Not Quite Not White Read online

  There is no Indian formula for this particular exchange. At most, we mumble “Mention not” in English. And we mean it. Do not mention it. Do not say thank you again. Do not send thank-you notes on fancy stationery.

  The Blessed Sneeze

  If someone sneezes, say “Bless you.” Even if a stranger on a bus or a passerby on the street sneezes, you must immediately say this.

  In India, millions of sneezes go unblessed daily.

  The Indoor Voice

  Do not speak loudly in restaurants. Use your indoor voice.

  Indoor and outdoor voices are indistinguishable on the subcontinent, where domestic architecture often blurs the line between inside and outside. Everyone speaks as loudly as they want. The exception to this rule is that married women should always speak softly at home and in public. Loud, boisterous voices are best left behind for one’s natal family. A soft-spoken daughter-in-law is a good daughter-in-law.

  On Summoning Waiters

  Always summon waiters as discreetly as possible.

  In a restaurant, your power and status exist in inverse proportion to how loudly you have to speak to get attention from the servers. Powerful, wealthy white people only have to look up from their plate in order to summon a waiter. They make a quick motion with their hand, miming the act of writing, and the check appears. Words are for the powerless and second-class diners. In India, even the elite snap their fingers loudly and call out, “Bearerrrrr, bill!”

  The Importance of Tipping

  Always tip the waiter, the hairdresser, the pizza delivery man, the hotel chambermaid, and the taxi driver.

  Few Indians consistently tipped waiters in the 1970s and there was no method of calculating a tip based on a percentage of the total cost of a meal at a restaurant. At most, people rounded off the bill, threw a few paisas on the table, and walked off. They did, however, believe in bribery and baksheesh. A tip is for services already rendered. A bribe is to ensure future services.

  The Proper Use of Salt and Pepper

  Never sprinkle salt excessively on your food. In a restaurant, pepper will be grated on your food by a waiter wielding something that looks like a small missile.

  The Indian traditional thali, or plate, often comes with a tiny hillock of salt, a slice of lime, a green chili, and occasionally slices of raw onions. In India, no one will think you have a down-market palate if you liberally salt your food.

  The Superiority of the Rare and the Dry

  Bloodiest meat is best. Driest wine is best.

  It required much work to put a piece of beef with little rivulets of blood trickling out of it into my mouth. I felt like I had summited Mount Everest when I actually came to enjoy the taste of an absurdly expensive piece of rare steak. The sort of meat we enjoyed in India was cooked until the flesh was falling off the bone. Southern barbecue is easier for an Indian immigrant’s palate at first. Then one must work one’s way up to carpaccio and steak tartare. From the cooked to the raw—this is how you climb the social ladder in America.

  Only the socially inferior prefer their wines sweet in the West. Once upon a time, white sugar was a precious spice, reserved only for the aristocratic tables of Europe. Banquet tables laden with sugary desserts were an ostentatious display of power and wealth. Now, the consumption of white sugar, sweet drinks, and sweet wines is almost criminalized among the upper classes.

  The Correct Use of Wineglasses

  Red wine is to be drunk at room temperature in fat, round glasses. White wine is to be chilled and drunk from longish glasses. Red wine goes with red meat. White wine with fish and poultry. There are tricky exceptions. Proceed with caution.

  During the 1980s, wine culture was largely unknown to most Indians. Middle-class men sometimes drank whiskey, rum, gin, or beer. Middle-class women did not drink openly, for to do so would make them look slutty. The upper and lower classes were free to do as they pleased. If a middle-class man thought a woman was “fast” enough to imbibe alcohol, he might offer her a drink with the mildly lecherous line, “Do you take?”

  Silverware and Other Miscellanies at the Dinner Table

  Do not eat with your hand in America.

