Category Archive

I’ve been struggling a little to write this on account of how it makes me sad to think about it - but this is memory I suppose - it’s something I desperately want to hold on to but I also don’t want it to make my emotions go haywire every time. It is written as a possible contribution for Apples and Thyme, an event going on at one of my favorite blogs, Vanielje Kitchen.

My Nani (my mother’s mother) practically raised me. My mother stayed at home to raise me for my entire childhood but my nani - she really developed a particular part of my identity in such a way that I can’t tell whether it was a nurturing process or a naturally inherited one. Probably a bit of both.

In December, I went to India and Nani made those foods that make my mouth water and my eyes well up - she insisted on making only my favorites because I haven’t seen her in years and suddenly all the energy seemed to surge through her body once again and she bounded into the kitchen every morning to set aside dough for chapatis.

Chapatis - how to describe them, truly describe them? When they are homemade, when they are handmade, by a woman you respect and love so much, when they are perfectly round because of years of practice and patience as a wife and mother; when they are perfectly oiled and never burnt and when they are eaten with rice and with that favorite dhaal that she doesn’t like but that she makes for you. When they are accompanied by story after story, about the ‘47 partition, about learning to cook for a stranger you must spend the rest of your life with, about raising two daughters, about raising a granddaughter.

She says “they only taste this good because they are made by your nani” - and that’s true to some extent. I’ve eaten naan and chapatis and parathas from the best of women and the best of restaurants and it just isn’t the same.

When I think of chapatis - the time it takes to prepare and yet how quickly they can be made after years of practice - I think of her. I think of her sacrificing everything because it was what you did and I feel guilty when I think of the times I mistook this selflessness for weakness. I think of the patience she puts into every task and that kind of love that resonates in every gesture. In every chapati is a part of that woman, a part of that woman’s trauma and grace that I so desperately wish I was able to understand.

When I was younger and I watched her in the kitchen as she turned the last remains of the dough into a small heart which she would let me play with before it was put on the pan, I used to imagine her giving a part of her secret life to me - that part of her life that she never talked about but I knew existed long before my life even began. I loved pressing my fingers into the very same spots of the dough that she had, until the heart became an uneven slab of mangled prints.

Now thinking back on it, I still feel this way - this sense of wholeness that comes only when I am with her, or with my mother or with my aunt. Where the fragmented parts come together to make one complete heart.

My nani has affected the way I think about food because I see it now as a metaphor for intimacy and for colonial trauma, as a mode through which we pass down our stories and histories, and through which we receive both painful and pleasurable inheritances. But she has affected the way I view and pursue strength as a woman also; she moves me to want better and to love despite everything else.

One day I will learn to make chapatis as perfectly round and flat as she does, and it will probably be the day I learn to love the way that she does.

I am very liberal with the term ‘home’. When I am living on campus during the academic year, I refer to my parents’ residency as ‘home’ - but as soon as I return to northern California, my tiny campus becomes ‘home’.

Most of my childhood was actually spent in Texan suburbia. I remember the house fairly well - the way the outside looked. I keep in touch with a couple of people who still live there so I remember random details about the small suburb of the large city I grew up in. But do I feel attached to Texas in any way? Do I consider it home in any way? Nope.

I was born in San Francisco and went to high school in the Bay Area. And although my heart feels very warm when I think about the bay area, I feel very removed from it. I commuted to school so I never had the chance to explore the town my parents now reside in very well - there isn’t much to know and I like the feeling of familiarity but I don’t feel an overwhelming attachment to this place.

I thought this is the way everybody felt. And now I realize more and more that people are very attached to their homes - the locations they consider home. They feel “at home” in certain spaces - it isn’t just a temporary space where they move their things.

But this is how I feel. After I moved out of Texas I have metaphorically lived out of a suitcase. Locations are fluid. They have sentimental value - there are stores and restaurants I miss seeing and I love my parents’ home. And there was a brief time where my parents’ home was home. I feel comfortable here. But it feels like I’m visiting whenever I’m here. Maybe it’s because I don’t have siblings that live here. I didn’t build a life anywhere. I just lived my life in a few select places, in a couple of lovely little houses.

