On India, religion, and belonging

It makes me laugh when people talk about India being their Eat, Pray, Love experience. Even if I momentarily push aside how problematic and offensive the suggestion is, I can't help but appreciate the irony of the implication that this is why I came to India. For one, I take great pride in knowing and appreciating truly good food. And although I appreciate paneer and garlic naan and dahi puri way more than is probably healthy, I didn't come here for the food. And unless Hrithik Roshan or Farhan Akhtar is suddenly considering dating a twenty year old, some overdramatic Bollywood fling isn't what brought me here. As for the praying—well, that's complicated.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how I don't really belong anywhere. When I'm around my Indian-American friends, I'm me; identity doesn't really come into play when you're around people who all identify the same way. But of course, I don't live my life in a little bubble, nor would I want to.

I remember speaking with a Creative Writing professor about a year ago about how the only time we're aware of our identities is when they're made unique, when they're made other. I rarely feel uncomfortable about my racial and national identities at GW, but I spent the majority of my life before college being ashamed of my Indian background. 

And it's weird, going from being the Indian kid in America to the American kid in India, and now, when I'm with my friends in my study abroad program, being the Indian(-American) kid among Americans in India.

But I thought I had come to terms with that. I thought it was an initial shock or a surprising sort of irony of winding up in this situation, that I had adjusted to that. But we visited a temple last weekend, and it made me really uncomfortable in a way I hadn't expected. 

I've been an atheist since seventh grade, since I was twelve. In the eight years that have passed, I've visited temples more times than I can count and have pretended to pray for the sake of placating family, for the sake of avoiding conflict and avoiding explaining myself to people who might not care to listen, who might never understand.

When I first started telling people in my family I was an atheist, over a year after some of my close friends knew, I wasn't received very well. Some told me I was going through a phase; others went so far to tell me they pitied me. And for a while I did, too. It's not easy losing religion. It's not easy reconsidering all you've ever known. It's not easy being twelve and being the only one in your entire family who isn't Hindu. But after an understandable period of time in which she adjusted and opened up, my mom came to accept my faith, or lack thereof. She stopped urging me to go to the mandir, stopped encouraging me to pray before exams or long trips. She gave me the support I didn't know I needed. She allowed me to have a bit more strength in myself, and so I got to do me.

I've been okay with what I am for years now. I'm not angry at religion, I'm not angry about being alone sometimes. I'm secure in what I am, so I was confused when my group and I attended a temple and I got weirdly choked up. I just sort of shut down, avoided my friends, tried to walk around on my own. And I got really, really sad. I started thinking about the factors that caused me to question religion and Hinduism in the first place. I started thinking about how isolated I felt as an atheist sometimes, how I'm still sometimes afraid to identify myself as so, how I use euphemisms for the sake of not offending others, as if even though I'm not offended by others' faith they should be offended by mine.

And I thought about how isolated I feel as an Indian-American sometimes. It took me years to get to the point where I can explore my identity, to where I don't hate being Indian, to where I don't recognize being American as the only way or the better way to be. But being there reminded me that I'll never really belong anywhere. The ship has long sailed on being Indian, pun fully intended. And at the same time, I'll never be American—not simply American, not only American. I am so incredibly grateful for every part of my identity for all that it has taught and continues to teach me. But sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's lonely and sometimes it hurts.

I'm so happy I came to India. I'm so happy I'm around people who are critical and questioning and open and welcoming, all at the same time. I'm with friends and family who are supportive and engage in conversation with me, allow me to talk about the things I've been sitting on for years.

In a way, I'm happy I got upset at the temple, at the fact that I got choked up because the smell of the incense reminded me of my grandma and how much she means to me, that the marble steps reminded me of the many staircases I've walked up when I didn't want to, that the faces around me reminded me of the bindi I didn't want to put on my forehead and reminded me why. I think of these things as growing pains. It hurts because it matters, and maybe someday it won't.

It's only been three weeks so far and although I haven't booked my return flight, I know I have about four months to go. I'm glad that I came here even though I repeatedly considered going elsewhere, even though I considered not going at all. I'm not in India to ~find myself~ but while I'm here, I'm able to explore my identity and what's important to me and I'm able to open up myself to parts of me I spent years shutting out. I'm here to be me.

~ V

See you soon, India!

Today's the day! In a few hours, I'll be on a fifteen-hour flight straight to Mumbai. How do I feel about this? Well, excited for one; this is incredibly important to me for so many reasons. But I'm also nervous, unsure of what to expect, and worried about missing my friends and everything at GW. More than anything though, I feel really, really ready for this. Over the past few days I've been home I've been thinking about this trip and all it means to me and I'm more sure than ever that I've made the right decision in choosing to study abroad in Hyderabad.

