If the World is Flat, Why am I on Edge?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2011-05-06T11:10:31-07:00

I reflect on the many things that have happened in my life in the last ten days. In a week buffered by two weekends, I flew to Cleveland to drench myself in music and hear my son sing, marveled over the lace and grace of a royal wedding, hopped over to Chicago to cheer my daughter as she danced, gasped at the meticulous annihilation of a much wanted man, presided over a terrifying week of AP exams in junior year and cackled with friends over a Mother’s day dinner. Our family had packed so much into the last many days. But had anything really changed?

As our flight taxied into San Jose’s Mineta Airport last Sunday, a burly gentleman behind me tapped the shoulder of an army officer who was seated in the row in front of me. “Hey, bro, guess what just happened? Bin Laden is dead. Check out this.” The man gave the uniformed gentleman his iPhone. Around me, within seconds, Blackberries and Droids and iPhones riddled bullets of information to their owners. A firefight of details ensued between passengers who, until then, had sat cocooned in their own thoughts. Overhead bins shot open and carry-ons tumbled out. This was the news everyone had been waiting for during the last decade.

For me, the evening felt momentous. Just four hours prior, I had been x-rayed by a machine that called itself Rapiscan. I couldn’t help wondering why the manufacturers had conjugated the word “rape” to derive the name of a denuding machine which demanded that you walk in and hold up your arms high above your head while it probed you all over with silent fingers. Earlier in the week, my son and I had smarted from the insulting banter of a security officer at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. When my son grabbed yet another basket to hold his shoes, the officer barked out an insult: “You makin’ more work for me, young man. You don’t need another tub!” Following the verbal barb, the Rapiscan at the airport also cast aspersions on my son’s character. I wanted to tell the two officers who led him away for further groping that their victim was likely heavy in unmentionable places from all that cramming for SATs and APs and that to imagine that the fruit of my loins might be an underwear bomber was a far greater sin than labeling me an underwire bomber (even though I was no more a maid in form inside my maidenform).

Given our family’s run-ins with security personnel during the week, I had only one question on my mind on the day of Osama’s obliteration. How would it change the way that I traveled from that day onwards? Would we ever again see the day we'd walk into an airport and see our loved ones off right at the gate? Could I resume carrying shampoos, creams, nail clippers, tweezers, water, yoghurt and peanut butter? Would I have to remember to wear socks in preparation for landing my feet on the stone cold floor at Security Check? Would it be possible, once again, to imagine a world without borders after ten years of feeling insecure at Security Check? Would my children ever hope to experience the even-keeled ordinariness of life in place of heightened security? Would there come a day when my anxiety over a dropping oxygen mask would surpass my fear of a fellow passenger who didn’t look anything like me?

In a week when I paced about the house like a tiger mother lapping up every detail about SEAL Team Six, my son lay like a beached seal, unaffected by the week’s tidal waves. Entangled in slippery junior year seaweed, he splayed on the sand, letting the news of the day bubble into his nose, wash over his blubber and soak into the ground. Without knowing about the Al Qaeda announcement of this morning, it seemed as if my skeptic knew, instinctively, like any jaded product of the nineties, that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Battle Whim of the Bovine Mother

2011-04-04T14:30:09-07:00

When I found out today that Tiger Mother’s cub made it to Harvard , I realized that Tiger Mother had gamed the system yet again.

I’m at work on a book these days and I know that the main thing about the publishing world in the days of dwindling budgets is that marketing is now really in the hands of the authors and not so much in the laps of publishers anymore. It’s all about creating a buzz well before a book is out. It’s also about sustaining the buzz long after the book has peaked.

Amy Chua had several slivers of meat to chew on while working on her book project: her book needed to be hotter than a freshly dead deer on the Serengeti plains; every territorial mother (Chinese, Jewish, Vietnamese, American, you name the breed) in the world needed to salivate and drool, knife in hand; and, along the way, some names needed to be dropped, again and again, like a trail of blood from impaled flesh, in the direction of the cherry-paneled walls of an Admissions Office Committee at Harvard.

Once I finished reading Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I was convinced that she is indeed the unrivaled mistress of orchestration. While some of us stage mothers lick our wounds and slink away by the time our children are in tenth grade, Chua hovers up above in the branches long after twilight, her tail coiled around the twigs, her paws poised, ready to pounce on her game.

After reading Chua's book, I began mulling over one possibility: Chinese mothers may be superior and Caucasian mothers may indeed be gentler; but it was becoming more and more apparent that the bovine Indian mother was often the most balanced. Here are some of the reasons why that may be so. Feel free to add some of your own at the end of the post.

