The HomecomingIt was one of those unbearably dry and hot June days of Delhi. As usual, the public bus was crammed beyond its capacity. No matter how often in the past four years, had I taken this two-hour long ride from my house in south Delhi to my university campus in the north, I never could get used to this ordeal. The combined smell of perspiration, foul smelling breath, stale vomit, the smoke from bidis, leaded petroleum fuel and cheap quality diesel exhaust, hung heavy in the air. Assorted remains of foods, peanut shells and glossy wrappers of Britannia Glucose Biscuits crunched under human feet. Cracked from overuse, the dark green seats of faux leather had bits of sponge falling out. Grimy dirt clung to every inch of the bus that could not be rubbed off against the sweaty bodies of the passengers. Of course, this was only to be confronted if you were one of the lucky few to make it inside the bus. The mad scramble by dozens of people to get on a bus while it barely slowed down at each stop was quite an athletic challenge for anyone. As I shifted my position to make space for the passenger next to me, I shot a glance at her. She must have noticed the look of surprise on my face because she gave me a bleak uneasy smile in return. “Excuse me, do you speak English?” my neighbor asked hesitantly, in an obviously non-Indian accent. As I nodded briefly in reply, she proceeded to pull out a folded map of Delhi from her bag. “Would you happen to know which bus-stop is closest to the Delhi University campus?” she asked, as she tried to unfold the map, while the two oily looking men standing next to her quickly cashed in on the opportunity, and peered down to take a look at her map. I could see how easy a victim she was going to be for them – a little push and a little shove and they’d touch her breast next. After all, it was a crowded bus and the driver was applying the brakes too jerkily and one of them had been kind enough to offer his seat to her. And maybe a minute or half would elapse before the lucky one standing next to her would begin rubbing his aroused penis against her shoulder. I took pity and said “I myself am going to the university, so I’ll let you know where to get off but if you are going to ride that far in this bus, it might be a good idea for us to exchange our seats.” The look of relief on her face contrasted with that of panic on the two men’s as they hurriedly made space for this exchange, seemed almost comic to me. I evidently looked like the seasoned Delhi traveler that I was and to make my role in this interplay even clearer to them, I gave them a sideward glare and flashed at them my weapon of choice, a pin. As expected, the two eve-teasers, as they are euphemistically referred to, executed a quick retreat from their vantagepoint. We carried on a stilted conversation of initial inquiries through the rest of the ride. As I stepped off the bus behind her, I sneaked a quick look, in order to place her. She was tall, dark-skinned and with wavy, almost kinky hair. She moved with a deliberate slow grace. And spoke with a soft sensuous drawl, in an affected sort of voice that I had to strain to hear. Evidently, she did not belong to these surroundings. Dressing in a hip hugging bright African print wrap-around skirt and an inviting tank top, to board a Delhi Transport Corporation bus was indeed an act of foreign naivete. Clearly, a flake, I thought to myself, as I gained step beside her on the sidewalk. And yet, I continued to talk to her. Perhaps, it was mere curiosity that kept the conversation going. Such was my introduction to Hiba Mustafa, almost three years ago. It turned out that that day, Hiba was on her way to meet some academic “biggies” at the Department of Anthropology, the very department where I had spent the last four years struggling to finish my Ph.D. dissertation. She on the other hand, was getting her Master’s in anthropology at Harvard but was spending that summer with her mother in Delhi. And as we walked, she got all animated at having discovered me. “I am really glad I bumped into you, maybe you, as a student can help more than all the professors I’m going to meet. I’m really interested in finding out which are the emerging trends in academic research in India and also what is the quality of the work being done here” she said. Ya, she really wants to know what I think, when she’s got all these luminaries lined up for today, it must be all her contacts at Harvard behind these appointments she’s managed to get, I thought to myself. “Do I detect a note of jealousy, here?” asked George in his ever so irritating and teasing tone, as I narrated to him the coincidences of that morning’s bus ride. “No, you know how I feel about these flaky foreigner kinds, next she’ll be TA-ing one of our courses on contemporary Indian society, never having lived here or seen anything or read anything for that matter. All because she’s been to Yale or Harvard and we are the petty Delhi University-kinds! Don’t I know how these elitist academic circuits operate?” I offered my defensive reply. The week after my chance meeting with Hiba in the bus, I invited her to join me for lunch with George at the University Cafeteria. By this time, George had heard the description of my previous encounter with her several times and was at a point where he had begun to lose patience with my endless chatter about how I found her so fascinating, so foreign and ever so pretentious. While the radio blared loud Hindi movie music in the background and flies buzzed all around, George and I sat at the green mica-topped table sipping