A few weeks ago, my friend Mansi and I were in my dorm room, making cookies late and night and pretending we didn't have our internships the next day. We had both been talking about how much Madrid meant to us, reminiscing over old photos and metro maps and memories of dry heat and cold sangria. I told her how sad it made me to miss Madrid. The very act of missing something suggested it was part of your past, and even when I looked through the photos I had printed out from my trip I felt weirdly detached, removed. It wasn't that Madrid meant any less to me than it did while I was there; on the contrary, it means more and more as time goes by. But it felt like it had all happened so long ago. I've been back for four months and I miss it every day, but when I look at pictures of bus rides and cathedrals and my host kids, I'm looking at my memories, at my past rather than my present. 

There is so much pain in missing something. Isn't that where grief comes from? From missing a loved one and what they meant to you and how they made you feel. From missing a relationship and knowing that your significant other will never be what they once were for you, that you've moved from a place of loving them to learning how to hate them, to learning how to feel nothing when you hear their name. In the same way, I've been grieving Spain. I hate that I don't live there anymore, that my metro is the DC Metro and not the Madrid Metro, that I don't eat patatas bravas and take weekend trips and live with four amazing people and spend way too much money at ZARA. And sure, some of these things can be recreated here, but it's just not the same. It's not my life anymore, it's not my present anymore—it's my past.

As Mansi and I stood in my kitchen talking about Madrid, I told her how missing Madrid worried me because it reminded me about missing India. I moved away from India when I was only two, but because I have family there, I visit quite often and to some degree, I think of India as home. Not a constant home in the way that New Jersey is, but a home nonetheless. Because of that, I've grown up with the ever-present feeling of missing it. I remember having a conversation with a classmate in a middle school art class about how much India meant to both of us, and how missing it manifested in the form of flashbacks. We both visited every other summer, and after the one-year mark, we'd both start having flashbacks of seemingly random images and memories—the rickshaw ride to a relative's house, the storefront of a sari shop on a crowded street, the way the highway looked on the way back from the airport, the view from your grandmother's window, the smells of the dirty streets. These aren't necessarily emotionally-latent memories, but they mean so much because they remind you of how much you miss home, miss place and the people in it. 

One of my favorite movies is Swades, a story of an NRI (Non-Resident Indian) who goes back to his village. He reconnects with place, and while the relationships he has with a mother-like figure, a love interest, and various other people in the village are all meaningful, for me the movie has always been about what returning to India feels like. At one particular point, the main character decides to quit his job at NASA and move back to India permanently. He tells a fellow-NRI friend about it, but the friend tries to dissuade him from doing so.

At this point, in classic Bollywood fashion, a song begins to play. But the movie is so well-made that this starts with a flashback just like the ones I often have. Image after image passes by and the lyrics (this website includes the English translation, too) at this point are just so poignant, so heavy and exact and they pinpoint just how the pain of missing people and place manifests. 

You see, missing India has always been a part of me. I've always missed my grandparents and the home I grew up in and the streets and the food and the sense of family and belonging. And although I lose that sense of belonging the older I get, the more "American" I feel, I can't help but think it's time to get that back. 

Because I was born there, because I could have so easily lived there and grown up there, I often wonder what my life would've been like. It's crazy to think of the hundreds of people I would never have known, as well as the countless people I could have. So in a way, I guess I'm returning to India to explore the life I almost led, to learn and grow and live the way I did in Spain, to reconnect with family and place and myself.

At the same time, I'm looking to dance again, to become better at Hindi, to reconnect with family, to learn more about the history and culture that are part of my own hyphenated identity. I've been reading the Karma of Brown Folk—which is absolutely blowing my mind, by the way—and I'm looking to consider orientalism, colonialism, imperialism, and the Indian-American experience from the other side of the world. I included this quote on my post before my trip to Spain and I'm including it again because of how relevant and true it is: "Travel not to find yourself, but to remember who you've been all along." I'll only be there for five and a half months, but during this trip, I hope to better understand who I am and what I am and what I've become and who I want to be.

Have you got any advice or words of wisdom to share? Please let me know in the comments below! Wish me luck and I'll see you in June, America!

~ V

On travel and race

When you’re born in one country and move to a second before settling down in a third, nationality becomes a tricky concept. Each time I travel, my national identity becomes increasingly less defined; although each new trip teaches me to value both India and the United States more, the experience of travel never actually pushes me strengthen my ties to the two. Rather, I am always reminded of the fact that I'm part of the world, that who I am is a result of where I've been and the experiences I've had as a result of setting. For example, with the case of this past summer in Spain, I don't consider myself more Indian or American. While I still identify as an Indian-American woman, I now think of my heart as belonging to three places—India, America, and Spain.

