Counters

I finally moved up to the front of the line at the passport check at the airport.

I could feel the pressure within now that I was the next person to be called.  It was not a pressure about the documentation.  But, a kind of pressure that I feel only in India.

It is a kind of feeling one gets when playing whack-a-mole, in which you need to be on high alert with your eyes constantly roving from the left to the right in order to watch out for a mole popping up.  Here, at the front of the long serpentine line behind me, I had to keep an eye out for the counter that would open up and to then rush to that officer.  A momentary delay would invite quite a few behind me to vocalize their feelings that I was holding them back. There's also a worry that if I did not watch out, then somebody from somewhere might beat me to that open counter.  The damn colonizers could have at least done one good thing by forcing a culture of queuing!

I whacked the mole.

I handed my passport.  I looked at the camera as instructed.

The officer flipped through the pages.  Without looking up, he asked, "what improvements have you noticed?"

That was a leading question.  He wants me to talk only about the improvements.  Yes, there have been wonderful improvements in India since I left the old country in 1987.  For one, at least in the part of India that I go to, there are no beggars, which is simply incredible to people of my age or older.  Women young and old are rushing around in two-wheelers, which is an improvement whose value can be appreciated only by those whose growing up experiences were practically in a male-only public space and women were rarely seen out and about by themselves, unless they were poor workers or beggars.  The list of improvements is long.

But then there are also losses in plenty.  Like the loss of appreciation of history and historical leaders who delivered us from the colonizers and made possible the measurable and intangible improvements that we now see in India.  Like the loss of religious tolerance in daily life and politics.  Like the deepening social caste divisions. 

The passport control counter at the airport was not where I was going to be a prematurely retired academic.  Even when I was teaching, I knew the limits to which anybody paid any attention to what I had to say.  Here at the airport, I was merely yet another traveler.

"Yes, plenty of changes" is all I said. 

Without looking up, the officer laughed when he heard my reply.  "I asked about improvements and you merely say there are changes."

He handed back my passport and I was off to the security check.

It occurred to me when I was waiting for the boarding to begin that I could have said something to make the officer happy and moved on.  I could have said, for instance, that the airport itself was a huge improvement from the old one.  But, I am what I am, and this is how I have often ended up in trouble, and burnt bridges with people and ended friendships.

Hours and hours later, I was walking towards the passport check in America.  I heard somebody call out, "sir, ..."  I looked at where the sound came from, which I now can do now ever since my ear was fixed and I don't have problems triangulating the location of the source of the noise.

"This way" the security officer guided me.  He wanted me to cut across because there was no crowd.  In no time it was my turn at an officer's window.

I handed the passport.

He placed it on a scanner.  "Where are you coming from?"

"India."

"Any money or food?"

"No."

"Welcome back." 

"Thanks"

I was home.

Lessons from a family feud

For Tamil Hindus of my age, I would think that it is not uncommon for Rajaji to have been our interlocutor for the Mahabharata.  His retelling/summarizing of the epic into a manageable tome in the local vernacular, Tamil, was a fascinating read.  A gripping story involving a gazillion characters and complex inter-relationships between the characters.

Of course, it is not a mere story for the believers, of whom I was one.  I was a true believer when I read Rajaji's Mahabharata but even then it came across more as an awesome story than as a religious text.

As the polymath-polyglot-scholar-intellectual David Shulman noted in his review of a wonderful book: 

[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney fixation on the glories of dying in war.

As Karthika Nair observed in the introduction to her book:

Unlike in the Ramayana, where the enemy is far away and some Other, here "that mortal enemy is one's own kin; the blood the heroes spill is all their own."

In this great epic, the war is between cousins; the sons of two brothers.  And one set of brothers has the counsel of god--Krishna. During a critical part of the war, when Arjuna loses his composure at the thought of killing his uncles and cousins, Krishna advises him that it is his dharma to fight.  Wendy Doniger wrote about the transformation of a war cry into something else that it is not:

How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today.

The Gita is a mere subplot in this massive epic.  The war does not end the epic though.  A confusing aspect of Rajaji's short versionof the epic were the pages well after the war, when the victorious brothers and their common wife are all dead.  This part of the Mahabharata is what Wendy Doniger is after this time in her latest work of translation, After the War: The Last Books of the Mahabharata.

In reviewing the book, Sunil Iyengar writes, "Why are the final books of the Mahabharata so unsettling, so gloomy about postwar prospects for what we now might call closure?"  Exactly.  That's how I have always felt about the post-war part of the story.  But, there was nobody that I could talk to about it, nor was I interested in religion and its stories for too long anyway.