  In Calcutta, we eat Bengali food with our fingers. It is a delicate, high art when executed correctly. In America, I noticed some people even picked up their pizza slices or French fries gingerly, as if a fork and knife would be more appropriate. Forks on left. Knives on right. Spoons are for soups and desserts only. I sensed early on that the placement of silverware was not an innocent act. It can determine one’s placement in the social hierarchy. Needless to say, possessing the right kind of tableware is also important. The newly arrived immigrant who finds success may buy all this. The cultural capital that accrues within the well-worn surfaces of heirloom china, crystal, or silverware remains painfully out of our grasp.

  The paper napkin at the dinner table and the use of a spoon in place of a fork at mealtimes reveals the telltale heart of the newly arrived Indian on American shores.

  The Unfortunate Smell of Curry

  If you wish to assimilate into white American culture, do not smell of curry.

  In India, no one speaks of the smell of “curry” because such a generic thing does not exist. Many different kinds of fragrances waft out of Indian kitchens. I knew which neighbor was simmering goat and which neighbor was frying cauliflower with nigella seeds. Our kitchens had open windows. In older homes, the kitchen was set apart from the rest of the house with an inner courtyard. No one checked their homes and clothes multiple times before guests arrived, anxious about the lingering odor of foreignness.

  Odors and Other Unpleasantries

  Use deodorant. Use mouthwash. Use dental floss.

  When I was a young girl, these things were unheard of in average Calcutta households. Even hair conditioner was a new item in stores during the 1970s.

  Queuing Up

  Stand in a line politely and patiently. Do not attempt to cut a line. Maintain appropriate physical distance from others standing in line ahead of you and behind you.

  American westerns told us the ideal American man was the outlaw or the cowboy. These men did not follow the niceties of Old World rules and were gun-toting, freedom-loving iconoclasts. American hippies who came to India relished breaking social rules. Yet, when it comes to standing in line, Americans are strict rule followers. Indians are line cutters. Indians often slyly inch their way up a line or find creative excuses for shoving others aside so they can get to the top of the line first. Indians also have a very different notion of what is considered acceptable personal space in comparison to Americans. Contact with other bodies in crowded buses, trains, and queues is a part of daily life in the subcontinent, and some even take comfort from this communal closeness. In America, by contrast, learning how to stand in line obediently, allowing enough space between the person ahead of you and the person behind you, is an important step in Going Native. Anything else is considered uncivil.

  R.S.V.P.

  Répondez s’il vous plaît.

  No one I knew in India asked for R.S.V.P.s in the 1970s. Even now few bother to R.S.V.P. Some will never show up to your dinner party, while others will arrive with six distant relatives, four friends, and two colleagues from the office. Luckily, Indian cuisine is marvelously flexible and a clever cook knows how to magically feed twenty people from a menu planned for ten.

  The Gift That Has Been Registered

  If invited to a wedding or a baby shower, always ask if there is a gift registry.

  Americans will tell you exactly what they want you to buy them when they are getting married or having a baby. What you wish to give someone is of little consequence. What they want is more important. It is an efficient system of acquiring necessary, or even aspirational, objects. No one has to deal with the hassle of receiving fifteen glass pitchers of th
e same design. In India, while close relatives are expected to give saris or small pieces of gold jewelry, many guests bring cash to a wedding. Some hand over the cash to the official wedding gift collector, while others enjoy a good wedding banquet and depart with the cash safely tucked in their pocketbooks. Since gifts are only given after the birth of a baby, preregistering for baby gifts is still a rarity in middle-class India.

  With each passing year my manual for Going Native continued to expand as new entries were added and older ones amended. I was author and exegete, maker and user, of my own field guide for the perplexed immigrant.

  * * *

  • • •

  There were many other new rules that Ma, Baba, and I had to learn during our first few years here. Do not expectorate while walking on the street. Do not ask people how much their car cost. Do not ask how much they paid for their house. Do not ask whether they rent or own their house. Do not ask what their salary is. Do not tell anyone that they have gained weight or lost hair. Now that we owned a phone, we came to understand that we had to call ahead and make an appointment before visiting a friend or a relative.