· Gentle Moo: Unlike the Chinese mother portrayed by Amy Chua, the Indian mother does not take the bull by the horns; instead she moos and steers her kid’s hind in the rough direction of where she wants him or her to go. Her motto: Nudge without the Edge.

· Holding pail to udder: Know that the Indian mother too knows to milk the system but she does it with a beatific smile, hot samosas in hand, her childbearing hips undulating with bovine grace inside her sari. She never does it in the manner of Amy Chua, with the unbending stance of a terracotta soldier.

· Above all, be Indian: Indian mothers name their kids Nachiketha and Bhushani and then proceed to prime them with lessons in Indian spirituality, Indian music and dance without ever realizing that pursuing the Indian classical arts is not a ticket to an Ivy. How naïve when there isn’t a national organization certifying Indian music and dance.

· Sense of community: The bovine mother may be called the Costco of motherhood. Like Costco, she does everything big and cheap and she’ll feed you even when you drop in for a second. But like the people at Costco, she almost always moves with the herd. She doesn't go for the unique. If you want Bang and Olufsen, you don't go to Costco, do you?

· No calculating before Calculus: Indian mothers haven’t quite understood that doing Calculus BC the summer before actually doing Calculus BC at school is one way to ensure an A+. “Just how long are we going to protect them?” they ask while packing naan, dhal, sabji and rice for their twenty-five-year-old leaving for work.

· No Hindi AP: Indian mothers don’t care that their kids could nail another AP if only they brought Hindi into their school system. Instead they’re fighting over what should be their national language: Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu and so on and so forth.

· Prom Date over Exam Date: On the other hand, Indian mothers care to dedicate an evening to Bollywood dance at local schools because they have their priorities straight. Another A+ in a transcript can only go so far to get ahead in the social scene.

· Drop and Go: While Amy Chua is in the room taking endless notes at music and tennis lessons, Indian mothers are drinking extra-hot chai latte at their local Starbucks along with buddies.

Working for an Affair Close to the Heart

2011-03-30T12:04:59-07:00

When I got the call in December asking if I would co-chair the press and media segment of the South Asian Heart Center’s 2011 Scarlet Night Gala in March, I dithered for a few days. During the prior years, I’d heard that South Asians–those of us who trace our ancestry to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka–had a fourfold risk of heart disease than the general population. I had seen enough friends affected personally by the reality of heart disease; it strikes South Asians at a much younger age and sneaks up on us without prior symptoms or warning.

I wanted to help. And while I consider myself altruistic, I’m aware that I've not given enough of my time to causes that affect the larger community. My excuse, until now at least, has always been that I have so many causes inside my home that need tackling that I have little time to fight world problems.

Inside my three thousand square-foot home, there’s always mutiny rising in every quarter. On many days the red Gigi chair in our living room is like the Gaza strip. My husband wants it. I want it. My son has planted himself in it. Finally, no one really gets it but we’re all using the chair as ammunition to spark other wars in different parts of our home. I’m always roaring through my house fighting fires. My daughter’s passport just expired. Guess who has to figure out how to get a new one? Oh, and my son needs to have his jaw fixed–for a third time. And who gets those six second opinions? Elsewhere, my husband is screaming silently for help: he needs to be wheeled into Facebookers Anonymous. And, in a flight of fancy, my visiting daughter decides she needs a halter sari blouse for an upcoming social at school. Nalli’s of Mountain View says it will make her a skimpy blouse for fifty whole dollars–a vulgar amount of money that in India could buy us twenty better blouses to clothe a battalion of breasts, not just two. My son, in the meanwhile, is trying daily to not be tardy for the second period at school. Then my husband is, once again, unable to fix the garage door. He blames it on dysfunctional wiring resulting from sunrays falling on the sensor at specific times of the day.

With so many landmines derailing the onward trajectory of my domestic life, I told myself that I simply did not have any time left to dedicate to the larger humanitarian causes. But when my friend talked to me about the heart effort and about how the South Asian Heart Center in Mountain View–the first nonprofit committed to reducing the incidence of heart disease–was emerging as a center of excellence in preventive care, I was convinced that I should make the time and give my skill to the effort.

