Not Quite Not White Read online

  Why did J.J. act like a buffoon and keep saying “dy-no-mite!” when his parents were always overworked and stressed? Why was J.J. not as wise and thoughtful as John-Boy Walton? I understood that all would end well for the Walton family. The adult John-Boy’s calm voice-over was proof that the future was going to be rosier than the present. But what future lay in store for the Evans family? Despite J.J.’s goofiness, I sensed the jagged edges of desperation inside Florida’s home. Ma, Baba, and I lived with similar jagged edges in our attic apartment.

  Little did I know that I was watching old reruns. The Waltons and Good Times had been canceled a few years prior to my arrival. My experience with television in Calcutta was limited to the occasional show I saw in a neighbor’s home. India had one channel in that era—Doordarshan—and it was state-run. Its broadcast hours were limited. In Cambridge, I could barely believe my own good fortune that we finally possessed our own TV and it came with six or seven local channels. Reruns, sitcoms, daytime soaps, nighttime dramas, miniseries, talk shows, game shows, spin-offs, season finales, series finales—I was becoming proficient in American TV talk. Sometimes I looked at the TV Guide on display at the supermarket in order to decode the complex program schedules. My parents never subscribed to TV Guide. Instead, they subscribed to Reader’s Digest and Better Homes & Gardens.

  Dynasty taught me how American rich people live. Three’s Company taught me how American roommates behave. Welcome Back, Kotter taught me how American high schools work. Solid Gold taught me how Americans dance. The Jeffersons taught me that having a piece of the pie meant movin’ on up to the East Side to a deluxe apartment in the sky. I had a crush on Vinnie Barbarino of the Sweathogs. I wished I had blond hair like Krystle Carrington. The young anthropologist among natives was Going Native herself. I was assimilating.

  Then, out of the blue one day, our social studies teacher announced we were going on a field trip to see a movie.

  The entire seventh grade class went to see Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. Ben Kingsley played the lead role. Ben Kingsley, as I later discovered, is the stage name of the biracial British actor Krishna Bhanji. I had to endure over three hours of seeing Kingsley as a mystical Gandhi lecturing the British about the evils of their empire. I hated Gandhi’s comical accent in the movie. I cringed in the darkened movie theater as Kingsley racebent his way through the movie, wearing brown body paint and the skimpiest of loincloths.

  The inevitable jokes followed when we returned to school. Everyone started mimicking the accent they’d heard in the film. They asked me if I rode to school on elephants. Someone even asked me if I wore a grass skirt in India, confusing one tropical stereotype for another. They asked me if my father dressed as Gandhi did. Our well-meaning social studies teacher beamed at me during classes over the next few weeks as he lectured us on how Gandhi’s nonviolent techniques influenced the American Civil Rights Movement. The teacher kept on looking at me each time Gandhi was mentioned and called on me more frequently than usual. Sharmila, tell us something about civil disobedience. Sharmila, tell us about Mahatma Gandhi. I imagined I heard whispers and titters from the back of the class. I imagined my American classmates saying, Yeah, tell us why your great leader was so skinny and why he was half-naked all the time. Tell us why you guys talk so funny. Tell us if you come from a place crowded with so many dark, poor people.

  I detested Attenborough’s India. White adults loved the movie. That made me hate it even more. Everyone said Attenborough showed India on film for the first time. I wanted to scream that I had seen hundreds of films that showed me India—Hindi movies, Bengali movies. I missed those movies now. My glorious American television set had only one flaw. It did not feature Hindi films. I barely saw anyone Indian on our TV screen when we arrived.

