Curry Read online

  Mauritian food is different, just as Mauritius is different from India, even if I constantly conflate the two in conversation, and also in this book, to avoid the multiply-hyphenated descriptors that pure accuracy would demand. The early history of the island is what teenage me would call a ‘colonial gangbang’ any time a half-interested friend inquired. A small dot off the coast of Madagascar, Mauritius was one of those barren islands that was in fact verdant and teeming with jungle and diverse species, including the dodo, lying fallow for colonizing powers – pretty much all of them – to settle and make farms, staffed first with slaves, then indentured servants, depending on the barbarism of the empire and the time. The Dutch, then the French, then finally the English took it, with the Portuguese making a couple of disinterested visits sometime in the sixteenth century, when they were already nicely set up in Goa and Ceylon. The British Empire ‘won’ Mauritius in the Napoleonic Wars, carving out space for the island in Patrick O’Brian’s The Mauritius Command, perhaps the only international bestseller with my ancestral home’s name in the title.

  Aside from that one visit, I know the place through stories, sketchy histories, and folk tales. But I can’t dress it in longing that I’ve never felt. The nostalgia that my parents feel for it, that they impart in their recounted memories, is one that anchors it as the past, not as a place of future revelation or truth for me. The language there, officially, is English, but it’s Creole and French that seem to come at you most on the streets. The 1.3 million people who live there are a true mix: 25 per cent are Black and mixed-race people primarily of Madagascan or Mozambican origin, many of whom are the descendants of the slaves brought over by the Dutch and French. When the British assumed rule and abolished slavery in 1835, the Indians who now make up about 70 per cent of the population arrived, mostly as indentured servants. Amitav Ghosh wrote of this exporting of coolies in a trilogy of historical novels – Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire – that I’ll get around to reading someday. Descendants of the French and British elite still live there, along with about 30,000 people of Chinese descent, Hakka and otherwise.

  Somewhere in that influx of people in the late nineteenth century, with Indian servants in demand to fill labour and administrative roles after outright slavery had been outlawed, my ancestors arrived in Mauritius. The Colonial Office List for 1886 lists a V. Ruthnum as a clerk in the Stipendiary Magistracy at Black River in Mauritius (the British name didn’t stick – it continues to be called Rivière Noire on maps and in conversation). It was perhaps this V. who made the first diasporic step out from India, joining what I might fancifully envision as a Wild West trial run for the melting-pot urbanity I’d come to depend on as an adult. Except, in V.’s case, there was no escaping his place in the chain of subjugation where he was somewhere in the lower middle and a white man was at the top. There’s certainly a currybook to be written about V.’s journey, but the happy ending doesn’t come until a few generations after his death.

  Alienation and a sense of being severed from the past is visited on South Asians from the outside on a daily basis, in forms ranging from violent racial attacks to the ongoing, often lightly intended and genuinely curious ‘Where are you from?’ that isn’t asking where you grew up, but where you were supposed to grow up if your parents hadn’t up and left. Alienation has branches, and the thickest and most poisonous stalk of alienation in the West is fuelled by racism and the norm of whiteness. The actor Kal Penn, who played the protagonist in the film adaptation of Lahiri’s The Namesake, as well as my beloved Kumar in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, touched on this brand of alienation when he was interviewed with his White Castle co-star John Cho by the Chicago Tribune in 2005:

  ‘Along those lines, I was probably in 4th grade when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out,’ Penn says. ‘There were all these Indian characters that were eating monkey brains and snakes for dinner, and doing all these things that had absolutely nothing to do with being Indian at all. I went into school, and with myself and every other Indian kid I know, nobody would sit next to us at lunch, for months, because they were convinced we had monkey brains in our sandwich. Those are the media images that go into people’s heads. If you don’t have close friends to disprove that – or even if you do but you’re only in 4th grade – that’s pretty powerful.’

  ‘That’s my favorite movie,’ Cho deadpans.

  Penn sighs dramatically. ‘I hate you.’

  Penn’s story, and many scenes in Harold & Kumar, capture the alienating effects of casual racism, whether malicious or ignorance-based, but his sweep of ‘every other Indian kid I know’ leaves out another form of exclusion that South Asians dole out and suffer from, not least of which because we’ve been rounded up under this loosely applicable term that covers all the differing cultures and countries of our manifold backgrounds. As Rushdie pointed out in 1982, ‘This word “Indian” is getting to be a pretty scattered concept.’ On my first day of high school, one of the older Sikh boys signalled me over at lunch and asked, ‘Hey, you speak Punjab?’ When I said no, he smiled, and the conversation was over.

  My Mauritianness, as touristy as it struck the actual Mauritians, was also false currency when it came to recognition by brown kids of a more direct Indian origin, ones who had a closer relation to specific regions, religions, social strata, and experiences that make up that massive and complex country. Being second-gen made me counterfeit Mauritian back in my old country, and I continued to ring false to South Asians who were more closely aligned with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh – the core that we scattered from. The ways to not-belong as a brown teenager in white, small-town Canada are even more complex than my Beavis haircut and Black Sabbath T-shirt could express in 1996. If Indian is a baggy term, South Asian is parachute pants.

