September 2003

Prologue: Deep in the Crevice

Three buddies on a roadtrip. Good old American boys, born in California, Berkeley educated, boozers, skirt chasers, baseball fanatics, purveyors of fine French food and In n Out Burger alike. And, oh yeah, brown. Not black, not white, but somewhere deep in the crevice between. Like mama told them, not undercooked or overcooked, taken out of the oven at just the right time. Golden brown, unless it was soccer or baseball season or during swimming lessons. Then they were burnt, unsuitable for going round to mom’s friends’ homes for dinner. Too dark, you know? No tan needed, plenty of melanin in these boys. No need to lay out, the shade of that beach umbrella will do just fine. (That way the girls can’t see their hairy chest and lower back too.) The lighter the shade of brown, the better. The lighter the shade of brown, the more others might think they’re Italian, or Spanish (from Spain not Mexico). Good for getting chicks right?

Darker brown was definitely bad. Didn’t think about it as kids, but now, now dark brown was more than just a joke at the family friends’ homes about suitability for marriage, about looking like a South Indian or even a kala. Now dark brown was noticed by others, outsiders, citizens, seriously. Citizens double took with dark brown. Mental images flashing instantly, unwittingly one after another, like the snap snap of a 35MM camera in their minds. Images of towers falling, flags burning, street crowds chanting, chaos, deception, suspicion. Unease. Can’t blame them, they suffered. They lost people. Loved ones. Neighbors. High school buddies. Friends of friends. Yes, the citizens of the United States of America suffered and now thought twice about dark brown.

Rugged, handsome features our boys boasted. Perfect for an Abercrombie ad, if only they were a little lighter or a lot darker. Just like business school taught them, gotta focus. Focus leads to differentiation, which leads to a sustainable competitive advantage. Can’t be in between, gotta choose who you are. Light or dark? Black or white? Come on, choose. Choose! Who are you?

Until recently our boys procrastinated, pushed off the question, tried to be both. But now no one asked them to choose anymore. Everyone just chose for them. Dark brown it is, fellas.

Now it wasn’t just the frustration of Indian women dominating the Miss Universe contests while you could watch TV for months and not see an Indian in a commercial or program. (And no, CNN or the DVD of Gandhi from Blockbuster don’t count.) That was just annoying, knowing that you had the looks and talent to be up there, were it not for the fact you were pulled out of the oven at JUST the right fucking time. Now it was far worse. Now you couldn’t even walk down the street in some nice college town without thinking twice about whether the gora walking the other way would wonder if you’ve got a small plastic bomb under your shirt. It’s just then, the moment where you think to yourself ‘I’d better not make any startling movements or I might scare the shit out of these people’, it’s that moment when you think twice about that you start to understand that this really isn’t our home. Our parents might have carved out a niche for our community in this country, and our families might have accumulated all the creature comforts they could afford (far more, even, than they could have done back home), but when citizens double take as you pass them on the street, your heart just drops as you realize we’re just outsiders deep in the crevice between black and white, hands calloused and backs aching from trying to climb out, only to reach the top and get kicked back down into the darkness.

………………

Chapter 1

But let’s go back to the old days, the good days before the citizens’ unease. Our boys’ families moved here in the early 60s, still waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night, the horrific images of partition still fresh and on the very visible sleeves of their souls. They didn’t move here just for the money, although the money might be good. (Does that disqualify them from the American Dream?) They were fleeing, from corruption, greed, insanity, their own man-made nightmares. America was their beacon, like so many others. Like everyone else here.

They came with engineering degrees and experience, work hard ethics without the play hard qualities that might lead them to screw up the balance at the local country club. They came with turbans covering hair that had never been cut, hair that they believed to emanate from their souls as energy. They came and realized that wouldn’t work here, at least not then, so they cut their hair, severed the link between body and soul. This opened doors. They got hired as busboys and waiters, cab drivers and janitors. They quadrupled up in one bedroom apartments, sent their money home to their wives and mothers, along with short notes promising to reunite everyone in America. They clung together and built the seeds of a community. They grabbed opportunity when it presented itself, scoring engineering and technical jobs with their entrepreneurial instincts. Families did come within a few years, citizenship established, homes bought, investments made, customs migrated, more children conceived, and the community thrived (although acceptance lagged). These boys are the first who know only this land.