down bottles of 7-Up. As we sat waiting for Hiba, I grew increasingly conscious of our grungy surroundings. The ill-ventilated dark room had a low ceiling that cocooned a pervasive and overpowering smell of fried food and instant coffee. For years, the Samosas and the Dosas served here had been my staple lunch, but now I began to wonder if it was appropriate for such an occasion. It did not seem like the sort of place for a foreigner. But as she walked in, I did a double take – I barely recognized her, she was dressed in a white cotton sari and a prominent red powdered Bindi marked the middle of her forehead. The only telltale sign were her Birkenstock sandals, ostensibly sticking out from under the orange Ikat border of her sari. “Do I seem less alien to you this time?” she remarked, as though she almost guessed every word I thought. I barely managed to stutter some inaudible words in my own defense, while George got up to introduce himself to her. He had known me long enough to realize what my sour expression implied. I could tell he was amused by my complete inability to mask my surprise. I sat quietly through the rest of the afternoon observing her work her charm over him while he responded with his characteristic ease. If at first I had found her fascinating, I resented her now. In spite of everything, over the summer my acquaintance with Hiba continued to grow and even though I believed then that I was resisting it, we grew to be friends. She said she valued my friendship because I was able to traverse the distance between her world and mine. To her, I was a sort of an abridged Reader’s Digest version of the complex India that she sought to understand. That probably explained why she always had so many questions for me all the time. Why do Indian women accept arranged marriages? Tell me, during the summer months why is there such a marked increase in the rate of immigration from the rural regions to the cities? Do you think the socialists’ economic policies that support such a huge public sector have worked well for India? Why is your mother’s recipe for Baingan Bharta so different from that in Madhur Jafri’s book? In retrospect, I wonder why I was unwilling to commit to her friendship. She certainly aroused my interest for she was unlike anyone I had met. Maybe, I was too arrogant to admit it then. I used to attribute my interest in her to the “mystique” of her background. Her mother was a career diplomat, placed as the first attaché at the Embassy of Trinidad and Tabago in Delhi. Her Sudanese father had married, impregnated and abandoned her mother during her ‘60s stint in Khartoum, all before Hiba was born. Even though she had never met him, Hiba talked of her father often. It was probably the fact that she looked so much like him that kept her curiosity about him alive. In contrast, she said that her mother preferred to not even have her ex-husband’s name mentioned to her. Her mother was then dating an Indian journalist and seemed quite at ease with the relationship, even though it had resulted in distancing her daughter even farther. As a child Hiba had lived and traveled with her mother and attended an array of international schools in exotic places. But once she came of age, she made her getaway to attend college in the US. The more I grew close to Hiba, the more I resisted her. Early in our friendship, I couldn’t quite make up my mind about what my perceptions about her were. On the one hand I felt attracted to the unusualness of someone so different from my own sheltered and limited, yet stable existence. On the other, I had a hard time fighting my disdain for someone her “type”. To me she had represented someone who was completely rootless and as I then interpreted, thereby lacking any depth. But if Hiba knew anything about my internal struggle to try to fit her into my clearly marked black and white world, she gave me no hint of it Grudgingly, during the course of that one summer, I did realize that her gypsy life had given her the advantage of not needing any cultural ties to identify herself. She wasn’t Sudanese, or Caribbean or American or anything but herself. She stood too free to fit any stereotypes and though that made me uncomfortable, I constantly sought more of her company. Without knowing it, by mere entry into my life, she influenced me towards seeking independence that few of us, Indian women, would dare to think of. Maybe the turning point for me was when one night I turned up at Hiba’s doorstep. I had walked out of my parents’ home following an argument with my father. These were not unusual circumstances; all too frequently I aired my differences with my parents quite aggressively. They were constantly frustrated over my being too unorthodox – which meant being out after dusk, being seen with George by some of their acquaintances, or merely having too short a hair cut. But, somehow this one time I crossed over my ingrained cultural barriers and walked out in protest. “You, at this hour! Did you come with George?” she asked as she opened the door. Silently, I walked past her and she peered out to look into the dark driveway to verify if I was alone. “Oh, it must be a real emergency for you to venture out in a public bus at this hour.” she continued non-seriously. “It is, I couldn’t bear to stay and continue to fight with my dad. Can I stay with you for the night or would your mother object to it?” I asked. “No, I’ll make sure she’ll understand” she replied with the confidence that I had finally come to admire and this time even rely on, in her. That was as personal as our conversation got that