Curry Page 9

  Distance from questions like that is what I once wanted from travel, and now require of the cities where I choose to live. A society in which one’s movements and appearance are met with utter indifference is my ideal, one that comes closest to being incarnated – for people of South Asian descent, at least – in cosmopolitan cities. On that trip to Mauritius, seeing key chains and tubes of sand from Chamarel extended to me in automatic recognition that I was a tourist did feel like a kind of homecoming: a recognition that I wasn’t any more at home in that country than I was in small-town British Columbia. In B.C., my race differentiated me – in Mauritius, it didn’t help me to fit in. I bought both the key chain and the tube of sand and showed them off to my friends when I got back.

  It’s more than just a white audience wanting to hear our real experiences: it’s us, the diasporic audience, wanting to read experience reflected back, or to see a familiar version of a story. Fariha Róisín, writing on Bend It Like Beckham in the online cultural magazine Hazlitt, uses a collective ‘we’ in discussing South Asian identity while she points to some of the isolating historical wedges within the great mass of Western brownness, particularly the ‘realities’ of children being expected to follow cultural expectations enforced by the families:

  … our language for who we are as South Asians in the West is still so young, still so undefined. We have so much internalized hatred amongst us; the running joke in Bend It Like Beckham is that Jess can marry anyone, just not a Muslim. We’ve refused to detail our shameful and horrific interlacing pasts. That the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has been accused of participating in a cleansing of Gujrati Muslims in 2002. Or that my very own Bengali parents survived a Civil War, where three million majority Muslim Bengalis were killed by the Pakistani Army in 1971. Or that Pakistani Muslims killed Sikhs in Punjab in the ’40s, and vice versa. Or that Kashmir is still a tentative region over a debate of religion and ownership. We don’t give voice to the hatred we have for each other, and therefore we are unable to unpack the absurdity of it, when in so many ways our histories are richer, intensified, and made more glorious because of what we’ve shared through the ages.

  Perhaps war is essentially absurd, and certainly conflict is inevitable among the various culturally and religiously diverse people assembled in one area of land over centuries, particularly when that land is colonized and partitioned – but calling a history of conflict between multiple parties something they have ‘shared’ is, to say the least, inaccurate. An experience of war isn’t commonly shared by both sides, nor is an outbreak of mass violence shared between one self-designated group and another: they can be discussed, common experiences exchanged, and attempts at atonement made, but to call the aftermath of war or ethnic cleansing a shared cultural history between all parties involved is to iron history into meaning-lessness. Racial and cultural communities that share a fairly uniform history can arrive at an idea of shared, internalized hatred, but South Asians in the diaspora don’t have a firm, united past: their ancestors are on separate sides of the borders of countries, classes, and wars.

  Just as curry doesn’t exactly exist, neither does the diasporic South Asian. If we’re attempting to build solidarity out of a shared history, it will never quite mesh, hold true, unless our great-grandparents happen to be from the same time and place. And even – perhaps especially – in a cosmopolitan city like Toronto, there’s every chance that the diasporic people I meet emerge from a past unlike my own genetic-historical soup of coolies, office clerks, a security guard, an auctioneer, a psychiatric nurse, and an ophthalmologist. Members of Team Diaspora may have skin of the same general tone, but each has a recent family history that is likely completely distinct.

  As a collective, South Asians in the West are bound by the incredible range of possible origins they might have had, the unknowability of their pasts, and the comical accident of resemblance. ‘There are so many pockets across the world with an Indo-centric definition,’ Róisin goes on to write, ‘and brown kids from Brampton might have nothing in common with the brown kids in Heathrow, yet the echo of the undefined territory booms louder than our shared similarities.’ This undefined territory she’s referring to – ‘what it means to be South Asian in the West’ – is perhaps impossible and undesirable to bridge: why define a uniform way of being, of existing as a brown mass in the West, in reaction to our perceived resemblance to each other and the cultural overlaps that diasporic people do share?

  When discussing past South Asian conflicts, our sometimesfatal inability to get along in the centuries of the past, the collective ‘we,’ the ‘us,’ sounds right because the idea of a vast South Asian collective makes sense. ‘We’ also makes sense when we’re talking about some of what we do share as diasporic subjects: great swaths of cultural artifacts and attitudes, lots of food, and the fact that we’re perceived as part of the same mass, one that we’ve gradually unified under for the sake of political, academic, and cultural advocacy. The key to defining diasporic South Asian identity isn’t letting go of or healing the past: it’s in stridently resisting definition, the idea that we should have to tell stories that reflect the shared, collective experience of what is in reality an incredibly diverse category of individuals from complicated, different pasts and places. But in the West, brown people are perceived as being on the same racial team and, in fact, many brown people do feel that that’s exactly true, as Róisin seems to when she sees ‘us, not an appropriative version of us’ in Bend It Like Beckham.