Then I went back to India. Even using the phrase “back to India” should say something about my relationship to the land. I wasn’t born there - I’ve been there 3 times. I was 1 yrs. old, 12 yrs. old and then I went last December. I’m not fluent in Hindi, the language the community where my grandparents live uses, I don’t feel connected to most of South Asian and North Indian culture. I don’t identify as Indian-American because of culture or religion. I am very unread on the history of the country.

But it feels like a home. There is a sense of belonging that I feel in the air, and in the community. I’m fully aware of my outsider status there - I’m not trying to give up my U.S. citizenship privileges and problematics by proclaiming my connection to the so-called motherland (I feel uncomfortable using this term - does anyone have an alternative? Maybe just ‘homeland’). But I do feel connected to that location in a way that felt new.

Salman Rushdie has a collection of articled and essays entitled Imaginary Homelands and he explains this term so wonderfully:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind…

While I think Rushdie refers more to the immigrant community that looks back at their home, and more specifically people who are exiled from the homeland, I feel very strongly about this statement. Home for me, is just a narrative. An important narrative, yes, but ultimately, just a story, just a series of memories that makes up a blend of overwhelming nostalgia and trauma.

Only recently have I stopped feeling so unsettled about this. I felt so thrilled at being able to “diagnose” my relationship to this sense of home and homeland that most people around me seem to have. And then I just felt scared.

Now I realize that I still have many things to learn and that part of growing is building one’s own home. And it’s fine to have many homes and a nearly-fairytale vision of one’s homeland. We should hold on to these things if it is what makes us feel safe.

Home is about the people. I can’t help feeling like as communities become further linked and connected, and national boundaries become more blurred, home will only grow as an imaginary concept and we will have to start thinking of home as the multiple spaces where our heart may reside.

It’s been almost a month since I have really written a post. Turns out, February brought along a lot of things to write about, but with no additional energy or motivation to actually write.

It’s March now - time for a change.

In February, I realized that I want to go to graduate school.

Let’s rewind to where I was at the end of 2006.

I was going to graduate from college. Then I was going to work. I was going to find a job with a non-profit organization. I was going to win a fellowship that allowed me to study abroad. I was going to find an opportunity to teach abroad. I was going to work at a public school. I was going to take time away from institutional education.

All of that felt pretty good. Many of the people I work with now were all going to be doing these sorts of things. Joining Presidential campaigns, teaching English abroad… very wonderful things.

Then I went to India.

I reconnected with my grandmother - we were able to pick up right where we left off 5 years ago. I was able to look into her eyes and see a woman who is surviving the trauma of partition in ‘47 every day. A woman who was praying for her daughters every day. A woman who is doing her duty as a wife every day. I was able to see what she was really saying to me while reliving and retelling stories about her life:

Do your work. Live a life that was better than mine.

I came back and now it literally feels like every breath I take is coated by this verbal framework.

I started to feel very incomplete in my answers to the question “So…do you know what you’re going to do after you graduate?”

I started to feel like I was hiding something from everyone; there was a feeling in me that felt…off, somehow - to be honest, I wish I could explain it better. Actually, I can.

It was Guilt.

Guilt in wanting to continue to pursue higher education. Guilt in not wanting to be eager to answer the call for secondary public school teachers. Guilt at wanting to be an academic in postcolonial studies. Guilt in choosing theory over praxis. Guilt in having to put myself into more debt than I can even conceive of right now. I feel guilty because the work that I feel called to do doesn’t seem like great work.

And of course, at the root of all guilt lies privilege. And it’s a privilege for me to be able to even think of graduate school. It’s a privilege that I’m at a private institution that can give me the resources and advice I need to get into graduate school.

But all we can do with privilege is tell guilt to go to hell and do the work we can do with it. Putting privilege to good use is all we can do. It doesn’t go away no matter how much we attempt to banish or ignore it. And it definitely doesn’t go away when we coat it over and over with superficial recognition, whining, and guilt.

I think it was Audre Lorde that asks in her letter to..Mary Daly I believe: I’m doing my work, are you doing yours?