  In 1982, Kal Penn and Mindy Kaling had not even started kindergarten. Aziz Ansari and Lilly Singh were yet to be born. My three children see Priyanka Chopra’s face featured in advertisements for Quantico on the sides of buses these days. They follow Superwoman and Humble the Poet on YouTube. If you were a brown kid thirty years ago in the United States as I was, you knew it was pointless to look for someone resembling you on-screen—not just resembling you in complexion, but actually representing your reality, your plotlines. Brown people appeared rarely in leading roles. When we did get a bit part, we were always straitjacketed into narrow types. Occasionally, I caught a glimpse of Kabir Bedi on General Hospital and a flash of Persis Khambatta in Star Trek. I had to wait until the 1990s to see names like Naveen Andrews and Sarita Choudhury on credit rolls. Then came Aziz Ansari, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj, Parminder Nagra, Archie Panjabi, and Kal Penn.

  Once Ma and I went to see a movie about the life of the Buddha. After the movie was over, she said, “Who was that handsome Indian boy who played the Buddha? I haven’t seen him before. Is he a new actor from Bombay?”

  “Ma,” I responded, “that wasn’t an Indian boy. That was Keanu Reeves in brownface.”

  We both walked out of the movie theater a little dejected. In the 1990s, even the Buddha was whitewashed on the American screen.

  Guest appearances, part of a large ensemble cast—that was all we got in America for a while. There was one tiny exception, however. While playing with the channel knob, Ma and I discovered a local TV channel that broadcast an Indian variety program on weekends. It was hosted by a woman named Vimi Verma. Once a week, for thirty minutes, she returned us to the world of movies and songs we had left behind. My parents and I scheduled our weekends around this program. It was wonderful to hear Hindi words coming out of the TV, and to see scenes from old Hindi movies. Somewhere, we sensed, there were others like us in the United States. They too worked in American offices, wore American clothes, shopped in American supermarkets. But they missed the movies of Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore, of Dharmendra and Hema Malini, of Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha. Cable TV had not yet brought hundreds of channels from all over the world into American homes. Moreover, we could not have afforded a cable subscription back then in any case. We were content to watch the staticky screen and relish those beloved films. Fiddling with the radio dial, Ma came across a program hosted by a man named Harish Dang. Every weekend, Harish Dang played Hindi film songs on his program. When my parents saved enough money to buy a tape recorder, Ma diligently taped those songs directly from the radio and started building her own library of homemade Hindi film song cassettes. After work, when Ma had finished cooking and tidying up, she would play those songs over and over again. It was our way of creating a small familiar space inside our new country. It was our DIY All India Radio.

  We would have to wait a few more years before Ma and Baba had saved some more money to buy a VCR. I waited eagerly for the day when we would have our own VCR. I did not want to watch Hollywood movies on it. Despite all my attempts at Total Americanization, I still craved Hindi films. As soon as we bought that VCR, Ma and I started trekking out to Indian grocery stores in Central Square that rented VHS tapes of Hindi movies. Often these tapes were of terrible quality. They were pirated copies made by entrepreneurial Indians who knew that homesickness would make their customers forgive the fuzzy pictures and bad sound quality.

  I kept all this a secret from my new friends at school. I did not think they would understand my need to watch Bollywood movies. Outside the home, I listened to the latest cool music. The Police, Pet Shop Boys, Fine Young Cannibals, Spandau Ballet, Tears for Fears, Roxy Music, Robert Palmer, Sade. I was going through an eighties British pop phase. I walked to Newbury Comics after school and looked at fanzines with my white friends. We talked about the latest records and the cutest new singers. At home, I spoke in Bengali and listened to Hindi music tapes. I built a secret palace for the Indian me inside my mind. A palace furnished with memories of another country and fueled by homemade cassette tapes and pirated videos.

  Once I had watched Hindi movies in crowded Calcutta cinema halls. Now I watched Hindi movi
es behind closed doors with Ma and Baba. I avoided speaking Bengali in public. I ate with my fingers only at our family table. I was changing into something else. For the first time, I saw myself as a minority, a person of color. I did not like it.