  Ma and Baba continued to read Better Homes & Gardens and Reader’s Digest. Although we used to subscribe to the Statesman regularly back in Calcutta, we never subscribed to a single American newspaper after we immigrated. I do not know if it was because my parents felt less interested in the news here or if the unfailing presence of Peter Jennings and Dan Rather during our evening dinner hour made newspapers an unnecessary additional expense. As I grew older and started paying attention to the contents of certain high school classmates’ living rooms, I noticed that their parents—the white, educated, professional ones—read publications that never crossed the threshold of our apartment: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Economist. My high school was located right next to the city’s main public library. After school I headed to the reading room and thumbed through these publications, usually unable to follow the essays, or understand why a cartoon was funny.

  When I saw the newspapers, magazines, and books that furnished the homes of successful, educated white people, I felt a certain kind of sadness for my parents. It was an emotion reminiscent of something I once read in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Aam Antir Bhepu. This is the scene from the Bengali novel as I recall it: The young Apu—the unlikely namesake of the Kwik-E-Mart owner in Springfield—is eating a delicious meal at a wealthy villager’s home in rural Bengal. At the end of the meal, he is served dessert—an unctuous semolina pudding, mohonbhog, studded with plump raisins and cashews and glistening with a generous helping of ghee, clarified butter. As he tastes the delicious mohonbhog he realizes it is far better than the version his mother makes at home. He feels a deep sadness rise within him as he continues to swallow each sweet mouthful. His family’s poverty stands in ever greater contrast to his host’s prosperity. But that is not the root cause of his heartache. Apu grieves for his mother because he imagines she does not know how a real mohonbhog must be prepared. As the wife of a poor Brahmin priest, Apu’s mother’s version is watery and innocent of expensive items such as raisins, cashews, or ghee. Middle-class, urban Bengalis of my generation who were raised on this classic novel will all remember how sad we felt when we reached this scene of rural impoverishment. We savored Apu’s grief the way we enjoyed wiggling the loose baby teeth in our mouths. It was a sweet pain. I felt a similar melancholia when I saw a copy of the Economist in a classmate’s living room. Ma and Baba had no idea why New Yorker cartoons were funny. They never read the op-eds in the New York Times. They never read book reviews in the Economist. They were unfamiliar with this version of raisins, cashews, and ghee.

  My appetite for self-improvement was the most American thing about me in those early teenage years as I was trying to go native. After devouring every issue of Reader’s Digest and Better Homes, and after watching every TV show I could cram in without falling behind in school, I methodically read the entries in my most prized yard sale purchase—the World Book Encyclopedia. I even tried to teach myself a bit of French using that encyclopedia.

  In seventh grade, the Peabody School introduced a second language to a select group of students. I am not sure how these students were chosen for French class. Perhaps they had the highest grades and were considered capable of taking on the additional burden of a second language. All the popular white kids were in French class. As a new student, I was not deemed eligible for French class. A few times a week, as many of the white students filed out for French class, I sat in a half-empty class with other kids who were not in French. We were told to use that period to review our work from other classes or start on homework. Some kids started homework, while others gossiped. Although I spoke English with a strong Bengali accent, I had no problem with following along in class or keeping up with my reading. Math and science classes did not challenge me in that first year because I had covered much of the material earlier in my Calcutta convent. I was hungry to learn more. I was desperate to learn everything America had to offer. Those idle hours in class while others learned French in a separate room felt frustrating. I smarted with the humiliation I imagined was implicit in the school’s decision to not allow me to learn French. We juggled three languages in three scripts—English, Bengali, and Hindi—in my Calcutta school. Surely, I could take a shot at French too. The following year, in eighth grade, it was determined that only those students who had already begun studying French in seventh grade would be allowed to go into second-year French. I was ineligible once more.