Because the thing is, travel allows you to compare that which you learn to what you have already known, and in that sense, a big focus of my trip to Spain was on racial and national identity—how we regard it, how we think about it, and how we talk about it, if we even do. I've been thinking about my experience with race in Spain before I even got on that flight to Madrid. I hadn't known how I'd be regarded, what my skin tone would be perceived as, whether or not it would be an issue. But it was never at the forefront of my mind and I sort of shrugged off any concerns that had presented themselves. I told myself that it was 2015 and my race wouldn’t concern anyone. 

But even though I've thought about it for so long and so extensively—both throughout my trip and beyond—I never wrote about it on here. For one, race is hard to talk or think about. And this is even more so when you’re an Indian-American, when your face is hardly represented in the media, when you have no real public role models who openly talk about race and nationality and the Indian-American experience.

Because I've grown up in the States, I've been aware of my race for as long as I can remember. I joked with a professor last year that I am most aware of my "Indian-ness" when I am around people who aren't Indian, when I am forced to realize or when I am reminded that there is something about me that is different, that there exists some sort of separation between me and those around me. But when I spend time with my friends who are Indian-American or Pakistani-American, I forget about it all. Of course, this is not to say that I live with the constant reminder of my "otherness," that I am always painfully aware of this separation. It's not that way at all; it’s not constant, and it's more subconscious, and even when it is conscious, it's not necessarily bad. 

But it's something that is important to me to acknowledge to myself, especially since I spent a lot of my pre-college years almost ashamed about or frustrated with my Indian-ness. I didn't know how to regard myself and like any kid, I looked at myself the way others looked at me. So for the longest time, I've felt like the weird little Indian girl and sometimes, I still do. I tend to be a little internally cautious, trying to gauge if strangers will look at me or think of me or treat me the way I'd experienced a lot of my childhood—or if they will see me beyond my racial or ethnic or national identity, as is often the case with people I meet in D.C.

The thing is, I'm incredibly proud of and grateful for this identity. I identify as an Indian-American woman and I love every part of that phrase. I love that I am Indian, that I have family that has taught me so much beyond the traditional, quintessential American experience, that I have been born elsewhere and speak four languages and have an entire cultural and linguistic lens through which I can view the world. I'm so grateful to be American, to have been an immigrant and to live in a country that teaches you every day through both its flaws and strengths. And I love, love, love being a woman, because I have been able to embrace feminism in a way that might have not been as encouraged had I been born biologically male. I'm grateful for each part of my identity for the variety of perspectives that have been available to me, for the ways I have been taught and able and encouraged to view the world around me and my place in it.

And the amazing thing about travel is that it makes you acknowledge it all and rethink it, too. How is race regarded differently in Spain? How do people acknowledge (or avoid acknowledging) my ethnic background, and how does this compare to my experiences in D.C. or New Jersey or Mumbai?

My first night out in Madrid, I had three separate groups of people come up and ask me what my race was. I had people guess if I was from Peru or Mexico or Ecuador, and one person even asked if I was Mayan. And although when I told my American friends about this they were shocked and a little offended, I later learned from a Spanish friend that this wasn't something he necessarily considered rude. He is from Peru but has lived in Spain since he was ten months old, and he's definitely accustomed to complete strangers coming up to him and asking about his background. It's normal to him and he considers it completely unoffensive. And when he told this to me, rather than focusing on what my response should be—both to the interactions with people asking about my race and to my friend’s experience with his own “otherness”—I just let myself consider the fact that there were multiple ways of looking at the situation, multiple lenses through which I could view the world and its treatment of race, nationality, etc.

I let myself consider that people regard race differently. It wasn't just the broad scope of questions I was asked, up to and even after establishing myself as an Indian-American, or the specificity of the questions (including but certainly going beyond the standard, "What does the dot on your head mean?”); more than anything, it was that race was talked about, that race wasn’t something that was taboo, and as a result, it was okay to be of another race. You weren’t necessarily weird or other or foreign or strange. You just were.

I've been back from Madrid for nine weeks (yikes!) but I'm still learning. Isn't that amazing? For those of you trying to decide whether or not to buy that plane ticket or select that study abroad program or take that summer off for an experience that will make you think and reconsider and grow beyond you realize, if you're waiting for a sign, this is it. Go. Do it. And when you're there, when you're in the middle of it all and you realize, holy shit I'm in Spain and I'm different and it's all so crazy and I wouldn't have done this had I not booked that flight, take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate this and how lucky you are to experience it all.

And when you're there, open yourself up and let yourself learn.

~ V