  * * *

  • • •

  I do not think my three children, all born in the long shadow of 9/11, will be able to recollect a time when they did not know that words such as minority, non-white, non-Christian, South Asian were meant to designate them. Our eldest child—a daughter whom we adopted—was born in New Delhi. Before she received her immigration papers from the U.S. embassy, we had to sign a form assuring the American government that our five-month-old baby was not a terrorist. Our youngest son was born in Boston and had already missed a few flights before he was six because his name, Kabir Singh, used to appear on no-fly lists. That Kabir is no longer stopped in airports, I assume, is because somewhere a computer has learned his year of birth—2005.

  Perhaps some of the half million or more people who immigrated to the United States in 1982 also got race the way I did. Looking at those statistics now, I feel deep comfort. I was never alone. Yet, I felt very lonely at the time, desperately trying to mimic the correct American accent by watching General Hospital and Hawaii Five-O. To be the foreign kid with an odd-sounding name was no fun in the public school classrooms. Kids with foreign accents and strange-smelling lunches would be teased mercilessly. So I, along with the other foreign kids who were new to our school that year, decided to speak like “real Americans” as quickly as possible. Changing one’s accent, however, does not lead to immediate acceptance by American public school kids, themselves in the midst of a historic experiment in racial integration in the city of Boston. Who was I going to be in this society? I would soon find out. I would have to spell my name for everyone. My surname, which once carried a surfeit of information about me, would become empty of meaning. And then I would be remade, imbued with new meaning. I would speak with an American accent, pretend my mother roasted a turkey for Thanksgiving, try to understand Judy Blume characters, decide whether I preferred Duran Duran or Run DMC, and figure out whether I should sit with the white kids, the black kids, or the Hispanic kids during lunch in the school cafeteria. I sat, in the end, with a ragtag group of foreign kids.

  Mimicry is a handy skill to have when you are an alien. I copied everything. Gestures, pauses between words, facial expressions, intonations. A small mistake could set me back in my journey into assimilation. If the native-born kids in school were like the Borg from Star Trek, I was that rare species that offered no resistance whatsoever to assimilation. Go ahead and put your nanoprobes into me quickly, I would tell them. You don’t need to tell me resistance is futile. I have no intention of resisting.

  Speaking American Like I Wasn’t Trying Too Hard required months of hard work, carried out in secret. In this activity, I had a close friend and ally—another foreigner. A girl from Naples had arrived at our school the year before—the daughter of a Neapolitan physicist and a Scottish nurse. My Italian friend also believed in using television as an educational device for Total Americanization. Since English was not our mother tongue we were exquisitely alert to every nuance, every variation, every slang used by the natives. When we were not practicing our English, my friend would tell me of her life in Naples, about the island of Capri and a magical place called Pompeii. She taught me a song about a beautiful parrot. I tried to mimic her way of pronouncing those words because she told me she missed hearing vowels and consonants pronounced as it once was in her native country.

  Come è bello pappagallo

  Tutto rosso,

  Verde, giallo.

  Cosa fai?

  Dove vai?

  Come è bello pappagaaaaaaaallo.

  I never taught her any songs in my mother tongue. I felt ashamed to speak Bengali in front of classmates in the Peabody School. Soon our group was rounded off by another foreign girl, though she had spent too many years in Cambridge to be truly called “foreign.” Her parents had emigrated from Hong Kong. She spoke Mandarin at home and was raised according to strict, aristocratic Chinese norms. When I visited her home, located in a wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, I was awed by the elegant living room filled with beautiful objects from faraway China. Her mother always carried an expensive leather handbag, and I spied lotions made by a company called Shiseido in their medicine cabinet. The three of us—a Chinese, an Italian, and an Indian—forged our own ties within a school where the dominant racial groups could not quite accommodate us. At the end of every school day, each of us went home to eat food that would be strange to most of our classmates.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ma, meanwhile, faced a different problem. In the early 1980s, Indian grocery stores were mostly located in distant Boston suburbs where the nascent Indian immigrant community lived. We did not own a car and reaching these stores was nearly impossible. In the Star Market near our apartment, Ma found some turmeric and a few sticks of cinnamon in Durkee jars. She found rice and some lentils. The rest she would have to improvise. Ma had dropped out of college at nineteen to marry the brother of one of her classmates. Until she arrived in the United States, she had been a Bengali housewife. Now she had a part-time job in a Harvard library (soon to be turned into a full-time job). During the day, she shed her usual sari, wore hand-me-down trousers and blouses, and walked to an office where she would have to converse in English. She managed with smiles and gestures when her wobbly English failed her. In the evenings, she tried to transform American supermarket chicken into something resembling a Bengali murgir jhol, a chicken curry. Soon Baba would start returning home—frustrated, angry, tired—demanding that we eat “American food” instead of our improvised Indian meals.