night. The following morning, when I returned to my parents’, they passively welcomed me back. I did notice however, that this time they had evidently registered the threshold at which I could snap. As a result, there were fewer arguments and fewer restrictions placed over my activities. The first time I took Hiba home was probably also the time when she assumed that our friendship was at a juncture where she had the license to explore deeper into why I was what she termed “the angry Indian woman”. “But they are so normal, so why the anger?” she began the moment I took her up to my bedroom. “You mean they appear so normal, and really they are quite the normal Indian parents” I replied. “And would you prefer it otherwise?” she asked “Of course I would, you know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t want to be told what to do and when, and definitely not when it pertains to my career or my marriage. You may not understand it, but I’d rather make my own mistakes than be dictated to at every stage of my life” I said. “Oh, I do understand, why do you think I have so many differences with my mother. But at least in my case, we can continue to fight over our differences, but in the end I have the option to choose my own course. She knows that I am financially and emotionally independent of her. But, you confuse me - you counsel so many women who come to the Center to try to take control of their lives, and yet with your own parents you fail to assert your choices.” “But you see everything only from one dimension; that is your limitation. I have several considerations at each step and as an outsider you can never empathize with my point of view.” I replied. I must confess I have never been the kind to accept direct criticism, however valid. My only defense against her candor was to hit back. George had his own take on the situation and had confronted me with it one day. “Why do you always complain about her to me, and still continue to see her everyday, you know you don’t have to be her comprehensive-guide-to-modern-India.” But I was still on the defensive. “I don’t see her everyday. I saw her days ago and that too I just took her to the Center last week because she wanted to meet some of the women counselors. Of course, now after that one visit she’ll consider herself the expert on the budding feminist movement in urban India. Do you know what she said on our way back, that she’d like to work with a Women’s group or shelter? As though after graduating from Harvard, she’d be willing to work at such low wages!” “Why do I get the feeling that you have some unresolved issues with her” he persisted. “I have unresolved issues with her, or you have unresolved issues with her? Do you think I haven’t noticed the way you look at her? She is a lesbian, you know, she herself told me so. So maybe you should think about that before you jeopardize our five years long relationship over some exotic-pseudo-intellectual-bimbo.” I shot back at him. I clearly didn’t like being cornered. George just gave me one of his insufferable I-know-you-too-well laughs, which resulted in our arguing for another hour over which one of us was attracted to her. In our five years together, George had been the one constant support in my life. He reveled in watching me struggling internally against what he had named “the Punjabi girl’s single commandment” – thou shalt never disobey thy parents. And long before I recognized it, he saw the potential in Hiba’s influence over me in resisting the power of such indoctrination. Our latest argument over this issue was just another episode in a continuing series. Back then, arguing over endless cups of syrupy chai in a roadside tea stall erected by the side of the Department wall, was the most companionable activity George and I indulged in. After his death the following year in a car accident, I cut off all ties with my university life. I had my thesis defense within days of his funeral, after which I withdrew from the world I had so fondly and patronizingly introduced to Hiba. My parents had objected to my going out with George right from the start of our acquaintance. Not only was he not Punjabi or even a Hindu, he was the lowest of the lows – an untouchable Christian! But, we were young and we were stubborn and so I’d paid little heed to my parents’ warnings of “you will surely bring a bad name to our family!” But as his death came as the undoing of my confidence in myself, it came as a blessing to them. For a whole year I barely stirred out of the house. I had finally earned the right to add the prefix of “Dr.” to my name, but still made no move towards finding a job. I merely stopped to exist in the world that had thus far defined me – no Delhi University, no volunteer work at the Center, and certainly no friends. Hiba had returned to the US some months before George’s accident. I was so consumed by my loss, that I set aside letter after letter that she sent me that year, unopened and unread. She must have given up after three or four. Months later her mother left a message on our answering machine, which I chose to ignore, in hopes of avoiding any explanations for my strange silence. To anyone who had known me for long, my sudden decision to marry Rajan and move to the US could only be attributed to some aberrant impulse on my part. I justified it to myself as it being the only hope of shaking myself out of the clutches of depression and desolation. So in 1997, two years after George’s death, I gave in to my parents’ pressure for an arranged marriage. I did not know Rajan well, but his father had attended college