Asian Indians have the highest rates of hospitalization in California for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD). Watch the South Asian Heart Center's program for heart health. At Mountain View’s El Camino Hospital, over the past two years, five percent of the patients who showed up at the emergency room with a heart attack were of South Asian origin. Mind you, the South Asian population of the area is just over three percent–even though Google, Oracle, Fry’s Electronics and Subway Sandwiches seem to be run and overrun by South Asians. South Asian women also have one of the highest mortality rates due to CAD. According to the 2000 California Census data, all ethnic minority women were living longer except South Asian women. For the last point, I will run a study on South Asian husbands the results of which I will publish soon in a separate blog post. The irony here is lifestyle: most South Asians are lifelong vegetarians, are not smokers and are not overweight; unfortunately, many South Asians still believe that walking the length of their home constitutes exercise and that their vegetarian diet is low in saturated fat. And here is another zinger: by 2010, India will bear sixty percent of the world’s CAD burden. I believe I have gathered enough personal stories to write a book with many (continuing) volumes.

Given the jarring statistics, I felt that I must help out even though my opinion of fundraiser galas in general is this: too much money that should really have gone to the have-nots is being spent by the haves on eating, gossiping and merrymaking. I also had an angle on the sartorial choices at galas; the sari blouses didn’t exactly endear me towards supporting big causes. The previous year, I had been invited to other Indian-American fundraisers and the sari blouses at these events raised so many collective eyebrows that I began fearing for my bank account. From what I gathered, judging by those blouses, the more we gave away to charity or to a favorite cause, the less we had left on our own backs. If this were the truth, must I commit and expose myself to more trouble?

Still, after mulling over the matter, I agreed to help out my friend because I felt that if I could alert one more South Asian about heart disease, I would have done one good thing to offset my accumulating bad karma. And after all is said and done, I enjoyed helping out the organization in my own small way. I met many talented and generous people. The meetings, all done by conference call, were efficient. In fact, they were so smooth that on one occasion I sat in on another meeting that sounded exactly like the meeting I was supposed to be at except no one asked me for deliverables and I slunk out of the meeting without announcing my entry into or my exit from the conference call.

My experience with the South Asian Heart Center benefit taught me lessons about project management that I can use in my writing life. The gala chairs this year were mostly women; almost all of the women who worked for the cause had daytime jobs and packed lives at home and yet they managed–getting past bureaucratic plaque, unclogging the stumbling blocks in their path, investing heart and soul into their piece of the action– to keep the pace and hoist a memorable gala on March 12th, where, by the way, they managed to raise some $200,000 for this worthy cause.

Ode to an unknown woman

2011-03-08T16:52:05-08:00

On this significant day, the hundredth International Women’s day, I must write an ode to one woman in Chennai, Pachaiyamma, who has made a difference in the life of my family in the last decade. She is one among the faceless, nameless women in India whose daily happiness depends on the essentials of life–needs that so many of us have graduated beyond–such as food, shelter and clothing.

My father lives in Chennai. At eighty-six, dad works a seven-hour day on weekdays and manages to work half a day even on Saturday. He would not be able to do this without the help he has at home. He lost my mother, his wife of sixty-two years, to cancer six years ago and since then dad has continued to work, read, debate and joke exactly the way he did when she lived. Dad has different kinds of household help.

Geeta comes home in the morning to cook. While dad cannot award her an “A” grade for her culinary skills, dad also realizes that a man in the waning years of his life cannot expect “to have a long tongue”. So he makes do with what is served on the table. Vinayagam, dad’s valet, is a barista, a chauffeur, a pill dispenser, a memory bank and an all around helper. He and my father are mildly annoyed with each other almost all the time. The rest of the family is insensitive to their civil wars even though we are secretly batting for Dad. Pachaiyamma visits home both in the morning and in the evening to clean and buff the house so it may sparkle the way it used to when her boss, our mother, ruled the roost.

Pachaiyamma has eyes like almonds. I don’t know if she uses Colgate but her teeth glow white against her dark skin. When I visit she loves to hear me talk about foreign lands. “Women have to drive? Why must you work? Why can’t the big man (my husband) drop you at work? Who takes your son to school? The small man drives too? Are there bicycles on the road? What about animals? Who drops off milk in the morning?” Her eyes grow until I can hear them groan against their sockets.

Although Dad grumbles that Pachaiyamma is never on time, there is never a day when she does not show up within an hour of the appointed time to take care of his house and his sanity. That, I tell my father, is more important than punctuality. But Dad, who paces about looking dapper in his crisp pant and his starched shirt is itching to get to work on time (even though he is his own boss). His glare warns me that he doesn’t need to be preached to by a daughter who is, after all, an occasional drop-in into his life.

During her two hours of work, Pachaiyamma washes the dishes, dries them, sweeps and mops the floor, launders my dad’s clothes if he hasn’t already washed them himself and even manages to snatch a bit of television between her chores. She makes herself a cup of coffee and packs up boxes of leftovers and dishes from the day’s meal to take home to her son and husband.

