The Hindi-Bindi Club (27 page)

Okay, enough for today. Take good care. I love you, baby.

Love,

Mom

22 January

Dear Kiran,

We’ve just returned from seeing Texas John in concert—what a treat! By the time this reaches you, I will have told you the entire contents on the phone, I’m sure.

We had John over for dinner a few nights ago. Aji and Ajoba were very impressed when he knew to touch their feet in respect, but when he started speaking Marathi, they nearly dropped their false teeth!! It was priceless!!

At dinner, John fit right in. Since he’s been living with an Indian family for the past year, he’s learned Indian manners and mannerisms. He ate everything with his hand—even Neelima mami’s varan bhat, which he said was the best he’s tasted! No surprise, everyone loved him. Even Ajoba, who rarely goes out anymore, insisted on attending John’s concert.

John made such a point of warning us it was strictly amateur night and not to expect Ravi Shankar. We went into the concert hall with our bar lowered so far, it was lying on the ground. And then…after all that…I should have guessed it…Texas John, our kurta-pajamas-wearing cowboy, played the sitar so beautifully, I could have wept. Afterward, Ajoba flicked his wrist and joked, “Now, I’ve seen everything. God can take me.”

I’ve saved the best for last…

Aji took John’s arm in that way of hers, the one that signals she’s about to sweet-talk someone out of something. “John? Do you know any nice Indian-American boys, bachelor friends looking to settle down, who would be interested in meeting Meenal’s daughter, Kiran?”

NOT ONLY did Aji take it upon herself to ask this, she scolded ME for not thinking of it/doing it first!!

But wait, it gets better…

I had talked to John about you, but nothing about semi-arranging your second marriage. After I filled in the blanks, he told me to wait there, don’t move, he’d be back in a minute. He returned with Maddie’s List. Remember I told you about the list John’s wife made before she passed away? On it, he pointed to: “Find a wife for N.T.”

As it turns out, N.T. is Nikhil Tipnis, one of John’s best friends from high school. Quick summary: born in North Carolina, brought up in Texas, divorced 4 years back (from his high school sweetheart), 2 years older than you, lives in Austin, works for Dell Computer. I’ll tell you more details when we talk, but he sounds terrific, and Texas John volunteered to introduce you in email!! I gave John your email address, so expect to hear from him shortly.

I’m crossing my fingers. Aji will be doing puja. And now that I’ve gotten all this excitement out on paper, I hope I can fall asleep. My coach turned into a pumpkin hours ago…

Lots of love,

Mom

Neelima Mami’s Moong Daal (Mung Bean Stew)

SERVES 4

1 cup dried split moong daal, without skin (mung beans)

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1 teaspoon coriander powder

7 cups water, divided 3, 4

1 teaspoon cumin powder

1 teaspoon salt

₁
/
₈
teaspoon turmeric powder

2 tablespoons canola oil

1 cup tomato, chopped

½ teaspoon black mustard seeds

¾ cup fresh coriander (cilantro), chopped and divided, ½, ¼

6–8 curry leaves (kadhi patta)

2 dried red chilies*

2 pinches asafetida (hing)

1 tablespoon ghee or unsalted butter

1. Sift through mung beans, removing and discarding debris. Rinse and submerge in 3 cups water for 15 minutes. Drain. Rinse again.

2. In a 2-quart saucepan over high heat, combine 4 cups of water, mung beans, and salt. Mix well. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium. Simmer to a stew, about 15–20 minutes, skimming and discarding surface foam. Remove from heat, mash with wooden spoon or potato masher, and set aside.

3. In a small skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add mustard seeds. When seeds begin to sputter, reduce heat to medium. Stir in curry leaves, red chilies, and asafetida. Stir-fry until asafetida changes color, about 30 seconds. Pour over mung beans. Mix well.

4. Stir in brown sugar, coriander powder, cumin, and turmeric.

5. Return saucepan to stove over medium-high heat. Stir in ½ cup fresh coriander and tomato. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium. Cook to desired consistency, stirring in some water if needed.

6. Remove from heat. Stir in ghee. Garnish with remaining fresh coriander. Serve hot with rice.

*
Neelima’s Tips:

Do
not
eat the red chilies!

Saroj Chawla: Lahore, Meri Jaan

Dear Saroj,

Have I done or said something to upset you? If I have, I’m sorry. But I can’t fix it if I don’t know what I did wrong.

Please don’t brush me off and say it’s nothing. We’ve been friends too long and know each other much too well for that.

Please talk to me. Whatever it is, let’s work it out, okay?

