Excerpt from BORN CONFUSED
by Tanuja Desai Hidier
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She'd told him I was the Indian girl. The Indian girl. Somehow neither description rang completely true to me, in terms of how I felt inside, but thing was I'd never really consciously thought of myself as American, either. Of course I did the Pledge, too, along with everyone else for years of mornings, but like everyone else I wasn't really thinking about the words. I mean, I definitely wanted liberty, like Gwyn had with the car keys and no curfew, and justice for all would be great, especially in high school where people were definitely not created equal (proof: cheerleaders). But I didn't know if that had so much to do with the stars and stripes; it seemed to have more to do with the jeans and teams.
So not quite Indian, and not quite American. Usually I felt more Alien (however legal, as my Jersey birth certificate will attest to). The only times I retreated to one or the other description were when my peers didn't understand me (then I figured it was because I was too Indian) or when my family didn't get it (clearly because I was too American). And in India. Sometimes I was too Indian in America, yes, but in India, I was definitely not Indian enough.
India. I had few memories of the place, but the ones I had were clear: Bathing in a bucket as a little girl. The unnerving richness of buffalo milk drunk from a pewter cup. My Dadaji pouring his tea into the saucer so it would cool faster, sipping from the edge of the thin dish, never spilling a drop. A whole host of kitchen gods (looking so at home in the undishwashered cement-floored room). Meera Maassi crouching on the floor to sift the stones from rice. Cows in the middle of the vegetable market, sparrows nesting on their backs. Hibiscus so brilliant they looked like they'd caught fire. Children with red hair living in tires. A perpetual squint against sun and dust. The most delicious orange soda I'd ever drunk — the cap-split hiss, and then the bubbling jetstream down a parched throat.
But mainly all my memories of India were memories of Dadaji. When he died the whole country seemed to come unhitched, floated off my mental map of the world and fell off the edge, to mean nothing anymore, just a gaping hole fast filling with water. And at the same time the place I had known grew fixed in my imagination, rooted in memory. When my grandfather saw me that last time, he looked at me like he couldn't quite believe his eyes. He called me by my mother's name, Shilpa, and then when my mother stepped in behind me and it all fell into place, the weight of all those years in between visits was visible in his slumped shoulders. To me he looked the same, wearing a familiar maroon plaid shirt low over a white lungi that I realized later had been my father's.
From Born Confused, copyright © 2002 by Tanuja Desai Hidier.
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