On some days, Pachaiyamma spars with Vinayagam who, every fewweeks, likes to show who is boss around the house just in case she and the cook get any ideas. On those days, she bursts into tears and then reminds herself why she works at our home. “Your father is my god. He helps me feed my family and educate my son,” Pachaiyamma says, dabbing her eyes with the end of her sari. “When I enter your home, I feel I’m entering a temple.” Then she looks at Vinayagam, darts of defiance stockpiling in her eyes. Even though Pachaiyamma was not fortunate enough even to have received an elementary education, she will not be talked down to by any man. Even though Pachaiyamma had no idea what children learned at school she was very keen that her son should attend school and college so he could have a better life than she did. Her son went on to get a Bachelor’s degree in Math and he is now a math teacher in a school for underprivileged children in Chennai.

On every trip I make to Chennai to visit my dad, Pachaiyamma is always around, waiting for gossip, laughter and the gift of a few saris. “Don’t give me anything new, Kalpana-ma. Just give me something of yours that you don’t need anymore,” she says when she sees the material I hold in my hands. And, without fail, she buries her face into the saris, inhaling their scented threads because somewhere in the fabric lies her dream for a brighter day.

What Raja Ravi Varma did for Hindu goddesses and Indian women (domestic goddesses)

2011-03-02T10:23:27-08:00

In October 1906, when the famous Indian painter, Raja Ravi Varma, passed away, his obituary in The Hindu praised his paintings, claiming that they "exerted a unique influence over the minds" of Indians. Over a hundred years later India continues to visualize women through his eyes. When I think of the women Ravi Varma depicted in his paintings of the late eighteenth century, I think of women who are comfortable with who they are–even if they are owners of child-bearing hips.

Paintings of Raja Ravi Varma

Varma's beautiful sari-clad women are not slim by any means. Many are proud owners of stubby arms and rounded upper shoulders. They are just women who are going about their daily lives. They are going to the temple or pining for their loved one or nursing a baby or introspecting about something or someone. Almost all of them are swathed in a sari and often caught in varying moods and drapes. They are preoccupied, it seems, in a most charming way. Yet they are confident. They display the essence of femininity.

Ravi Varma is also credited with giving dimension and color to goddesses in Hindu mythology. His depictions of scenes from the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharatha are engraved into the collective memories of Indians. For those of us who grew up in India, our vision of the female form, especially of goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswathi, is colored by how Raja Ravi Varma first imagined them.

Giving human form to deities: Goddess Lakshmi (Goddess of Wealth) and Goddess Saraswathi (Goddess of Learning)

Until he began giving life and color to these mythological figures and Hindu deities, India visualized them merely as caricatures or cartoons. Varma was criticized for applying European oil painting techniques at a time when India was trying to wrestle free from imperialism. But beauty prevailed and Varma went on to win national and international awards for his mastery over the medium. The largest collection of Varma’s paintings is at the Thiruvananthapuram Museum in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. For more insight into the master and his oeuvres, read the illustrated biography Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India, Mapin Publishing, 2010, by Delhi-based art conservator Rupika Chawla.

In 2007, a Kanchipuram silk sari was released by The Chennai Silks (Chennai, India) that was dedicated to the great Indian painter. At approximately $100,000, the sari was woven with twelve precious stones, gold, diamond, platinum and silver to depict eleven of Verma’s popular paintings. The women in the paintings were hand-woven. Notice how the grand finale envisioned in the sari (see below the painting and the sari with the "woven" painting), "Galaxy of Musicians", makes a resplendent palloo (the free end of the sari that goes over the shoulder and trails in the back).

Varma's "Galaxy of Musicians" showing eleven musicians in regional attire playing a variety of instruments popular in different parts of India. Below see sari ode to the painter (Photo credit: The Chennai Silks)

Ahmedabad, the textile city, turns 600 years old

2011-02-28T10:59:16-08:00

When I lived in India, I never got a chance to visit the city of Ahmedabad in the northwestern state of Gujarat but I grew up hearing stories about the glorious past of this textile destination. As I began work on my book project, the first place I realized I must visit to begin my research (and I heard the same suggestion from every expert and saw many references in every book I read) was a place called the Calico Museum of Textiles which, I’m told, is a memorable trip through the world of Indian textiles spanning five centuries.

