujarat, two additional people suddenly materialized to take us. “They will cook and clean for you in Nargol,” she told me.
When we got to the train station, they handed Kevin and me our first-class tickets and gestured that they would meet us at the end of the journey. Then the two old women picked up our bags and waddled off to the third-class compartment. I felt like a slave driver watching them go, but I was helpless to stop them.
When we arrived in Nargol, the two servants became a whirlwind of activity, one making the beds and sweeping the floors, the other beginning a feast in the kitchen. That night, I woke up to use the bathroom and discovered I had to go through the servants’ quarters to get there. I crept along on tiptoe as quietly as I could, doing my best not to disturb them, but my foot hit something solid, and I tripped. I heard screaming and felt hands grabbing my leg. Somebody turned on the light, and then we were all laughing. The servants had been sleeping on the floor, and I had tripped over them. I wagged my head back and forth, the universal Indian gesture of relationship, did my business, and returned to my room. But before I fell asleep, I realized something: There was a bed in the other room, and it was empty. Neither of the servants was sleeping in it. They had chosen to sleep on the floor, next to the empty bed. They could not conceive of it as their lot in life to sleep in a bed. Gulshan’s line whenever Kevin and I picked up our plates from the table flashed into my head: “Cleaning is for us to do.”
Every interaction in India was a lesson in the class structure. While munching on masala veggie burgers at the Café Royale near the Regal Cinema in Bombay, I asked Saleem where a college student like him got his spending money. “My parents give it to me,” he answered.
“Would you ever do this?” I asked, motioning to the young men dressed in crisp white shirts who were ferrying food back and forth to tables.
Saleem almost choked on his sandwich. “Don’t be crazy, boss,” he said. “Nobody I know waits tables. Very few people I know in college even have jobs. They all get pocket money from their parents. These people are a different class.” He waved his hand in the direction of the waiters and took another bite of his food.
I couldn’t help but think that everybody I knew in America waited tables or had some other kind of job in their high school and college years. But class worked differently in India. Labor lacked dignity. I thought of an older cousin of mine, Aftab, who had left India for America several years earlier. In India, he was the partying type, constantly shooting pool and riding his motorcycle up and down Bombay’s Marine Drive. He was never very interested in education. When he arrived in America, he got a job as an exterminator and worked overtime for almost two years. Then he and a partner bought a convenience store. A year later, he bought his partner out and started looking into another business opportunity, gas stations. He n
ow owns four in West Palm Beach, Florida. In India, none of this would have happened for him because he would never have taken the manual labor job to begin with. Aftab hires recent immigrants and offers the best workers a cut of the business, which gives them the opportunity to climb the ladder the way he did.
My confusion about the separation between the servant class and the upper middle class revealed a quintessentially American point of view. Status is much more fluid in America, at least within the wide range of the population that can loosely be characterized as middle-class. I wait tables at a restaurant, and after my shift is over, I go out to a lounge and someone waits on me. Even if I get a graduate degree and earn a six-figure salary, I don’t treat waiters like a permanently lower class. After all, I was one and know what it feels like. And who knows when someone serving me in this restaurant will get their own graduate degree and be my boss. Better to be friendly.
My “American-ness” was starting to stare me in the face in India: not the America of big-screen televisions and Hummers, but the America that, despite its constant failings, managed to inculcate in its citizens a set of humanizing values—the dignity of labor, the fundamental equality of human beings, mobility based on drive and talent, the opportunity to create and contribute.
Someone once told me that the most penetrating exploration of the relationship between identity and nation is found in the writing of James Baldwin. I had brought several books of his essays with me to India, eager to discover in his writing a map for myself. In college, I had looked to black writers for fire. I had identified with their anger and alienation and had carefully crafted an oppositional identity based on their example. Baldwin had walked the same path and had become so consumed by his anger that he left America for Europe to escape the indignity of segregated coffee shops and the brutality of Harlem police officers. But he found that Europe was a stranger to him. When he was mistakenly identified as a thief in Paris and taken to a French jail, he had a morbid wish to be going through the ordeal in the cells of Harlem, where at least he knew how to interpret the facial expressions of the cops. When he met North Africans in the streets of Paris, he realized that they were not his brothers any more than white Parisians were. They did not share his experience of alienation, his anger, or his ache for acceptance. Their mothers had sung them different songs. It was Americans of all walks of life, black intellectuals and white country boys, that Baldwin understood. He followed the logic of this observation and realized that as murderous as America had been to his ancestors, it was the only place that he could call home. Baldwin, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Langston Hughes, made of that surprising fact an opportunity: He started to view himself as a citizen with a stake in the success of America. “I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores,” he wrote. And he started to realize that the experience of blacks in America had provided them with “a special attitude”—an attitude that had given rise to America’s only indigenous expressions, blues and jazz, and some of its most significant heroes, ranging from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman. Black people had been prevented from integrating into American society and had somehow still managed to have a profound impact on the American imagination.