with my father in the ‘50s and their family had remained in touch with ours’ through the yearly exchange of generic letters that began with “dear friends and family….” Of course, my parents had long dreamed of such an ideal match for their only child. Rajan’s parents had moved to the US in the ‘60s and Rajan was a product of, what they proudly termed as an “amalgamated upbringing of American affluence and Indian values”. They were always quick to narrate all their son’s achievements – how Rajan had received his undergraduate degree from an Ivy-League College, how he had done so well at the business school, how he had received a huge bonus that year at the marketing firm he was working for in DC, and how he had recently bought a Saab convertible. I was markedly the latest of their son’s acquisitions. If there was anything that I learnt about my husband in the first few days of being married, it was that we both had entirely different expectations from our marriage. I had expected to find the new me, shaped and supported by the new man in my life. The new me, who could get me away from the pain of the past. As far as my husband was concerned I was the generic wife who had to suit his needs. In his mind the boundaries of my role as a wife were very clearly defined. Merely the facts that I had grown up in India and that he had gone all the way there to seek me, entitled him to the assumption that I should and therefore would fit the mold. He did not know me at all and he wasn’t even remotely conscious of any such need in our marriage. But for me this realization took a long time to sink in. In fact the first time he exhibited his characteristic lack of sensitivity, I was taken quite by surprise. Jet lagged and with aching swollen feet, as we walked into his apartment he said “I knew I would come back a married man from my trip to India with a bride who would know nothing about furnishing styles and gadgets here. So I took the liberty of buying everything that we may need, before I left for Delhi. You can take a look around but don’t touch anything unless you are sure you know how to operate it.” “It would be a little odd for me to get accustomed to using a dust-buster to clean a Ganesh statue, or putting steel Thalis in the dish washer after every meal.” I replied. To give him some credit, he probably chose to ignore my sarcasm and instead answered in all honesty “Well, you needn’t use all these machines just yet, just use your hands, the way you’re used to at Home”. Home. Merely one word had given him away. Here was my entry into Rajan’s hybrid world of living in one place but existing in another. A world of living in an upscale apartment building in a chic suburb of DC but a world made complete only by the weekly ritual of hanging the customary string of fresh green chilies and a lemon at the front door. A world of professionally interacting with people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds in a multinational advertising firm but having only Indians for close friends. A world of cultivating an interest in the PGA tournaments, or keeping abreast with the latest on the NBA lockout but then spending each weekend seeing old tapes of one-day cricket matches between India and Pakistan. A world of attending business lunches almost in a pursuit of tasting a new cuisine every day but at the same time exercising an almost tyrannical control over which Indian dish was to be cooked for dinner each night. A world where he had a public image and a home, a carefully simulated environment of “Home”, where he felt safe, unexposed and comfortable. Within days of my arrival in the US, I found myself thinking of Hiba because other than my husband, and my in-laws, she was the only person I knew in this foreign land. In my initial naiveté I asked Rajan for his help in trying to find her. “Could you help me locate my friend, maybe if you could show me how to search the Internet…” But before I could finish, he cut short my sentence with a terse reply – “I’m not going to let you get on the Net to look for some weird friend. Do you even know what all is available on the Net? As long as you’re my wife, I’m not letting you get into any such things.” By then, I had been his wife for almost a month but it took me a few more to get attuned to hearing the phrase “as long as you’re my wife….” So, as long as I was his wife I couldn’t try to look for a job, or volunteer to work at any place or drive a car, or go out by myself, or have any friends or do anything else for that matter. So there I was, entrapped in his incense smelling house, with gadgets that commanded god-like reverence for companions, with a brain and an education that I was not allowed to use, enjoying all “my privileges in the land of freedom and opportunity” that my husband so frequently reminded me of. To Rajan and my in-laws, I was the ideal wife and daughter in law (Bahu) who suited everyone’s needs. To my mother in law I was the Bahu to be proud of – the one who made perfectly round fluffy Rotis. At each meal she blessed me softly in her Lahori Punjabi. To my father in law I was the Bahu to be praised – the one who could always intuitively sense when he craved his next cup of chai. To Rajan I was the wife who met all the requisite demands any Indian man could ask for – fair complexion, tall, beautiful and even equipped with the bonus educational qualification of a Ph.D.; the single dimensional woman, who put up no struggle to their reign of control. True to his meticulously created image, Rajan organized an elaborate party to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. This