ARRIVAL AND IDENTITY

12 september 2006
ARRIVAL AND IDENTITY

all of it is familiar. .

i haven’t been to india for over 10 years, but everything i perceive is an echo of my earliest memories: the smells [spices, manure, incense...], the colors of the clothing [fiery orange, peacock blue, hot pink], the music, the way the light is in the morning and evening against the heat of the day, the way bathrooms work, the way kitchens work, the lizards on the wall, the voices of crows, the way people drink water without touching the cup, the endless street pageant sprinkled with serene cattle, buzzing swarms of auto- and cycle-rickshaws, carts piled with bananas and pomegranates, shouts of passing [insert item here]-wallas, barbers shaving patrons by the roadside with mirrors on trees, ambient alternation of muezzins and temple bells.... i’ve seen all this before

India is not at all strange to me. it’s me that’s strange to India.

people stare. after all i’m a woman with light skin, blue eyes, short hair, solitary ways and not-conventionally-feminine body language. i make lots of mistakes in speech and procedure. plainly i don’t know what i’m doing. plainly i’m not from around here.
then again i’m kind of strange anywhere, skirting categories habitually.
still, there’s a difference between wilfully flouting rules you know well, and floundering amid rules of which you haven’t mastered the nuances.
there’s a lot i’d like to be able to do here as a participant in society...but there’s so much i have to learn before that’s possible to contemplate.
i want to get fluent and literate in Hindi and Urdu.
i want to be able to feel like, and be regarded as, a resident and not a guest.
and yet that doesn’t mean i want to try to emulate some standardized model of “Indian-ness.” i don’t know what that means, and it would in any case be false. i’m *not* an Indian; i’m a farflung product of South Asian diasporic miscegenation.
what i want, rather is to find a spot to be spliced into the loose strands on the fringes of this uncommonly dense and complex fabric, shot through as it is with counterpoints and contraries, mirrors and embroideries, paisley and [madras] plaid, patches and tears. after all it’s more or less the same way i tend to find myself situated in the US-- slightly outside everywhere, maintaining some freedom and a critical vantage point.

GHAR MEETHI GHAR
The house where i’m staying hosts 4 students on the ground floor, with rooms around a communal courtyard area, and 4 more up above. It’s spacious and airy and there’s also an accessible rooftop, great for fresh air in the evening. [“evening in Lucknow, dawn in Varanasi,” or am i getting it all backwards?]

i’m going to call our hosts Ram and Nasreen.-- they’re kind, generous, energetic and openminded. they say they enjoy having a houseful of young scholars around.

next door is some sort of universalist religious cult center which had its grand inauguration just as we were moving in. almost 24-7 for several days it was everything from chanting mantras to bhajans to qawwali and various fusions of the above, including qawwali stylings of lyrics like Hare Krishna Hare Ram and Om Mane Padme Hum. we sat on the roof one night listening for a while, under a near-full moon and a flurry of bats, enjoying a cool breeze after a hot humid day. but while it’s entertaining to watch it all going on with a birdseye view, i think they’re driving their neighbors crazy. they painted the outside of the newly sleek high-concept design house with red and white candy stripe panels on the outside, and mosque-green on the inside, which is easily visible through the open-sided terrace rooms. they tried to come over the fence to paint on our side too, and when Nasreen complained and said “hey, what are you doing, you can’t paint my house,” they said “but you’re just like our family” to which she retorted “i’m NOT your family.” today she went over to say “the music is great, but when is it going to stop?” so, perhaps to placate her, they invited her to have an audience with the guru. i don’t know if she went.

we’re also close to the military cantonment, and an associated training facility for army and navy officers, whose sign says, “We make the imossible happen/Miracles do take sometime.” [sic] there’s an attractive path with relaxing piped-in music in the cantonment for morning constitutionals, where i go running. i walk or bike to classes at the institute through rather terrifying traffic in which anything could be coming at you at any time from any direction.

classes are intense. it’s incredibly infantilizing to feel so inarticulate and to not always understand what people are saying to me, and sometimes i am bitterly impatient. at times i resent how all-consuming this process can be, and how isolated it makes me feel from the academic and political work i ultimately want to use it for. but this is a temporary feeling. someone warned me to be careful about wishing for instantly uploadable language modules to plug into one’s brain, because they just may be available sometime soon.

[“I know kung fu!”]

ROZ KI BAAT
Lucknow is the provincial of Uttar Pradesh, which is the biggest and most populous province, the traditional “Hindi heartland.” [Delhi has its own federal district, like Mexico City or Washington DC] this means that there’s always some sort of rally or demonstration or garbar or hangama or gherao or hartal or whatnot going on. recent events have included a very military-looking parade of boy and girl scouts on a polio vaccination campaign; a shut-down of the center of town after some students beat up a transit worker and the bus drivers blocked off the roads with their busses in protest; both Sunnis and Shias objecting to the pope’s recent anti-Islamic statements; and a BJP youth wing ransacking and vandalizing an elite Christian school after the school had held a controversial assembly aka “seance” in which they had invited a rickshaw driver called Nobo Kumar Mandal who claims to be channeling the spirit of Jesus and healing people to come and manifest the divine presence for the assembled students. a couple of students had fainted-- whether the disturbing result of occult possession, or natural outcome of a hot and crowded hall, is still under discussion, as is the appropriateness of the school’s holding such a function. aside from that issue, what everybody seems to agree on is that the BJP-sanctioned thuggery was unacceptable.

Nasreen for one was disgusted: “i guess they don’t have anything better to do between now and Valentine’s day. that’s when they beat up any couple that they see out in public-- it doesn’t matter what their relationship is, whether they’re married, or engaged, or dating, or cousins, or siblings, or friends, anyone. They say Valentine’s day is a sign of the sexual decadence of the west, and of moral degradation.
“But with the school, it’s also a class issue. this is an elite instution, English-medium, selective in admissions. Say you went to a Hindi-medium school, you’re not popular and accomplished, so you’re jealous of those who have what you don’t. These were hooligans acting out of personal resentments and bitterness, and now they’ve found an excuse, a justification, to go out and make trouble and hurt people. it wasn't like this 20 years ago."
Ram and Nasreen, by the way, are a mixed Hindu/Muslim marriage. so was one of their parents’, in the years just following Partition. she thinks the communal tension is worse now than it was then.