I began reading more about the town and realized that just two days ago Ahmedabad turned six hundred years old. Ahmedabad was founded on February 26, 1411 AD by Ahmed Shah and has been the financial capital of the state of Gujarat for a long time. During 19th and 20th centuries, Ahmedabad’s textile industry exploded and soon it was celebrated as the Manchester of the East. Mahatma Gandhi established the Sabarmati Ashram in 1917 in Ahmedabad and for many decades the city was at the forefront of India’s Independence struggle.

Inside Walled City & Sabarmathi Ashram with Gandhiji's Chakra Photo Credit Creative Commons

On the occasion of its birthday on Saturday, Ahmedabad unveiled the largest cake ever made in India’s history. The cake was 239 feet and 14 inches long, 3.4 inches in width and weighed over 1800 pounds. When I saw this video of the cake and the craziness that accompanied the cutting of it, the first question that gnawed at my brain was whether the cake was eggless. Considering how many people of the Jain faith live in this town and how picky most locals of the town are about food, surely this must have been the tallest order for the thirty bakers who worked on it? Jains shun onion, garlic and, of course, all forms of meat.

“Ahmedabad’s food culture is brilliant. You would have never heard of Jain pizzas, for instance,” says Mala Sinha, a textile designer who runs Bodhi, an ethnic wear lifestyle brand, in the town of Baroda which is sixty miles away. “Ahmedabad is avant-garde in so many ways–historically politically, culturally,” Sinha says. "And architecturally too, it’s a great city."

By 1487, the city had become enough of a power center that Shah’s grandson, Mahmud Begda, decided to fortify it against possible attacks. A wall seven miles in circumference was built to encircle the city and protect it from invasion. Today, the walls are gone but some of the original grand gates still stand, their beautiful carvings and calligraphy lending an old-world charm that inspires the work of designers like Mala Sinha.

The region’s fascination with color has its roots in the Indus valley civilization which developed cotton-growing and dyeing technologies. “Ahmedabad has always had the nagar sheths, men who were principal merchants and patrons looking over the welfare of the city,” Sinha says. Little wonder so many skilled artisans came from all over the country and settled in Ahmedabad. With national institutes like NID, the Indian Institute of Management and the School of Architecture, the city now continues to be a Mecca for design. “Designers from all over the world still come here and get stuff made here. Trade was alive many centuries ago and it continues to be so today.”

At Bodhi, Sinha’s team specializes in block printing, screen printing, elaborate embroidery and cloth embellishments on saris from natural fabrics (cotton, tussar silk and mulberry silk, among others), stoles and home furnishings. They are continuing the traditions locals have honed for centuries.

Sinha’s saris are fabricated for working women who want saris that make them look professional during a presentation or a lecture. Sinha believes Indian women don’t have too many choices for the professional look. She says most of the selections at the higher end are glitzy or made with festivals and weddings in mind. “They end up looking like Christmas trees–with a heavy border or zari,” she says. “And so we had to have a language for a woman of today who is a thinking woman, a global woman.”

The Sinhas are doing their part towards the environment and sustainability. They preserve rainwater and have special solar dryers for the fabric baking process. Developing new design techniques excites this couple and they have created a process whereby Bodhi’s workshop has a meticulously worked out conservation system to reduce water pollution and wastage. Water is filtered using microbes and it is channeled into tanks containing a bed of biological matter for further filtering.

For Mala and Pradeep Sinha, Ahmedabad is special because it did not just inspire their life's pursuit at Bodhi. As one of the first graduating students of NID in the seventies, the Sinhas fell in love in this ancient city. "I found my husband in Ahmedabad and that's a very special tie," she says.

Below Mala Sinha's friend of three decades, Mona Vijaykar of Saratoga, California, creates her own block printed dupatta with help from Bodhi's staff.

Kindling New Ways to Read

2010-12-21T16:19:46-08:00

My husband and I make an antiquated couple. We take years to adopt new technology. While friends are trading news on droids, we taxi in, like GE aliens landing in the midst of a 4G subculture. Then we whip out a phone like the Samsung SCH-A690 (which, by the way, one can sell for $3 out on the internet) and unabashedly talk into it while our nextgen friends and family cackle like demons around us. We are a downgraded version of homo sapiens in this fast upgrading Silicon Valley culture.

That’s why I didn’t believe it was at all possible for me to adapt to new ways of reading. When a friend who works at Amazon tried to lure me into reading on a Kindle, I demurred. “Sorry, dear,” I said. “Give me a musty, dusty book any day. A book has to smell like a book. Reading is a tactile activity, you know.” But this friend who likes to pressure people into thinking like her, stopped by and dropped off a sleek Kindle outside my door one afternoon more than a year ago. I put away the book machine into the drawer our family reserves for printer cables, floppy drives and Intuit's Quicken (deluxe version circa 1998).