  I will never know for sure what happened to him in his new job. The clothing shop sold very expensive men’s suits for Boston Brahmins. It was owned by an Armenian American and the tailors who did the alterations upstairs were recent immigrants from Italy. Sales were handled by an Irish American and an Italian. It was and continues to be a very elite, white, male store. A stone’s throw from Harvard Yard, the store dressed the most successful WASPs of the city and was run by white men who did not possess Ivy League degrees and were never allowed into the club themselves. In 1982, add to this volatile mixture an Indian man. None of them had worked closely with an Indian before, or been to India. Their knowledge of Indian food was limited to the one or two curry restaurants dotting the Central Square area of Cambridge. Often Baba would come home from work, after a day-long tutorial on the merits of the two-button, side-vented jacket, or after mastering a proper four-in-hand, a half Windsor, or a full Windsor, and repeat the lines he had heard at work from his coworkers. “Cumin smells like armpits.” “Cilantro is revolting.” Suddenly, jeera and dhania—cumin and coriander, the beloved staples of an Indian spice box—became offensive.

  Thus began our great experiment in “American cuisine,” which we really understood to mean “white people’s food.” While I was scanning every entry in the 1968 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, a set we had bought for a few pennies at a yard sale, Ma began looking for recipes on the backs of boxes and cans. Bisquick boxes and Campbell’s soup cans were especially helpful. All sorts of tasty casseroles and baked items could be created by adding Campbell’s mushroom soup or some powdered Bisquick mix to prosaic, cheap ingredients. Because we thought white people always had a soup course, we started each dinner with soup. Ma found that ramen noodle packets sold ten for a dollar. We shared one ramen noodle packet, ladled into three blue melamine bowls, at the start of each dinner at our kitchen table (there was no separate dining room table). We ate our meals with spoons, forks, and knives, Western-style. The soup was followed by broccoli and chicken, bathed in Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup, covered in Kraft shredded cheddar cheese, and baked in the oven. Jell-O was a frequent dessert. It was also cheap. Our supermarket cart in th
ose days contained things like cans of Spam, the cheapest brand of baloney, squishy white bread, Kraft cheddar cheese, Little Debbie snack cakes, Entenmann’s doughnuts, lots of Campbell’s soups, Bisquick, Jell-O, Cool Whip, and dozens of packages of ramen noodles.

  E. M. Forster once wrote that the English in India ate the food of exiles cooked by natives who did not understand it. We, a newly arrived immigrant family, ate what we thought was the food of Americans and cooked without understanding it. General Mills and the Campbell’s Soup Company were our local guides. And we stopped eating our own food, which we did understand, for a while, because someone had taunted Baba by saying cumin smelled of armpits.

  White people’s food seemed to come in three colors—green, red, and white. Salads were green. Salads were also new to us. Though we ate a wide variety of vegetables in Calcutta, raw vegetables were rarely served as anything other than a garnish. My palate was unaccustomed to something as exotic as a bowl of raw lettuce drizzled with a pungent, unctuous liquid. Once I was served this kind of a dish with small cubes of toasted bread, pieces of bland chicken, and a few tiny fish. It was called a chicken Caesar salad. I found it revolting. We never ate chicken that was not marinated in at least four types of spices and grilled in a clay oven or braised in a curry. I grew up in a rice-and-fish culture, but the anchovies were hard to stomach. We were freshwater fish eaters. Salmon and cod did not suit our tastes.