Iyengar adds:

“The Mahabharata wants to have its karma and eat it too,” Doniger writes in her introduction. ... Doniger hails this ambiguity as an enduring charm of the text. It “is precisely the uncompromising and unresolved nature of their ethics,” she writes, “that makes these books particularly useful to us in this age of doubt and confusion.”

I was in my pre-teens when I read Rajaji's version for kids.  I can understand now why the final chapters of the Mahabharata were so confusing to me.  I was looking for a tidying up of the story, all wrapped up with a bow on top, but the end was not cut and dried.  (Too many metaphors in one sentence? To heck with that rule!) 

I have placed an order for the book.  Perhaps you too should?

Postscript: Vyasa is credited as the author of the Mahabharata.  To give you an idea of the complex inter-relationships between the characters, here is one: Vyasa is the father of the brothers Pandu and Dhritarashtra, whose sons battle it out on the killing fields of Kurukshetra.  Karthika Nair sarcastically described Vyasa like this:

The pink tongue

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  The town did not exist prior to the mining and power generation enterprises.  There were a bunch of villages all around and, yes, many villagers were displaced--with compensation.  Whether that compensation was fair is a question to which I do not have an answer, nor is that the focus of this post.  

Many of the employees were from outside Tamil Nadu, which is why there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil.  There were a number of Telugus. And then there were quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi, Saurashtra!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home; perhaps there were more.

This motley crew in a classroom setting once gave us a hilarious moment.  During the elementary years, I wonder if it was the 5th or 6th grade, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  He asked because we all knew that not every kid was a Tamil.

Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said.

It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things.  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

(I think Madhulika's family spoke Kannada at home.  Or was it Konkani?)

We did not know any better or worse.  Such linguistic diversity was normal. The way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

Many friends from school were not Tamils.  When we spent time together, we joked and conversed in English.  Rangayya, Manibaba, and Srinivas were Telugu-speakers.  Srikumar and his family conversed in Malayalam.  When Vijay and I fought, we did that too in English, leaving aside our respective backgrounds of Malayalam and Tamil.

While they all spoke their respective languages, not all of them learnt to read and write in Telugu or Malayalam.  After all, the school did not offer those languages as options.  It was then up to their parents or classes at their cultural associations.  In order to satisfy the language requirements, my friends studied Hindi, with the exception of Manibaba who dabbled in Sanskrit. 

All of them spoke Tamil, some more fluently than others.  If memory serves me well, none knew how to read and write in Tamil (unless they took Tamil for a couple of years in school.)  With stores and street names and bus routes and many more public services carrying signs in both English and Tamil,  they could easily navigate through the town and the state with the spoken language but were otherwise "illiterate" in Tamil. 

More than literacy in their native languages--the mother tongues--I would imagine that these raised questions about identity.   At least, they spoke their respective languages in their homes, unlike many children of immigrants who do not speak the languages spoken by their parents and grandparents.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes in that wonderfully autoethnographic essay:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

Another child of immigrants has an entirely different story to tell about her mother tongue.  In this intense essay packed with emotions, "over time, Cantonese played a more minor role in my life," she writes.  What led to the memory erasure?

I became furious that my parents weren’t bilingual, too. If they valued English so much and knew how necessary it was in this country, why didn’t they do whatever it took to learn it? “Mommy and Baba had to start working. We had no money. We had no time. We needed to raise you and your brothers.” All I heard were excuses. I resented them for what I thought was laziness, an absence of sense and foresight that they should have had as my protectors. When I continued to be subjected to racial slurs even after my English had become pitch-perfect, I blamed my parents. Any progress I made towards acceptance in America was negated by their lack of assimilation. With nowhere to channel my fury, I spoke English to my parents, knowing that they couldn’t understand me. I was cruel; I called them hurtful names and belittled their intelligence. I used English, a language they admired, against them.

In immigrant families in which "successful" assimilation leads to children not learning the language of the old country, grandchildren often don't have the linguistic ability to converse with grandparents.  As Aziz Ansari joked in one of his bits, the chats with his grandmother were ultra-short because he didn't know Tamil that his grandmother spoke, and she did not speak English either.

These are modern problems because many of us simply do not stay put where we are born.  But then staying put is really not an exciting choice either.  Something has to give.  Sometimes it is the pink mother tongue that we sacrifice :(