Love,
Meenal

It’s not you, it’s me. When’s a good time to phone you there?

Saroj

Hypothetically speaking, if I was to visit Lahore, who would accompany me? I’m afraid to travel in an Islamic country without a male escort, preferably four, but I wouldn’t want to put my “infidel” husband at risk in potentially hostile territory. I would also worry about the possible ramifications of Sandeep’s passport carrying the stamp of an Islamic country.

Since 9/11, it can be challenging enough to be a brown man, more so when traveling by air. I fear giving authorities (more) reason to question my husband, subject him to increased scrutiny.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Parsi, Jain, or Buddhist. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor or an engineer or any other educated professional. If you’re a man with brown skin and/or a name that appears Muslim, even to the ignorant eye, you risk fitting the profile of a terrorist.

These are my thoughts as I push my grocery cart through the supermarket. I buy smoked Gouda, Brie, grapes, strawberries, kiwi, crackers, and fresh bread. I’m in and out in ten minutes. We’ve shopped in this store for twenty-five years. I know the location of every item, could find my entire grocery list in the dark. When Sandeep used to run the occasional errand for me on weekends, he, like many men on weekends, didn’t bother to shave. Not anymore.

After 9/11, we had armed guards in our supermarket. At first, Sandeep didn’t understand why the guards were giving him dirty looks and trailing him. Then, he caught on. He calmly went about his business, and no one approached him. Still, it rattled him, and he resolved to appear clean-shaven in public. And poor Yash Deshpande, who has dedicated his life to saving others, told us how he inspired fear and suspicion in parking lots and elevators.

This is what non-Muslims experience. It makes me wonder about innocent Muslims.

Sandeep says India saw worse in 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards sparked rampages of violence against random bearded and turbaned men. The bloodbath of thousands drove many men—against religious custom—to shave their faces and cut their hair.

If this is supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t.

In the elevator at the Rotunda, I set down my grocery bag, press the button for my floor, and watch the numbers light up.

1984.
I find myself thinking about
1984,
not the year but the novel by George Orwell that I read in a neighborhood ladies’ book group. Big Brother Is Watching You. America’s Patriot Act reminds me of
1984
. As much as terrorists frighten me, so does an act that allows authorities to detain “suspected terrorists” indefinitely, deprived of due process. No formal charges. No lawyer. No phone call. No “innocent until proven guilty.”

Am I not a patriot because I don’t support this?

Some people believe a patriot puts the nation’s safety before an individual’s rights. Some people believe national security justifies whatever margin of error (some mistakes, whether or not you own up to them, are inevitable). But be honest. That’s as long as we’re talking about
other people,
right? Them. Not us.

What if it’s
you
? Or
your husband
? Or
your son
?

What if there’s some terrible mix-up? If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time? If there’s one rotten apple in the bunch of officials, and that lone apple’s assigned to
you
? What if somehow, some way,
you
or
your loved ones
get screwed?

Do you know the American expression “S.O.L.”? In case you don’t, I will tell you. It means: Shit Out of Luck.

These are my fears. Will they keep me from going to Lahore? I don’t know. But if perchance I go, I won’t allow my family to accompany me.

T
hrough Yash Deshpande’s contacts in the medical community, I hook up with a young Punjabi Lahori couple named Farani. The husband Yousef is a surgeon. The wife Saira is a hematologist.

I want to invite them to dinner, but I’m torn between my desire to meet Lahoris and my wariness of associating with them. I know my American history. I know about the infamous McCarthy trials where people were arrested, scapegoated, their lives ruined because of suspicion of communist relations. In the 1950s, it was the Red Scare. Today, it’s the Green Scare. (Green is the color of Islam.)

It is said history repeats, and I witnessed the ruin of a civilization so advanced no one expected its annihilation. Not even Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founding father of Pakistan. In his inaugural speech as Pakistan’s first governor-general, Jinnah said, “You will find that in the course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

So much for that prediction.

Once you’ve seen a sophisticated civilization crumble, you know no nation is invincible from self-destruction. Just as her people have the power to make a nation great, they also have the power to destroy all that is great. Where nation-building takes generations, evisceration requires only a minuscule fraction of this time. After the holocaust of Partition, I recall everyone saying in shell shock, it happened so fast….

T
he other day, I saw a bumper sticker that read: “I pray to God to protect me from His followers.” With this prayer, I bite the bullet and invite the Faranis—Yousef, Saira, and their five-year-old son Aamir—to dinner at our house.