Our heroes grew up in apartments just next to their gas stations, in small one-story homes with three generations rubbing elbows in the narrow corridors, or above the managers’ desk in their motels. In the summers, they worked the registers at the station, restocked the shelves in the grocery store, changed the sheets and cleaned the bathroom in the Best Western. Not the type of lifestyle you brag about to your buddies when school starts back up, but this was the type of dedication that built wealth for families in a new world. By the late 1980s and 90s, our boys’ families traded up into bigger, nicer homes which their folks could hardly figure out how to fill up.

Education was the buzz in the community. Our boys were sent to prep schools, where they became learned and articulate scholars and varsity captains on the weekdays. On Saturday, they were ballers without the hops, hip hoppers without the gats, rolling with their crews blaring Ice Cube and Public Enemy on the way to T Bell. And when Sunday rolled around, they morphed into nice family oriented boys at temple.

This wasn’t Southall or Wembley, or even Singapore, where you had enough of your people around that you could afford to just be you. Maybe we weren’t strong inside, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. But if it were that easy those guys wouldn’t be famous would they? The non-Gandhis of the world need numbers for strength, and these boys had no one but each other. Three little Indians, isolated on an island full of rich white kids and a couple token blacks and Asians. They clung to each other nervously at first, amplifying their similarities despite the fact their parents saw them as different, as Gujaratis or Punjabis from wildly different backgrounds.

So they didn’t grow up in the ghetto, unless of course they owned a motel there and lived above the manager’s desk. You wouldn’t think that a second generation would be talking like they were born and raised in the hood., pistols packing. Brown kids, suburbanites like most of the hypocrite white kids we went to school with, pimp strolling around with their tens and twenties, Tupac and Biggie blaring, speaking to our damn souls. I felt it. I’m not gonna lie. I was like, fuck the police, fuck white America. Bigots, racists, marginalizing us, fuck that. Stand up, the revolution will not be televised, burn Hollywood burn, all that. Free the people. We all did.  Even our boys.  Then they realized they weren’t fighting for themselves. Or their friends. They were fighting for people who never passed them the ball because they thought they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They were fighting for a music, a culture, a language that they had adopted that was all about people who could give a rat’s ass about them or where they came from. (In fact, if you really think about it, the new crap music being written wasn’t even for them, it was for white kids in the middle of America who fell for the same shit that they did.) When you come to that conclusion, you know you’ve been taken. You’ve been fooled, you bought into a whole way of life that is not your own, you’ve faked everything because you didn’t have the strength to represent who you are inside your house when you walk outside.

So there they were at a ritzy prep school, wondering why everyone wore Berkenstocks, trying to figure out the words to some Led Zepellin and AC/DC songs. Trying desperately to be liked, to fit in, to be normal. And they did, they fit in eventually. They scored girlfriends, won valedictorian awards, partied. But they were not honest. Not with themselves, their families or their friends. They learned the game at school, picked up the language and the norms, just enough to get by without being an outcast. And over time they perfected their skills. But they never told them who they were at home, they never shared their struggles to live in between worlds.

So maybe it was their fault, not anyone else’s. Maybe if we all spoke up, explained ourselves more than just taking people out to a great place for curry, maybe there’s no one to blame but us.

“I sat down in the middle of the garden…and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.  There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit.  I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few.  All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground.  There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.  The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.  Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.  Their backs were polished vermillion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened.  I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more.  I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.  When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.“

A typical morning with Jiya:

When Jiya wakes up in the morning, she usually has a big smile, gives me a kiss and announces, “It’s morning time!” Then, for whatever reason, she neighs like a horse. Soon thereafter, she demands her morning milk bottle (doodoo in hindi, which sadly conjures up images far less cozy than a warm bottle for anyone who grew up in America). We have a brief negotiation, which she always wins with the final statement, “I’m coming wit you.” I stumble down the stairs with Jiya in my arms, or possibly holding my hand and stubbornly making her own way down. In the kitchen, I fill up her bottle — her “pretty bottle” if it’s clean — as she reminds me “I want too much, Daddy, too much.” I follow along and fill the bottle to the very top. 45 secs in the microwave and we’re almost ready. “I want to put the topper on!” Of course you do! She usually turns it the wrong direction (maybe because she’s lefty?) while singing “turny turny turny”. I finish off the turny and plop her down on the brown sofa, bowing to her final demand: “I wanna watch little bit Dora.”