Last month, out of duress, I fished out the Amazon Kindle. Our book club was planning to read Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone in January 2011 and I discovered that I was seventy-fourth on the waitlist at my local library. Given that some members of my book club finished books between conquering the Everest, petting lions down in the Ngorongoro crater and melting the last chunks of ice on the Antartica, I knew that if I couldn’t sail to the ends of the world, I needed, at a minimum, to demonstrate my mettle by reading the month’s selection.

So I registered my Kindle, punched in my credit card number and entered a black and gray bookstore. Its façade was intimidating at first but it became friendly within seconds. The New Oxford American Dictionary was at my fingertips, I noticed. I was annoyed that I could not find the Roget Thesaurus but I figured I must not stoke the embers of irritation even before my Kindle fired up.

I liked one thing right away about my electronic book. This thin, insipid thing, this flat clinical tablet, never once taunted me about my age. I didn’t have to look around my desk for my reading glasses. A text size button on the Kindle allowed me the flexibility to change the font size of my book to a comfortable size without telling me, like the average bookstore or the library, to go, IN VERY UPPER CASE, TO THE LARGE PRINT BOOK SECTION FOR PEOPLE ON THE MORTIFYING EDGE OF AN AARP MEMBERSHIP.

Thus began my adventure on the Kindle. I liked its miniature offerings. For $3.99 I could download short stories from the Atlantic Monthly. I loved window shopping for books by trying a sample chapter for free. I got sucked into word games offered on the Kindle at zero cost. I discovered that on long trips I could continue to read. Assuming that text to speech was available for my book, my Kindle would read to me as I zipped down the highway. Even though my Kindle was not smart enough to know to not also read the question mark that appeared at the end of a sentence and almost always read with zero expression, I began to love how reading had entered in between the lines of my life in exciting ways. I read while I waited for my son outside school. I loved having the option of reading three books at the same time on a device I could drop into my purse. I didn’t have to worry about fallen bookmarks either; Kindle set them up for me. I began reading while working out without ever having to worry about the book falling while I tried to turn the page. I didn’t have to hold a plump book while working out. Instead, I let my Kindle rest on the little ledge by the exercise monitor and it just sat there and waited for me to click it as and when I wanted to turn the page.

I’ve discovered that there is, after all, one down side to my Kindle. When I was all charged up and in the middle of a sex scene with my Kindle, when I was panting away at the gym with this sex toy in front of me, the darn thing ran out of battery. A book never does fire you up and then die on you in quite the same way, does it?

Crossing The Bridge

2010-12-13T16:12:52-08:00

When a year trundles to a close, most of us tend to measure our progress by the number of milestones that we reached during the year. In my case, I’ve been forced to measure my progress by the number of bridges–literally and figuratively–that I’ve crossed in the last twelve months.

In 2010, I faced, head-on, my greatest fear of the last several years. Over one year, I forced myself to conquer an anxiety that snaked into my life earlier in the decade–an inexplicable fear of crossing a long span of a bridge that, my doctor explained, may have been triggered by taking to the road a few times after ingesting a combination of allergy medication and caffeine.

In 2003, I started having panic attacks as I entered highways or ramps leading from highways that connected to other highways. I would break into a sweat. I’d feel as if I’d lost control of the wheel. I would find myself braking hard at inopportune moments. Following that incident and several more during which I was gripped by terror, I would find myself hunting for alternate routes simply to avoid certain challenging sections of highways. I would stall and not go somewhere because I was consumed by the feeling that I would not be able to handle the drive. I put aside work on an exciting writing project because I could not fathom crossing a one-mile span over water. I lacked the mental courage to navigate the bridge I would have to cross to reach Yuba City from the Bay Area.

Last January, however, my passion for writing egged me on even as I confronted another shift in my career. Now I found myself veering over to the other side on overdrive. I began finding that while the drive up the Golden Gate bridge would make me queasy, the return would be a snap. Whether I liked it or not, I found myself signing up for activities in Marin County that put me over the Golden Gate at least twice a week. I was at Left Coast Writers salon at Corte Madera once a every month. I found myself driving up to Sausalito monthly to attend a reading at Why There Are Words, a literary salon where, for two hours, I would steep in the voices of established and emerging writers. I challenged myself by going to places I hadn’t gone before and gnashed my teeth trying to find parking. Then I was at a writing workshop near the AT&T Baseball Park fighting gnarly traffic every Monday, hovering over ugly concrete ramps and bridges and attending the workshop for several months in spring and summer. As if all this driving were not enough to unhinge my delicate self, I sought yet another writing group in San Francisco’s Russian Hill where I could not even see the tail of my van in the mirror as I drove up at a fifty degree incline and spluttered to a stop at a stop sign right at the peak. I found myself going places, not caring about which highways I would ultimately have to roar down; fortunately, one such irrational moment recently found me coursing through a six-mile span of the Richmond bridge on a dismal rainy afternoon. I was not comfortable doing it. I heard my heart in my ears. But I hung on, taking many deep breaths along the way and looking around me at the waters as I pressed on.