  In the 2016 book Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), which blends memoir with focused reportage, author Kamal Al-Solaylee speaks of brownness as ‘a continuum, a grouping – a metaphor, even – for the millions of darker-skinned people who, in broad historical terms, have missed out on the economic and political gains of the postindustrial world and are now clamouring for their fair share of social mobility, equality, and freedom.’ Al-Solaylee sees brownness as a ‘burden’ carried everywhere we go: ‘Pretending that it’s otherwise is intellectual dishonesty.’

  Al-Solaylee’s intensively researched and reported book is a doors-open investigation, conducted in quite the opposite manner to the table-bound text-and-meal interrogation you’re reading right now. Al-Solaylee seeks out the particularities of brown experience all over the world, from Sri Lanka to Hong Kong to Qatar to Toronto. And yet, he begins and emerges with a sense of a united brown identity, even if it is one initially imposed by an outside gaze:

  For much of our history, we’ve been defined by others – as the brown race, as the weaker tribe, as the civilization-ready subjects of empires. But the time has come for us to self-identify as we wish. There’s strength in numbers and comfort in knowing that one’s experience is not isolated or an aberration. Whenever I get pulled aside when crossing the U.S. border, I find it reassuring that I’m not the only brown face. I see the Iraqi or Pakistani business traveller, the Colombian student, the Sri Lankan chef or the Indian family with three or four or five children, and I know that while our stories are different, we find ourselves singled out because of our brown skins and histories.

  Al-Solaylee’s version of self-identification isn’t a call for a flattening and universalizing of brown experience to create one narrative of what it is to be brown. As his detailed exploration of regional and class differences in the experience and perception of brownness across the world proves, his is a nuanced vision of a collective experience. As a different sort of storyteller – not a journalist, but a fictional inventor – I buck slightly against even this multi-faceted take on what we share as brown people. Perhaps, and this is certainly born of coming from an upper-middle-class background and living in urban centres
, I don’t want to self-define as part of a brown identity that is still shaped by outside perception, by the imagination that the majority imposes upon us. The realities of racism and the white majority dominance of life in the West defines how brown people are seen, how they must act, and what they are allowed to achieve – but this doesn’t need to limit our imagination of ourselves, or lessen the distinctness and individual nature of experience, especially as expressed in art, in memoir. As brown people in the West, our stories don’t have to explain ourselves to white people, or to each other – they don’t have to explain shit. They don’t even have to suggest that brown people are a we, or a they.

  Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle came out in 2004, four years after I’d already moved to Vancouver, four years after it could have done me some real good, in high school. Rewatching the movie now, I can see how the casual objectification of the invariably hot female characters clutters the movie’s efforts to humanize the Asian and South Asian protagonists. H&K is a stoner movie, in direct genre lineage from movies like Half-Baked and the Cheech & Chong series, but it also has much in common with college sex comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, many of which had painfully stereotypical depictions of gay and non-white characters to accompany rampant, dehumanizing misogyny. Harold & Kumar corrects the racial elements, even if the depiction of women as sex objects remains in line with long-standing genre conventions. Co-writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg started by writing their protagonists as young American guys.

  ‘We always had a very multicultural group of friends,’ Hurwitz told the New York Times in 2008. ‘One thing that struck us was that no matter our ethnic background, we were very much alike. But whenever we saw Asian or Indian characters onscreen, they were nothing like our friends, so we thought we would write characters like them.’

  I was deep into cinema when Harold & Kumar came out, arguing about Antonioni’s lack of merit and making a case for Bergman’s Winter Light as being a more truthful re-envisioning of the director’s own The Virgin Spring – but it was Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle that had a marked effect on my 2004. The movie’s excellent performance on DVD after failing at the box office, and the fact that it was about stoners and goofy shit before it was about race and belonging, made it an incredible sneak attack of a film. Kal Penn as Kumar, who has all the mental equipment and skill needed to get into medical school but doesn’t want to fall into an Indian-American stereotype profession just to please his father, gave people around me, especially when I spent part of that summer in Kelowna, the equipment to actually perceive me. It was my first true experience of representation mattering, because it was the first time I felt my brand of the brown diasporic experience had been accurately represented onscreen. In a fucking stoner movie, of all things. Instead of being looked at as an E.T.-like curiosity by white people, Kal Penn is a legitimately attractive possibility for women, as is John Cho’s Harold – this made a real difference in non-cosmopolitan places, where coloured skin was an aberration in the yearbook. By aligning itself with so many of the standards of stoner films and college sex comedies, Harold & Kumar subverted the genre with the elements it flipped: colour and culture, making the ethnic leading men into a pair of American dudes who did indeed confront racism and address their thoughts on cultural pressures, but only along the way as they sought to get burgers, find meaning in life and work, and yes, to get laid. Ejecting the traditional immigrant narrative was what made H&K an important movie: it was allowed to be a dumb, clever look at smart and funny dudes whose cultural origin wasn’t the most prominent aspect of their thoughts and lives. The recent Master of None, Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s Netflix series about an immature Indian-American and Taiwanese-American best-pal duo in New York, owes something to Harold & Kumar – namely, this foregrounding of non-racialized aspects of the two main characters, even as Dev’s and Brian’s stories often do feature short dives into the past and their heritage via their parents. (Incidentally, Ansari tweeted that he and real-life friend Yang have been frequently mistaken for Harold and Kumar on the street.)

