Diaspora

Last fall, I found myself in Dublin, New Hampshire. It’s not even a speck on the map. It couldn’t be as it consists of a post office, a town hall, a library, a general store and a community church. The highway divides the ‘village’. I thought village was a flattering word for such a tiny pimple of a place but Dubliners insisted it was a village. Low peaks and a wealth of forest surround Dublin. It was the fall and the leaves were turning into those familiar and stunning reds and golds. The landscape seemed on fire at times and drivers suddenly slowed down to take in the beauty.

            The journey to Dublin had taken five and half-hours from New York to Brattleboro in Vermont and then an hour’s drive to Dublin. A couple of miles past Dublin, heading north, was a turn-off. The narrow black topped road led past a still, placid lake. The water was so still that it was a mirror for the surrounding trees. On the other side of the road were the hidden mansions of the New England rich. Dirt roads wound through the trees and I had to take my guide’s word that they were quite stunning.

Another dirt road and there, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, was my friend’s house. I’ll call her Apu. She’d left India 30 years ago, from Baroda, to visit America and stayed on, never to return. We’d been friends when I lived in Manhattan. She had been a professor in a New York City college and had now retired to this nowhere place. I wasn’t entirely surprised. I’ve meet Indians in other isolated places. Once, going up the Orinoco river, we stopped at a small bar called ‘Menens’, of course its owner was a Mr Menon. And another time, driving with a ranch foreman across the Texan panhandle, we stopped to talk to the driver of another pick-up. We were the only two in sight.  The cowboy confessed his partiality to samosas and told me there was an Indian family living somewhere in a remote village who cooked him samosas.

            Apu lived in this backwoods with her American husband, Frank, and their indulged and very spoilt dog with an Indian name. In winters, the snow is waist high from November through to April or May and the road into the village virtually impassable at times. They have to wait for the snowplough to free them from such isolation.

            Like so many other Diaspora, Apu had not quite lost her ties to India. Admittedly, they were loose as frayed threads. She still wore a kurta (though never a saree, as she had no occasion to dress up in Dublin) and had cooked a wonderful Gujarati dinner (spices sent via UPS from New York). She remained a strict vegetarian and she would quietly celebrate her festivals like diwali with special meals. But apart from this identity, she had no further interest in her Indian-ess. Indian news is as spare as hen’s teeth in Dublin, and even CNN doesn’t pay any attention to India in the American news programmes. Of course, she still had family ‘back home’ and they telephoned or visited infrequently.

She’s always told me India had rejected her. I never quite understood this reasoning. Yes, she had had an unhappy childhood because of a death in her family and her college years as a professor were lonely. India isn’t kind to single, career women. This rejection could as easily have happened to an American. But she clung to the rock bed that India had rejected her.

            Her feeling of rejection naturally implies America’s acceptance. America had given her job, independence, social security and if not exactly an identity, a partial feeling of belonging. In Dublin, she was the only brown face around. She had pitched herself into this remote, isolated community with the energy of the immigrant wanting to be accepted. She had revived the library, started poetry readings and, as an ex-professor of literature encouraged the elderly Dubliners to write their memoirs.  I met most of her acquaintances during my stay and knew they’d never met an Indian before and had only a confused idea of where India was. They knew it to be a fearful place, synonymous with diseases, poverty and unimaginable terrors. The exception was a patrician gentleman we stopped to ask for directions in the next village of Peterborough. He had, surprisingly visiting India years ago and more surprisingly loved his brief visit and wished every American went there.

Apu drives us all the way back to Brattleboro, wanting to spend as much time as she could, squeezing the last drop of our friendship. When we said goodbye, she said she was happy, she was contented, she was settled. But I doubt her. Such isolation takes its toll on the spirit and the soul. American isolation is worse, like a steel, pampered prison, letting in very little light or sustenance from another culture, another country.

I’ve been there and know the feeling all too well. Like spores, the winds have carried us to nearly every corner of the world.  Some of us left India yesterday, some a century ago. Ambition and economics took us away, and we never returned.  Like me, we possess that chameleon quality to adapt to our hosts. We become English, American, French, Argentinean. We speak those languages, celebrate those customs, and marry away. India fades the longer we remain away and, after a generation, vanishes. Among friends, we can completely forget who we are. We’re one of them, and they look on us through the prism of that friendship. However, as in a Pinter play, when a stranger enters, we’re separated from the others. We’re recognised as of Indian descent.