“The more you face your fears, the faster you will overcome them,” said Dr. Denise Beckfield, a clinical psychologist and the author of the book, Master Your Panic and Take Back Your Life (Impact Publishers, 2004). While attending a writing workshop in Iowa City in July, Denise and I hit it off. Talking to her about my situation was a reaffirmation that I was doing all the right things.

I crossed other bridges too. I’ve forced myself to enter writing groups where I would put my work out to be critiqued by a group of writers whom I had not met before. In the process, I’ve met many aspiring and established writers of fiction and non-fiction, men and women who have reassured me about my strengths and riddled me with bullets while pinpointing my weaknesses. I’ve gone out of my way to make supportive connections. I’ve sought people with alien ideas. I’ve enjoyed watching talented writers hone their craft in stages as we all hunched over the table exchanging what worked in our stories, what did not and why. This would be the twelve-month period during which I learned that my Indian background was an asset and not a burden as I had originally assumed. This would also be the year in which I learned that every experience, while unique to the person caught in it, is universal to the human condition.

I learned to let go not just my fears for myself. I learned to let go at home too. I watched my younger child take his driver’s license test. In the weeks following his test, I watched him roll out of our driveway to brave the world outside. Then I cheered him on in his first baby step in the world of realationships. He invited a girl to his school’s annual winter ball–a small step for a boy trying to wean himself off of the trappings of adolescence, yet, a giant step for a mother who wished to weave him back into the folds of her cocoon.

It was a year when I stood on the edge, contemplating also the next big decade of my life, realizing that only after crossing over to the other side I’d be able to look back and appreciate my newborn courage to drive myself farther.

All is Well

2010-12-05T19:00:15-08:00

When I wake up this December Sunday at 9 am, it is a summer day. The sun has set our living room on fire. The curry leaf plant basks in the golden beam warming the front window, its green lush against the flame of the Japanese maple outside. Everywhere the color splashes and swells after weeks of the gloom that’s typical of fall.

I think about my last week, the one in which I’ve sailed through a rainbow of emotions. On Monday, there’s the face-off with my husband over Facebook. When I drop him off at the airport, our marriage is at the departure lounge. He is in grave danger of being unfriended. By Tuesday morning, however, my husband is looking like an angel: when he’s away on business for a long spell, I can live how I want and not worry about cooking, or turning off the lights or watching the heating bill.

On Wednesday morning, I’m dreaming about the possibilities of buying Chinese furniture at a closeout sale in San Mateo. By that afternoon, however, thanks to a phone call from a man named Andrew (who, two weeks prior, had the gall to ask me if I were wearing breast implants) tells me my left breast looks out of whack. While this fact is nothing new to me, Andrew’s call draws attention to the number of things that I still have pending on the todo list of my life. If the suspicious spot on my left breast is, in fact, trouble, what must I do? Must I focus on cleaning my fridge? Must I get my closet ready for possible surgery? Must I inform all my friends about my condition so they may stock up their fridges and take turns to drop off food outside my door?

When Friday morning arrives and I sit in front of the clerk at the breast care center, I’m expected to sign a paper called the Advance Care Directive. I am not amused. Talk of timing in the American healthcare system: show a panicking patient a link to the closest mortuary and tell her the cedar casket is fifty percent off until year-end. Fifteen minutes later, my left breast is squished into a photo frame for the sixth time in one pressing week. The machine grunts and shudders. It’s about to launch my only left breast into the Milky Way. I’m told to hold my breath. In that moment, my son’s compressed grade from his last Calculus test begins to inflate into an A+. Holding my breath some more while I begin to orbit Jupiter, I tell myself I’m okay with what I’ve been granted in this life–my two average children who are rote scholars and not Rhodes scholars like Varun Sivaram and my above-average husband who is a good, humble man even though he isn’t George Clooney–and so will someone release me from this photo frame this instant?