  Inventing a shared past to create a unified diasporic culture is, in part, the project of currybooks, of narratives such as Bend It Like Beckham, which are built on easily recognizable touchstone tropes. But the past can’t be altered to fit a desire for belonging and solidarity in the present: what people in the South Asian diaspora in the West share is that people looking at us assume that we all come from a similar past and place. But we don’t, and there’s no need to pretend that we do.

  I’ve always found Bend It Like Beckham to be a shallow parade of annoying stereotypes of older-generation South Asian stiffness and their grudgingly dutiful, big-dreamin’ children. I also understand that I’m not at all the target audience, and understood that I wasn’t anywhere close to the target demographic when I saw the film in the Park Theatre in Vancouver at age twenty, alongside my equally bored and annoyed father. It was precisely the placating notions of unity and shared experience that bothered me about the movie. The cut-out parents, in particular, with their finger-wagging admonitions barely exceeding the character development in a Twisted Sister music video until the inevitable, predictable, third-act relinquishment of tradition and acceptance of their daughter’s personhood, frustrated me in their prêt-à-porter relatability. But the film’s impact on brown girls and women who saw their own wishes to escape cultural expectations is undeniable – and, as Rajpreet Heir wrote in the Atlantic, director Gurinder Chadha works to create a sense of hybrid identity in protagonist Jess, played by Parminder Nagra:

  In showing Jess in so many traditional situations – making Indian food, dancing at her sister’s wedding ceremonies, and trying to wrap a pink sari in the locker room – alongside the scenes of her trying to pursue football, Bend It Like Beckham helps viewers better understand Jess’s masterpiece invention of a hybrid identity … To play soccer in the park with the boys and then secretly play for a team, while also trying to be a good Indian daughter, requires nonstop maneuvering.

  I didn’t even come close to noticing this about Bend, but upon rewatching, I can’t disagree with Heir, and have to acknowledge the reactionary nature of my analysis of the film as it exists in my memories. Despite the hammier aspects of the film around her, particularly her strident ‘Respect your elders!’ parents, the hybridity of Jess’s identity is delicately and cleverly depicted. As much as I like to hope that my critical skills have some degree of purity, my response to Bend is entirely in line with my earlier resistance to reading diasporic novels simply because they we
re diasporic novels. But I’m more sympathetic to my post-adolescent reaction to Beckham: a packaged version of what it’s like to be a non-traditional brown person in the West agitating against old-fashioned parents was something I had every right to be utterly disinterested in. Bend It Like Beckham arrived at my eyes as part of an old genre, a descendant of Footloose and Pump Up the Volume, the racial and cultural elements decorations on a story I’d seen many times. A story like this adjusting itself to Western contours – the teen rebellion movie browned and bangled – truly did mean something to brown teenagers and kids who it hit at the right time. But the film’s power isn’t in how fresh and South Asian it is, but in how familiar and Western it is. It casts people of a relatable colour in a narrative that was previously just-for-whites: while Bend doesn’t say anything profound about South Asian culture, and likely didn’t intend to, the movie does say something to secular South Asian teenagers in the West – that their struggles are analogous to the ones they’ve seen in white, Hollywood narratives. Like so many stories of rebellion, this is a movie about discovering you’re just like everyone else, and that’s okay. It shares this with Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: both films are mainstreaming narratives, stories that don’t efface the unique aspects of diasporic experience, but do concentrate on just how Western brown people in the West can be.

  There’s ingrained colonialism and empire in the mere existence of any brown narrative written or filmed in a non-Indian language: for the ones in English, the connection is inescapable. Indian diasporic writers and a large proportion of Indian writers, whether they stayed on in the country or not, seized this linguistic tool for expression, recognition, and financial betterment with resounding results, from Midnight’s Children to The God of Small Things to Narcopolis. When I was a teenager listening to death metal and black metal, I wondered why these Nordic Europeans sang in English. As an adult listening to death metal and black metal and reading diasporic literature, the question rarely occurs to me: you write in English because you have to, because history and movement have rendered your mother tongue a novelty. Or, crucially, because you don’t have a mother tongue – you never learned it from your mother, or maybe she didn’t from hers. Either way, writing in an Indian language would shrink your market, and if you’re second-gen, you’d likely never come close to the fluency you have in the language that arrived at your tongue courtesy of historical and economic machinations that didn’t pause to ask what you wanted to speak.

  Wealth is another pervasive, although often hidden, actor in this genre stream in South Asian narratives: these memoirs, novels, films, and stand-up comedy acts are most often written by the wealthy, or at least the middle classes. The kind of people whose families had servants in the old country, perhaps, and who regenerated wealth in the new one. As I heard at many a family-friend dinner party growing up, this rebuilding of class status and money often wasn’t easy, with the transfer of educational and professional credentials from the subcontinent to the West rarely being straightforward. The fall from the past in a diasporic story is often also a fall in signifiers of everyday comfort, as in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, where rural cook’s son Biju embarks on what he thinks of as a trip upward, living as an illegal immigrant in New York City. Instead, he lives in horrible conditions, contending with rats running over his sleeping body by night as he works for minuscule wages by day.