            I’d been away from India thirty years and seldom thought of myself as ‘Indian’. However, strangers always reminded me. I was making a television documentary on Homicide detectives in New York. My crew was British, the cops American of the usual mix of Irish, Hispanic, and African American. I believe I was looked on all as just another Englishman. Until one day, a detective walked in, saw me and came to the point. ‘You’re an Indian, from India, aren’t you?’ I admitted I was, though many years away from my homeland. ‘I’m quarter Indian, from India,’ he said proudly. ‘My grandmother came from somewhere in south India. You must tell me how I can trace her roots.’ His partner looked at him in surprise and said: ‘I never knew that.’

 When he had first walked in, he hadn’t a trace of India in his face. Then, having acknowledged his ancestors, I saw the blurred traces of India still left in him.  It was in the faint tinge of his skin, mistaken for a tan, and in his face. Through two generations away, he wanted to reach an India he never knew through me. He also reminded me what I too had nearly forgotten – that I was Indian.

We can never shake India totally.  The dust hides in our souls, and the country is imprinted in our features. We’re a distinctive people. We cannot be mistaken for other Diaspora people – the Chinese or Hispanics, German or Dutch or African.  We can mix, blend, and churn in with other blood but the thin stream of India remains in us. Probably that detective, Johnston was his name, had never thought much about his grandmother’s roots. However, when he saw me, I drew out the memory of an old, dark woman that he only dimly remembered.  Unfortunately, she had told him little of her mother country and only bequeathed him her blood.

Admittedly, this has happened quite a few times during the years of my self-imposed exile. Though in less dramatic circumstances. Some of these encounters have been brief and tenuous. As in the song, across a crowded room in the sea of faces a glimpse, a smile acknowledging our common ancestry, and then gone. At others as strangers meeting in an airport lounge or at a dinner party a long way from India, where we exchange our places of origin, for some not even seen or imagined. Sometimes it’s a grandmother, at others great-great grandfathers and grandmothers who left the land. Of course, we all promise to visit, to explore but there’s never enough time.

Last year, in Leicester, I worked with British actors in my stage play. They were of Indian origin and wanted to talk about an India they had never visited and did not know. However, they were in a profession in which looks define the character and they were always cast as Indians. An irony never escaped these Englishmen and women. They were forever cast as Indians.

It’s because we’re ‘forever’ Indian that we are drawn to forming our own ghettos in strange lands. Whether we’re in Africa or America or wherever, we are, despite ourselves or because of it, drawn to each. We need not be relatives or even from the same city, our languages are different and we chose the common language of English or French to communicate. But you’ll find us on the same street after a while, in the same neighbourhood. We draw comfort from each other’s presence, whether in rich suburbia or a rundown street.

Leicester, as an example, has the biggest percentage of Asian’s in a British city.  They came to England, via Africa, and though two or three generations removed, they still practised every Indian custom. At times, they are more Indian than Indians here in India because of their great distance from their motherland.  India’s changing rapidly, but the Diaspora remembers the India from their distant past and wants it to remain a constant. Like the North Star to ancient seafarers or the Bollywood films they love still, more so than those in India.

I know that inner instinct. It’s hard to define why. I have good, close friends who are English or American and we’re totally at ease in each other’s company. I grew up with them. However, many years ago in college in Canada, I met a student my age.  We didn’t know each other well; we had a different circle of friends. Then imperceptibly we gravitated towards each other and I admit he’s my closet friend. He’s not in my profession or shares many of my interests. It was a mutual bonding as we came from the sub-continent. He’s of Pakistani origin, though never having lived there. When we meet up, we’re instantly close. We’ve both wondered about that as he too confesses that though he has many other friends and I am the only Indian one he knows, he feels at ease with me. Maybe the blood does draw us together.

I returned to India finally. I tired of the Diaspora and was fortunate to still have a few roots back here. I thought I was finally home. I was fully an Indian as an Indian can be in his homeland, living in his ancestral house.  That is, until I was buying a car. The owner, a small pear shaped man from the film industry, left the car with me for a week, without a word. When he returned, I suggested darkly that I could have stripped and sold his car. He chuckled and shook his head: ‘You wouldn’t have. You’re not Indian.’ I remonstrated that I was but he was insistent and I asked him to define what he meant. He said: ‘You’ve acquired different values from us. You’re not Indian, sir.’

I still haven’t recovered from that backhanded compliment/insult.  Or was he reminding me that, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, ‘you can never go home’.