  Brown people, especially young ones, are expected to have an opinion on Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling. When I tell people I love comedy, I know that three questions in I’m going to be asked how much I love Aziz and what I think of Master of None. Actually, I harbour some resistance to even watching that series and The Mindy Project, if only because I know I’m supposed to. It’s bizarre to have an expectation of watching a sitcom and forming an opinion about it placed on you, but as a brown person who thinks and writes about culture, that’s the deal: there isn’t much diasporic comedy on North American television, so it’s only fair that you turn up and take it in.

  Perhaps Aziz doesn’t much want to be the mouthpiece of a brown generation, and Kaling may be equally disinterested. I know I don’t enjoy the general expectation that I’m a fan of either, or that I should have a stance on exactly how they let down the depiction of what brown life in the West is really like. Ansari, writing in the New York Times, points to a different truth: that representation, full stop, matters a lot to people of colour in the West, a fact he’s carried with him as he wields increasing control over casting his own show and appearing in work by others. Growing up in South Carolina, Ansari ‘rarely saw any Indians on TV or film, except for brief appearances as a cabdriver or a convenience store worker literally servicing white characters who were off to more interesting adventures.’ Master of None has been part of changing that filmed reality: Ansari and Yang gave us South Asian and Asian leads who had fuck-up careers, dated girls, did the Seinfeld and Larry Sanders stuff that had long been white territory. Ansari, who plays, in the show’s first season, a constantly auditioning actor, has his character lose out on parts due to his unwillingness to do Indian accents. Both Dev in the show and Aziz the creator are staking out space for brown people in the West who don’t conform to the familiar Apu Nahasapeemapetilon take. It matters to see our first-gen and second-gen bodies and Western lives reflected in some form on the screen, by writers of comparable origin – of course it does – but what matters even more is that every mass-culture take on Western brownness from a brown voice isn’t given credence as the defining take, or the one that all succeeding texts, shows, or movies act in response to or in imitation of.

  Even if it is a counterstream take like Master, there’s a genuine sense of despair when you see one story of Western brownness upheld by whites and members of the brown audience alike as the one that seems true: a sense that what you have to say or write may only be relevant in relation to the story they’ve seen or read before. That you’re either carrying on the same narrative or reacting against it and, either way, that original story is the one that matters.

  And the movies and stories that don’t subvert the conventions of an immigrant narrative? They can still resonate. Hacks like Dan Nainan, the fifty-something comedian who poses as a millennial and groomed an intricate fake connection to internationally successful stand-up Russell Peters in order to snag high-paying gigs at Indian-American weddings, use their South Asian heritage as the basis for massive swaths of their material, relying on recognized commonalities instead of crafted jokes for laughs. And often (though not in Nainan’s case, as his act is just too terrible), those laughs happen. Diasporic audiences often crave confirmation that the alienation we feel individually is shared, that it resonates for others. In currybooks, an answer to that alienation is floated: embracing, even if only within the span of a few hundred pages, the realness of another place and culture, the one that was truly always our own.

  Still, shouldn’t approaching pain, alienation, displacement, and a sense of cultural unbelonging come from a place of incomprehension, not a predetermined inquiry that holds that the East has answers to the dissatisfactions of a life in the West? I’m not telling you, I’m asking. But it’s a pointed ask. Does Saroo, protagonist of 2016 Best Picture nominee Lion, based on the true story of Saroo Brierley’s incredible discovery of his village roots after be
ing lost and raised by an Australian family, truly resolve core questions of his existence when he learns that he’s been mispronouncing his own name for his whole life? And what does his discovery do for us, for the audience?

  It tells us that there’s an answer, a true and calming reality, in the embrace of the past. As a character – I won’t presume to speak for Saroo Brierly, co-author of the memoir Lion is based on – Saroo’s real name will likely always be the mangled mispronunciation of his authentic name, a variance on sher, the Hindi word for the film’s titular Lion. His immigrant existence is a mixed, complicated, in-between one, a balance formed by turmoil and forward motion, not the peace of answers found in the past. The popularity of these narratives, and the relationships that diasporic writers have with them as both authors and readers, are part of another tangled story we tell each other and ourselves, wondering ultimately if they are something that white Westerners are interested in for reasons that would make us uncomfortable.