So the question is, what does it mean for me to do my work. It means pursuing what I am passionate about, finding the means to doing this, and then using this as a space to influence and motivate others to do their work. Theory doesn’t need to be mutually exclusive from praxis.

Graduate school, here I come.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to go about graduate school. Because I don’t really know. And I’m very scared of so many things, including not getting in, not being able to afford it (actually I know I can’t afford it — I guess I mean, not being able to find a way to manage the costs), not being capable or qualified enough, not finding a program in California, and of course, having second thoughts about going at all.

Will it be worth it?

There is much more to say about it. But I will bring it up again when I’ve done some research.

My grandfather was recently diagnosed with being bi-polar. He is in his 70s, perhaps early 80s, and he was officially diagnosed in a clinic in Delhi about a year ago. I’m kind of unclear about it, because although my mother is fairly open about discussing mental health, she and my grandmother consistently worry about news that might affect my state at school (i.e. they don’t want me to worry). For the last 8-12 months (again, unclear to me), he has not spoken more than a couple of sentences at a time. Even when I went to visit, he really only spoke to me if I asked him a direct yes/no question. I can’t really get into how overwhelming it was to see a man who was part of my upbringing and realize that he was not as I remembered him. To realize that he was not how he wanted me to remember him. Being the traditional patriarch of the family, he has caused a lot of problems for his wife and daughters. But to me he still lingers in my mind as the man who taught me long division, let me pretend to cut his hair, and sang old Hindi movie songs while we walked to the mailbox.

My father is a very stoic man. He has always been very introverted - according to the bits and pieces of his childhood that I have collected from his in-laws, who were very close to his parents. He changed career paths about five years ago - hotel management to yoga instructor. All of his yoga students talk about how compassionate and sensitive my father is (my mother is considered a very “lucky woman“) - a few refer to him as “a man in touch with his feminine side”. He cooks, does the laundry, and has always had an attitude towards my mother that appears to be very liberal, progressive, and “unlike the average man”.

My father has never talked about his childhood. I’ve seen him cry three times. The first time was when I was very small, and we found out his older sister died of cancer. He loosened his tie while he sat in this chair in our apartment, put his hands in front of his face, and let out a sob that I can’t ever forget. The second time was when he left for New York for six months to work as a line chef at a holistic institute, in the time between his career change (I was about 12). The third time was when I left for college. When I think about my father, the things I hear about him, and the way that I know him, I only think of that first time I saw him cry. In a suit, failing to resist vulnerability. My father has a biting quiet temper (which appears at any time - my relationship with my father depends on my ability to consistently walk on eggshells) that is garnished by the context he grew up in: where man was patriarch, and where, at the end of the day, his wife still owes him something.

There have been five straight men in my life - three white and two men of color - who have at some point in our relationships or friendships - revealed the fears, failings, and vulnerabilities that were embedded inside them, amidst years of gender socialization. (Don’t cry. Be strong. Be a man. Don’t be weak. And never fail anyone ever.) Some of these conversations happened over a period of time, and developed because we were in a relationship, we had become close, and because I could not stand never knowing what was wrong. Other conversations were not conversations at all - they were ephemeral confessions that probably held more meaning to me that they did to them. I am not friends with the three white men anymore. The first joined the marines. The second I pushed away upon realizing the extent of our verbally abusive relationship. The third - we never were friends to begin with. Both men of color have stayed in my life, for very different circumstances that are irrelevant right now. All of them, at some point, have thanked me for being able to share something about themselves. Everytime that happens, I cry.

I cry because I’m angry that men continue to come to their token woman of color friend because they can’t explain why, but she listens the best. Because despite feeling greatful, they continue to disrespect and take advantage of me. Because they are afraid that their significant others will get to know this “side” of them.

But mostly it’s because I think of my father and my mother’s father. Men who are never going to open up. Because they can’t - for different reasons - but because they hear the voices in their heads that tell them to be men. To never talk about how they are doing. To never admit to themselves how they are doing. To never let people get too close to them. I cry because I have to accept that there are whole histories there that I might never get to hear about - because it’s not ok for them to talk about trauma and pain and the past.

And also I’m scared that I might become like that. Because it’s the only way to “make it in this world”.