What Isn’t
(for Priyanka)
India:
men on elephants on crowded roads selling cheap DVDs,
all-dancing-Bollywood women in glittering saris offer you chai,
children tug at your shirt begging for just a little change please,
you can’t save them all, so you keep your rupees
for the ubiquitous Israeli teen who swears he’ll get you high,
or for the street vendor with the gorgeous tapestries made fair-trade in the village nearby its all going so fast you can’t help but feel so alive…..
at least, that’s what my friends tell me their gap years were like.
I couldn’t tell you what India really is, cause I’ve never really been.
I but I think I know what it isn’t
it isn’t your first day in America which also happens to be
you first day of college in Granville, Ohio
population: 2000, motto: centre of everything
where the cows (and I mean, non-holy, beef cattle )
outnumber non-white people 20 to 1
but that’s where I found her.
we met at 18 at the international student orientation fresh off obscure Midwest jets,
nothing in common except a sense that we had ended up as extras in some eternal
bad college comedy, complete with football players frats sororities most of whom
believed Singapore was in China that and Bombay was a restaurant and that
the only language worth knowing was American.
Nothing in common except a sense that we were not in Asia any more.
Nothing in common except a sense of what the fuck have we signed up for?
She told me what India wasn’t:
it wasn’t the dead silence first night in a small town
keeping her awake as she shivered, having never shut her eyes to anything
but the raucous lullabies of Bombay’s side streets, all yells and diesel engines,
unused to the vacuum of a suburbia asleep. It wasn’t being kept awake by the creaks
of the bunk above her as her roommate started to fuck their physics tutor.
And wasn’t a professor telling her he couldn’t answer to her raised hand
until she had turned her accent into something he could understand
Not the tasteless instant rice in the dining hall once a week,
not the first taste of her roommate’s vodka coming back up
as security guards caught her bent over the toilet for being under 21.
And I could lie and say I was there for her but like everyone else,
I was too busy redrawing boundary lines and self-portraits in the eyes
of strangers with the accents I recognised from TV, strangers I secretly
had always wanted to be, busy getting used to the taste of light beer
and bad whiskey, finding my own level of alcohol tolerance because
I didn’t come to the promised land to be homesick,
I believed in survival, evolution: simple adaptation,
rehearsing the right accent to one day perform spoken word poetry in, dance smile drink dress talk learn to say ‘paper’ like them
pretend
to the point you forget its an act, see, the difference between me and her was
that she never learnt how loud to laugh when she heard a joke she didn’t get.
But at some point I would visit her room
take off our shoes, sit on her floor
and for a night, I would stop pretending to be vegetarian
and she would let me have her leftover chicken biryani:
I never got used to the American way of eating
with one spoon, she hated using spoons at all,
taught me to use my fingers to roll rice into little balls
over episodes of Family Guy on her laptop
how to balance the grains till they reached
my mouth, and in between the one liners
and the weekly guess-who’s-not-speaking-to-whoanymore,
it occurred to us how the rice back home
was just that much juicier, the chilli just that
much more intense, and I licked stories off my fingers
as Home dripped onto the floor, she missed the smell
of cheap motorbikes, I missed the sound of ceiling fans:
and India welled up in her eyes as she remembered I paid attention
as Bombay fell between her fingers spread itself out between us
on her Walmart discount carpet, all ten thousand years of it
wound its way into my ears:
that thing about a city you call your birthplace that makes it
just a little warmer in your mind than anywhere else you go.
And I guess that’s how we found ourselves,
not aliens in America, but astronauts
on a mission, huddled round a galactic
campfire their fifth night on Jupiter
singing Home on the Range,
or whatever it is astronauts sing,
suddenly at home again in one another’s minds.
I couldn’t tell you what India’s like I’ve never really been,
but I think India exists somewhere in a small town in America, Ash House room 105
Like Columbus but successful, like Columbus in reverse
Where I remembered myself again, how I was once 18
sentimental, fresh off the boat and wide-eyed
Where we both found connection, some kind of enlightenment,
and a deep appreciation for the first two seasons of Family guy.