Meanwhile, back upstairs, Karam is still usually snoring away despite all three of us hollering, tickling, licking and generally annoying him.  Eventually I drag him out of bed and plop him on the toilet for a pee, where the *real* moaning begins:

“I don’t want to go to school!”

Daddy: “Well, if you’re so tired, we’ll put you to bed earlier tonite.”

“I’m not tired! I’m just comfy in my bed!

“I’m sick of school!”

“I’m cold. I wanna crawl back under my covers!”

Then, as resignment sets in that school is inevitable…”I want a big breakfast, a really big breakfast.”

Just an example of what happens in our house most mornings.  I’m sure there’s a re-run playing in millions of homes across the world every day… 

• Two 2.5 hour ski lessons @ Squaw
• Ski rentals
• Helmet rentals
• Mittens (one of which he lost during his first lesson, plus he DESPISED them anyway because they’re frickin mittens and he knows he’s not a cat or something)
• North Face gloves (see above)
• Goggles
• Two frog dogs at the end of each day (fantastic invention by the french where you take a nice, crusty baguette, hollow out the middle bready bit using something that looks like an iron stake, then squirt some ketchup and mustard inside the hollowed out cavern before tossing the dog in)

Karam woke up at 7am sharp the first day, 15 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, and I knew right away that he must be excited. (He’s usually the last one up in our house on weekday mornings.) His first words? “Skiing!” We jumped out of bed, got dressed, wolfed down some Cheerios (he had a non-fat chocolate pudding also), and got into Squaw at 8:30am. He and his little crew of “Level 1″ skiiers hit the slopes at 9:45am. He did pretty well in getting his skis on, hopping around, and practicing his pizza wedges. He even did alright on his first couple runs down the slope after taking the “magic carpet” up the hill. I left around 10:45am to give him some space and not have me watching him the whole time, but by the time I came back at 11:45am, all hell had broken loose. He was crying, cold, hungry, frustrated, I’d forgotten his sunblock and he was ready to go home. I’ve never seen him fall apart so badly! He munched down frog dog #1 in the car and that helped a lot, but he pretty much cried all the way home about why I’d bought him mittens in the first place, how the chin strap on the helmet scratched his chin all day, how his goggles were falling down his face all day, how they only gave him juice and n food at snack time, etc etc. And he was SO sick of hearing about doing a “pizza” which means a wedge stop while coming down the hill. He was cute though, and he badly wanted to like skiing because he knew how much I wanted him to ski with me.

Day 1 of Skiing:

He took the next day off, slept in, I made everyone a big breakfast and we hit the hot tub and skipped rocks into the lake and had snowball fights and watched Iron Man on DVD. At the end of the day I asked him if he wanted to take another lesson the next day, and he agonized over it before saying he would do it. But he added, “I’m not too fussed if you want to skip it, Daddy.” Again, my little selfless boy trying to make me happy.

I woke him up the next morning (no self-initiated early wake up this time) and in his drowsy, mostly asleep state his first words were: “My arm is hurting. I can’t ski without my arms.” I eventually woke him up and tried to give him a pep talk about not quiting, how everything in life gets easier if you keep practicing and working at it, how I was SO rubbish at skiing when I was little (a *slight* fib in that I didn’t ski til 19) and now I’m really good (another slight fib, some might say), and how if he really hates it today he won’t have to go back again.

By the grace of god, he ended up making HUGE leaps and bounds on this second day. His pizza stance was solid, he was leaning forward at the right times, and he was much more confident and giving me thumbs ups as he cruised down the hill. I was so happy and proud of him for persevering. At the end of day, as we munched on our frog dogs on the way home, he was shocked to find out that we were driving home to SF later that day and he couldn’t come back the next day to ski. He was upset, but I was thrilled to bits inside, knowing that he’d caught the fever for skiing. By next season, we’ll be on the sloped together!

Opening the door

of the fortress

a shaft of light

enters through

the brass lock

lighting up

the temple idol

touching its feet

and sweeping upwards

to reveal an

enigmatic smile

– in this dark foreboding

fortress –

only the pigeon flutters.

- Satish Gupta

The story of my life

written in the

sands of time

buried in the

warm dunes

– how many more

caravans will

move on

without noticing

the faint shadow

this ripple creates.

- Satish Gupta

Let me know what you think about it!