reached for my package of Ritz crackers this morning and found a soggy mess.
Why? Was this a case of overzealous chai dipping? Did I accidentally spill Limca on them in the middle of the night? Was it another episode of my sleepwalking and throwing random kitchen objects into the toilet again?
No. It's monsoon season. The humidity is so thick that it leaves a damp nasty blanket over everything. Everything is just wet and hot including my clothes, my books and my Ritz crackers.
Gross.
I love the monsoon.
I'll be walking outside and making my way through the damp nasty blanket, and all of a sudden a dark cloud will loom for a few minutes and then it will burst leaving everything in its surroundings drenched. The rain will continue for hours and hours and I can always feel everyone's relief in the air. To their mothers' dismay, little kids will run outside in just their underwear and drench themselves, shrieking. As their mothers come to terms with the inevitable, they decide to make the most of it and take out the Dettol soap and give the kids a good scrubbing. Rickshaw drivers will pull up, their pant-legs soaked to the knee, their wiper-less windshield covered with water and will grin and say, 'kaphe accha mausaum aajkal kya?" (great weather these days, right?") People will have muddy feet and umbrellas with holes in them, but this is a place where storm clouds don't mean a frowny face. In a place where so many people are deeply connected to the rural agrarian outskirts, a few months of rain mean a prosperous year of crops and health.
The end of the heat also brings more parties. The wedding fireworks are starting again and Vanya turned one.
Who is Vanya? I'm not 100 percent sure, she is sort of the niece of the woman that I'm renting from.
What matters though, is that she turned one. One year old birthdays are a really big deal here. By a big deal, I mean a really big deal. As my practical practical friend Saurabh put it regarding his own niece's first birthday, "Why don't you just put the kid in a yard and give her a balloon and then put the rest of the money in a mutual fund for her?" But I had fun. We all dressed up. A lot. We drove out to some farmhouse on the Delhi-Jaipur highway. In a several acre amphitheater, both a DJ and a traditional Indian classical music band played and everyone danced. Three big cakes spelling out the word "ONE" were eaten and then we began the several course actual meal. Vanya cried and got eyeliner all over her white dress and fell asleep. We all stayed for several more hours and then left. I don't really remember my first birthday, but I doubt it was like that. Maybe I'll reclaim it as something that was denied to me in my infancy, like some men are reclaiming their foreskins. Doubtful though.
Besides walking in the rain and celebrating birthdays of people who are definitely not clear on the concept of birth or day and only vaguely clear on the concept of people, I feel like I've been killing a lot of time since my mom left (she was here, it was fabulous, ask me if you want more of a play by play). The project is going slower than I expected (for a million reasons that I'm sick of ticking off), but that gave me the opportunity to reread the Namesake.
I once read an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri and she said that the biggest compliment she ever gets is when readers come up to her and tell her, "I really like my story...er I mean your story," because she wants the readers to identify with her work. When I first read this, I thought that she was being just a little obnoxious. However, after reading the Namesake for the first time since coming to India and it really felt like my past seven months but reversed. If you haven't read it, go! That's your library task for the week.
Not to give a book report, but I love it because the Indians in the novel don't come to the U.S. for wealth or for a "better life," but because the guy on the train told him to "pack a blanket and a pillow and go." I love how the inspiration to go and explore was external. I love how what they confronted was met with ambiguity and growth and change that weren't necessarily positive, that weren't necessarily negative. I love how they reforged their old life (kind of) in America by meeting other Bengalis, how observing different traditions weren't part of "observing their culture" but were just natural tendencies. They were comfortable. I love how the mother went through these cycles of being critical of her surroundings and then critical of her own criticalness and then critical again. I love how the parents in the book didn't think of things that they did as uniquely "Bengali" until their kids pointed them out. I realized through reading it again that after this time I can probably point out more things that are uniquely "Midwestern American" than I can point out things that are "Indian."
I recently met a couple of other researchers in India and the question of what is "distinct" to our subjects is one that baffles all of us. My friend was researching dietary practices in Tamil Nadu and she would ask women what they wouldn't eat when they were pregnant and they would say, "Oh, we eat everything," when it was clear that they were avoiding all kinds of foods. Now these women weren't stupid, it's just that they ate everything, but some things. There was such a "naturalness" to what they chose not to eat that it wasn't worth articulation. Similarly, when asked about our diet, most of us wouldn't say that we omit foods we consider dangerous like glass shards or foods that we ate at one point in our lives like breast milk.
I know that when I put it this way it all sounds really obvious, but when I ask someone what their job is and they say, "Nothing," it's totally bewildering. It's still the beginning in a lot of ways, but just as Ashima discovered what was Indian, I am constantly discovering how "American" the premise of my project is. Just like Ashima though, I don't think that that's always a problem.
Anyways, that's all of my babble for now. Write back! I miss you fools!
Love and all of my remaining soggy cracker crumbs,
B
