More Indian than Indians

I spent much of today going back in my head to a time when I was in college, trying to balance, academics, interests and life in general. It was an age when everything was about passion, be it watching a television soap opera or learning how to drive a car with automatic transmission, writing a zillion-word term paper on something you couldn’t quite comprehend but had a fabulously unorthodox spin on or skiing down the slope to the grocery store at two in the morning during a snow storm. And whatever I did, whatever my friends did, whatever we did together, we did passionately, with more dedication than we made up our eyes or debated the merits of hot dogs over pretzels for a Sunday afternoon much-craving. It was all very American, all very intense, all very high adrenaline.

But when I my first real Indian - of the kind from India, that is – I started learning what ‘laid back’ really meant. The first friend I made who was not white-skinned and part of the local ethos was a woman from southern India, who had moved to the United States for an education, fallen in love with an Indian man there for the same reason and settled down to a life of hectic domesticity with him, finally moving into a small town in the Rocky Mountains known for its university and surrounding ski resorts. We became friends almost immediately and I was swept into the family fold with no effort at all. And me, who had never really been able to bond with Indians abroad, melted in very happily and comfortably.

And my friend showed me a way of living that had all the passion that mine had been about, but with a very different focus. Academia or a career was all very well, and the dedication was total in those aspects. But where everyday life and social interaction was concerned, it was a whole new game. My friend introduced me to all hers and I saw how hard they worked to be laid back and casual and, amazingly, ‘Indian’. I was taken to potluck lunches and dinners, did my thing at dandiyas and disco nights, sat through dance and music concerts, even giggled the evening through at a comedy show that was a series of silly jokes and mimicry that centred on Bollywood and South Indian cinema, neither of which I knew anything about, but that was more than familiar to the people I sat with. In fact, some of them who had spent all their lives away from the country that almost all of them called ‘back home’ knew dialogues from films, told me about the private lives of movie stars and even had incredible knowledge of what box office takings were for one section of cinematic society.

And during Indian festival season I learned more than I could ever have done in my own environment in Mumbai or elsewhere that I may have called ‘home’ up to that time. I went to bhajan sessions, I went to pujas, I went to birthday parties and meditation workshops and I got more prayer and people and food than I could handle. But it was all part of that intense learning experience that was life for the expatriate Indian who longed for a home and roots that he or she had never known or had forgotten about. These people were more Indian than Indians who lived in India, even if their India was one that they dimly recalled from too many years earlier. For me, it was an India that I delighted in, since I could, more than anything else, return soon enough to a world that I did know, I did belong to and could understand.