The machine grounds me back on earth in half a minute. I am pronounced healthy after I’m shown an x-ray profile of my breast, which, what do you know, looks like Angelina Jolie’s. It’s full, deliriously curved, tilted upward and looking at Brad Pitt. Two hours after that test, I find myself, once again, making a clean breast of my life to someone else, a high school teacher. After listening to my lament, my son’s teacher says my son is doing okay and would do even better if only he had the pragmatism to lower his course load this year.

In a week during which the juice has evaporated from my existence, this new Sunday morning feels like a gift from the heavens. The sun bathes the seat wall under our cherry blossom. A mug of Peet’s coffee in one hand and the week’s New Yorker in the other, I go out in my jammies and rest against the wall. Around me the light wind rustles through the cherry tree. I hear little snaps above me. Leaves bid a farewell to their branches. They tumble about my feet. I begin reading the profile of Eli Broad, a multibillionaire in Los Angeles.

But in minutes, it seems, the promise of a perfect day vanishes. The first splat hits my head. A steady patter of rain begins. And on my bench, two feet away, a squirrel has left a legacy of poop, three oval beads arranged in a semi-circle that, presently, will get adulterated by the washing from the skies. At least all’s well, I tell myself looking heavenward. And just when everything is well, a little load of crap appears from nowhere and reminds you to stop gloating.

Oh, Say Can You Smell? Or The Day I Landed in America

2010-07-22T23:08:53-07:00

I was nauseous the bleak January day I landed in America. Nauseous, not because America had a smell to it the way India or Hong Kong or Paris or Dar-es-Salaam has when you first get off the plane. For someone flying in from India–which always smells of a bottled-up mix of powdered sandalwood and phenyl, and curried potato and curdling milk, and jasmine garlands and human feces–America is appallingly sterile.

A lack of smell can also make you nauseous in the way that eating mud can make you gag. But the root of my nausea lay in Singapore Airlines lying about its food on economy class. The Hindu Vegetarian menu card that my attendant waved at me promised a mildly spiced lentil patty dusted with cumin powder and fresh coriander. It read like a menu announcement at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, missing only details such as the corkage fee for wine. What I got, instead, at thirty-three thousand feet above sea-level where I had no way to walk out on my meal, was a concrete cannon ball deep fried in aviation fuel which I couldn’t cut with a steel fork or shove past my epiglottis.

Then I soaked in the stale cabin air of Hindu Vegetarian-ness and Western Chicken-ness amid the echoes of wailing babies and the rattle of old parents who opened their pungent packets of homemade Indian food just when I was about to drift off to sleep. When the cabin stopped reeking of food, it trembled with the odor of pee, the way long-haul airplanes smell vaguely of pee almost all the time, because they carry so much of it in their underbellies, just like toddlers with succulent diapers.

“Just where are all the people of this country?” I wondered, wobbling out of customs at San Francisco International with two mammoth suitcases. Seconds later, my eyes were blinded by a flash of white light. My husband had arrived to meet me at the airport as expected, camera in hand.

After twenty-six years of life with him–during which time he has lost many cameras, one of which is probably still waiting for him on a rusting bench in Paris–I’ve come to terms with how he doesn’t even go to the bathroom without a camera dangling from his neck. He spends his leisure cataloguing photographs of the pre-digital era. The subjects of the photographs are, in many cases, now gone into the afterlife. Still, he diligently tags them on Facebook as if our reincarnating Hindu gods really care about our Internet avatars as they prepare us for rebirth.

My jetlagged self was sucked into a vortex of hugs and kisses. My husband recovered speedily, however, reminding himself that he had to record the moment on his camera, and making sure I posed for him a couple more times at the airport lounge. I looked around us, for the first time, anesthetized by the clinical environs of an American airport. A whole jumbo jet had landed. But I could count the people at San Francisco’s arrival lounge with my fingers and my toes.

In contrast, when you land at any airport in India, the whole town comes out to greet you. People line every inch of the exit space and gawk at you without blinking an eyelid, taking you in from head to toe and whispering to their neighbors about you. Young men might say “Welcome, sishtar!” or “Nice lady, like Frieda Pinto!” as you walk past. But the day I landed in America, nobody, nobody but my husband, looked my way.

I felt neglected. I was, like my father might say in Tamil, a mootapoochi, a minor, measly bed bug that left no stain on the world. If people did see my puny brown self, they seemed to dust me off with a flick of their fingers. This was my first shocking impression of what would signify my future in the United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where no one would genuinely care about who or what I was or what I did as long as I carried my driver’s license, renewed my automobile registration, paid my taxes, didn’t kill anyone and didn’t line-dry my clothes in my front yard.