When I hear their car pull into the driveway, I lift a slat in the blinds with the tip of my fingernail. Squinting through the crack, I watch them get out. Aamir has sneakers like Jack’s with lights that flash with each step. Yousef is clean-shaven. Saira wears a
salwar-kameez
but doesn’t cover her head. Like Kiran, they look too young to be doctors.

The doorbell rings. I don’t wait for Sandeep but dash for the door, getting there before him. I stop with my hand on the knob, try to catch my breath. Can’t. My heartbeat drums in my ears.
Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom.

My husband bellows my name from upstairs. (We have the fanciest intercom system, but does anyone ever use it? No.) “Did I hear the doorbell?”

“Yes! They’re here!”

“What?”

“Come down!” I turn the knob, swing open the door.
“As sal—”
The words
as salaam alaikum
dry on my lips.

There they stand. Papa Bear. Mama Bear. And Baby Bear. With three pairs of hands clasped in
namaskar
.

They beat me to it.

“
Namaste,
Auntie-
ji,
” they say. Even Baby Bear in his squeaky, innocent-little-boy voice.

I, too, put my hands together at my heart.
“Namaste.”

Before I register what he’s doing, Yousef bends and touches one hand to my feet then his heart, a sign of respect to elders.

A wave of emotion rises inside me. My throat closes, and my eyes sting. As I touch his head, blessing him, the wave crashes. A sob rips free of my chest, and I burst into noisy tears like a maudlin Bollywood heroine.

Sandeep rushes to my rescue with a joke about emotional Punjabis, the true test of a Punjabi, making everyone laugh, including me. We speak in Punjabi. Such an intimate language, our mother tongue, spoken only by our community. Before long, we’re swapping life stories. Pakistani-born Yousef and Saira inherited their stories of Partition….

Their families, not related, emigrated from the Indian side. Before Partition, Yousef ’s family owned mango orchards. They were wealthy, but Partition sliced through class hierarchies, leveling the field. Whatever you had, whether a mud hut or a mansion, you lost it, abandoning anything you couldn’t carry. Like everyone else in the overflowing refugee camps, they crossed the border into Pakistan with next to nothing, struggled to reestablish themselves in a new land, a society that wasn’t always welcoming of
muhajirs,
refugees. Locals threatened them into selling the parcel of land allotted to them by the Pakistani government in compensation for their relinquished mango groves. They missed the people, the places, the way of life they left behind. Bit by bit, things improved; still, it often feels like “two steps forward, one step back” with the country’s problems.

It’s been my experience that in social settings, Americans generally avoid talking about religion and politics, and Indians talk of little else. Conversely, Indians avoid public sex-talk, and Americans talk of little else! I find the Faranis are like us in this regard, too.

“We are an Islamic nation,” Yousef says, “but there’s great debate amongst our people as to
what is
and
what is not
Islamic.”

“There’s great debate in America,” Sandeep points out, “as to
what is
and
what is not
constitutional.”

Yousef and Saira grew up loving Pakistan but wishing they could see India (“We’ve always wanted to see the Taj Mahal…”), the way I grew up loving India but wishing I could see Lahore (“Are the Shalimar Gardens still as beautiful as I remember?”).

Neither of our families went back after they left. Besides emotional issues, visas between India and Pakistan are difficult to procure in good times, impossible in bad. Likewise, cross-border travel.

“Ironically, now that we’re U.S. citizens, we can easily visit our ancestral lands,” Saira says.

It’s not right, we agree. Peace-loving, nonviolent citizens of India and Pakistan should have access to their shared culture, heritage, and loved ones across the border.

But how to tell a peace-loving, nonviolent person from one who is not?

That is the problem.

“My
nanaji
says it’s a conspiracy,” Yousef says, “by power-hungry leaders who use fear tactics, propaganda, and the almighty ‘patriotic card’ to serve their own interests, feed their greedy addictions. It’s to their advantage to keep ordinary Pakistanis and Indians apart, to fuel mistrust and hatred, because if we got together, one-on-one, we’d catch on to their scam, see the truth behind their lies—that the average person is not so threatening, not the enemy, that we are most capable of loving thy neighbor. Then what would happen to their power base? Poof. Gone. This is my
nanaji
’s theory.”

“Are they power-hungry or passion-starved?” I ask. “Don’t we Punjabis know best the human need for passion? Like air, it cannot be denied. A person must feel passion for some
thing,
if not some
one,
in order to live. A goal. A cause. Conveniently, ‘serving God’ and ‘serving country’ carry universal honor. Even more, ‘
defending
God’ and ‘
defending
country.’ Tap into those, and voilà, you transform into a Pied Piper. Play those magical tunes on your flute, and watch how the hypnotized masses follow anywhere you lead.”