  I could explain none of this to my parents. My grades in all the other classes were very good. My parents did not imagine there was any problem at school. Yet, I felt I was allowed to advance only so far in my new American school and then certain doors were being closed off so that I would always remain Not Quite. I learned how to count from one to one hundred in French from the encyclopedia, carefully trying to decipher the pronunciation of each number from its phonetic equivalent printed on the yellowing pages. Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix. Each evening I sat in with my encyclopedia and read about France and the French language. For no particular reason, I memorized the French motto of the British Order of the Garter—Honi soit qui mal y pense.

  Why did French matter so much to me as a new American immigrant? The wealthier white kids in school all studied it. Some of them even spoke it at home. A few had traveled to France with their parents during summer vacations. French carried prestige. When the Architect took us to the nicer restaurants in Boston, the wine list had many French words on it. The Architect always translated the French words for us. A new bakery chain called Au Bon Pain had recently appeared in Boston. They served a delicious flaky pastry called a croissant. I wanted to understand what all these exotic words meant. I wanted to learn how to pronounce them like a native. I did not want America to be translated by the Architect forever. I wanted unfettered access.

  Authentic French cookery was in vogue in America. Ma, Baba, and I lived a short distance away from Julia Child’s home on Irving Street. We saw her cooking shows on WGBH, Boston’s local public television channel. Cassoulet, coq au vin, tarte tatin—I devoured Julia’s lessons, making note of every tidbit she dropped about her time in France along the way. Ma never cooked any of these dishes. As I got older I fibbed to my classmates and pretended we ate such food at dinner. I had seen enough of Julia’s shows to imagine what that food must have tasted like. I would rather lunch off that imagined taste than bring leftover roti and sabzi to school. In high school I finally had my chance at enrolling in a French class. Our textbook, Nos Amis, taught us that French was spoken in Paris and Marseilles, as well as in Quebec, Martinique, and Tunis. We learned that French kids enjoyed Parisian croissants as well as Tunisian briks. We learned that French-speaking people shopped in les marchés as well as in les souks. Julia, however, continued to teach public television viewers French cookery as practice
d in France.

  White Americans were forever in pursuit of authentic tastes. French food in Provence. Italian food in Tuscany. The yearning to search for authenticity, for the origin of things, ran strong in the West. Wilfred Thesiger found the authentic spirit of Arabia in the desert tribes. He dismissed Arabs from polyglot trading ports or more cosmopolitan cities for not being as pure as the Bedu tribes whose ways apparently remained unchanged within the confines of the Rubʿ al-Khali. The Student who used to visit us in Calcutta and shopped for saris with Ma, similarly, would never consider us the proper subject of her research. Anthropologists such as the Student spent months with potters in Indian villages or tribals in remote hills. Forest-dwelling tribals and illiterate villagers were fitting subjects of American academic fieldwork. Middle-class, anglicized, city dwellers—Indians like Ma, Baba, and me—were not authentic enough. The real India was to be found in mud-hut villages and tropical jungles.

  The desire to conquer the wilderness stretched from the early European colonists in the New World to Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Television taught me that the final frontier beckoned even in the future. White Americans wanted to boldly go where no man has gone before. I identified with the crew of the USS Enterprise because I too found myself far from home, exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations.

  * * *

  • • •

  One summer, early in high school, I developed a sudden obsession for no-bake Jell-O desserts. Every afternoon, when my parents were at work, I created pastel-colored delicacies based on recipes I found in advertisements for Cool Whip and Jell-O. A dreamy pale pink strawberry mousse. A light green key lime pie. Quivering multicolored parfaits. Each evening, when my parents returned home from work, I liked to surprise them with my new American creations. One afternoon, while I was busy making another no-bake mousse or pie, Ma came home during her lunch hour with a colleague from work. He was a tall, lanky, white man with wispy brown hair. Ma had told me about him earlier. He drank wheatgrass juice, ate only organic, vegetarian food, and avoided white sugar. He came home with Ma to learn how to make paneer.