was one occasion where Rajan’s two worlds overlapped, his personal and professional circuits interconnected and I had the opportunity to explore where I fit in. I stood alone on the balcony, looking in through the large glass sliding doors that ran across expanse of the apartment and for the first time in the past year I realized how much of an outsider I was in this house. I stood looking at groups of fours and fives chatting in every room. The pot-bellied Indian men stood clustered together, decked in their Armani suits, each holding the requisite accessory of a glass of scotch. They had to have been discussing the results of the latest round of general elections held in India, or the score of the last cricket game or the songs of the latest release from Bollywood. Their wives crouched together on the couch, in brilliantly colored silk saris and dazzling diamonds, exchanging petty gossip. In contrast, Rajan’s colleagues from his firm stood in little groups, chugging down mugs of beer in attempts to cool down the burning from the masala in the Rogan Josh and Tandoori Chicken. “Am I interrupting some introspective revere?” asked Ray, Rajan’s boss. He had crept up from behind me and caught me off-guard. “Oh no. I was just looking to see if I knew all of Rajan’s friends.” I replied. Rajan had walked into the balcony at this point and stood beside me possessively. “And don’t you? Aren’t most of them your friends as well?” Ray continued. “I surely don’t know his friends from work, I’ve only just met most of them today. As for his Indian friends, I thought I knew them but now I’m beginning to doubt that. I’ve been in this country only for a year but all these people have been here for a long time and I still have a hard time identifying with them. I have only just arrived here but even the whole generation of Indians that moved to the US in the ‘60s and the ‘70s is still struggling in the process of this cultural transplanting. I think they are creating a very dysfunctional world by resisting the inevitable metamorphosis required for assimilation in mainstream America. If you ask me, I’d say that the create-a-little-India strategy doesn’t work for me.” I did not mean to make the remark as an offensive provocation, but Rajan took it as one. He retorted with the comment: “Then why marry one of us dysfunctional types? Aren’t you at all grateful that I brought you out of the filth and poverty of India?” After the guests had left I tried to defend my position by letting Rajan know that what I had said to Ray was not by way of passing a judgment against him but that it was a general observation I had made. But, even before I started my defense I knew that he’d fail to see my point of view. This was not the first time that Rajan had hit me but it was the first time that he had not even bothered to hide it from his parents. They just stood there watching. The fact that no one came to my aid somehow hurt more than the physical injury. The only sympathy that I received from his mother was by way of her remark “Oh, you are so sensible, then why are you so stubborn? You should let him see you cry a little, he may soften his blows a little. Besides, as women, it is in our destiny to be beaten up, at least be glad that he didn’t turn you out. As a child, Rajan has seen his father do that to me very often; but where could I go, I’d just come back each time.” This incident was probably the proverbial last straw for me. I had been under house arrest for months now and begun to obsess about finding Hiba with a sense of desperation. To me she symbolized my only way out. I tried to find her whereabouts from the Harvard alumni association, but she had graduated years ago and no one there had any information about her. I even wrote to her mother in Delhi, but that too drew to a dead end. With the passage of a few more months, my hopes of ever finding Hiba began to fade. Of course in my few rational moments I realized that my need for finding her had no connection with the reality of the crisis in my life, but these moments were few and far between those in which I was on the verge of insanity or suicide. The day I chanced upon the article about a crisis intervention center for women in the local Indian newsletter, I knew that this was my only alternate escape route. On a cold drizzly day in March, I took flight, walking the three miles from the apartment to the Metro-station. I had never been in a subway before – what a stark contrast from my old days in Delhi buses! At Dupont Circle, as I emerged to the surface from the underground world, armed with my map of DC, I was struck by the weird sense of déjà vu. I walked up the stone steps approaching the calm gray façade of the house on P Street. The sign stood before me – Saheli (girlfriend), a center for South Asian women. It was ironic that after working for years with various women’s groups in Delhi, I was here to seek help. Almost without looking up, the woman at the desk asked “May I help you please?” Her voice seemed distant but familiar. In a brief moment of confusion I wondered if my imagination was playing tricks or if I was finally surrendering to my impulse of seeking refuge in insanity. “Hiba?” I muttered uncertainly. Although I don’t recollect many details of what followed in the next few minutes, I do remember the overwhelming sense of comfort as I felt the grip of Hiba’s arms wrap around my frail, bruised and battered body. Among the rush of dichotomous emotions, of relief and embarrassment, I broke down and cried. At last, I could afford to cry, for now, I was finally home. |