  While deceptive portrayals of a better life in the West (and often direct lies about the fortunes that await across the ocean) have propelled emigration for decades past, a longing for escape to the West is a staple of many real-life immigrant stories. In Lion, for example, Saroo’s wresting from his family also uplifts him into economic circumstances that would likely have been far beyond his reach had he stayed in his homeland. In Hari Kunzru’s 2004 novel Transmission, Indian programmer Arjun Mehta is deceived with prospects of a job that matches his vision of a luxurious life in the West, but ends up working in contract-employee servitude, barely scraping by and at the mercy of employers who could cut them loose at any time. What fuels Arjun’s move is a vision of life in a permissive society where companionship and bounty are a given:

  His current favorite daydream was set in a mall, a cavern of bright glass through which a near-future version of himself was traveling at speed up a broad, black escalator. Dressed in a button-down shirt and a baseball cap with the logo of a major software corporation embroidered on the peak, Future-Arjun was holding hands with a young woman who looked not unlike Kajol, his current filmi crush. As Kajol smiled at him, the compact headphones in his ears transmitted another upbeat love song, just one of the never-ending library of new music stored in the tiny MP3 player on his belt.

  Abandoning actual India for a false vision of America proves to be a mistake for Arjun, who sinks into increasingly depressing work situations and eventually becomes a fugitive from justice. But this downward trajectory isn’t always the story: for diasporic hoppers such as my parents and many of their friends in the U.K. and Canada, the nursing professors and the software successes and the business people, it worked out. Some visit back-home more than others (back-home ranging from Guyana to Mauritius to Gujarat), but I don’t think any of them seriously entertain the idea of moving back for good. And, almost certainly, they wouldn’t reconsider having emigrated in the first place: the elements that they miss, they can go back for, or simply feel nostalgic for. What would have been missed by not leaving is their lives: the substance of their careers, the families they made, their existence itself. Diaspora worked out better for some than for others – much better – but the success stories complicate feelings of longing for the past and a different land. But that’s fine – stories and literature are methods we have for dealing with complexities.

  When such complexity is calcified into clichéd tropes, it becomes simplified and rote. British journalist Bidisha was asked to speak at an event on Indian literature and languages at the 2016 London Book Fair. Writing about the event afterwards, she called attention to repeating narratives:

  the forbidden romance between the Mughal princess and the servant boy in a lotus garden; English stiff upper lips melting in the heat of the Empire’s monsoon season; the fraught narratives of being tempted by religious fundamentalism or condemned to a forced marriage, of struggling to survive destitution and poverty, of being torn between parental tradition and youthful self-determination, the clichés of cruel brown men and suffering brown women, vast differences of equality and opportunity, the agonies of culture and identity. These things do happen, but they are not the only stories.

  Not the only stories, indeed. I’m sure Bidisha would agree that novels and collections appear every year that push against the edges of these stories, exceed or ignore them completely, but the sheer percentage mass of repeating stories in the field of South Asian letters is impossible to ignore. Her prescription for the future involves a loosening of strictures on what authors are expected to produce, even defying these expectations outright and defending ‘our inclinations as artists who are Indian, or Indian diaspora, or second- or third-generation writers of Indian heritage living far from the birthplace of our grandparents. We have as much right to produce a bourgeois comedy of manners, a psychological thriller or a ripping space opera as we do to craft realistic, sober literary fiction.’

  Even within that category of realistic, sober literary fiction, South Asians diasporic and otherwise encounter a restriction, which novelist Rumaan Alam indicates in his review of Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce My Name: ‘There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there’s this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own, small experiences. That can be charming but it doesn’t approach importance.’ Race and cultural background are inextricable from an author’s life, experience, knowledge of other people – but the empathetic, individual, particular vision that is the value of any good literary effort must be allo
wed to look outward, must be given permission to rove outside of the parameters of experience that other books have convinced you that an author with a brown-sounding name is allowed to have.

  Bidisha trains her critique of what brown writers are allowed to produce on the white-dominated world of U.K. publishing – she was addressing them directly at the London Book Fair – but her words would be just as apt in a much wider context of not just publishers, but readers. The modes of expression available to brown writers may be dictated by the industry’s commitment to the immediately marketable, but also by what readers of all races are interested in reading.

  My own hubristic crime as a young reader, skipping over the brown-name books on my parents’ shelves, was not believing that particularity could exist in any of those books, that they could be anything other than versions of each other – and later, while writing, that I’d only find what I wanted to write about in flight from the stories that other brown writers were supposed to tell, when really I did want to write about race, about culture, about family – just my own particular version of it, which seemed utterly out of step with what I found in the sari- or-mango-on-the-cover books.

  While these straight-up, mango-gnawing examples of currybooks certainly exist – those homecoming-comfort-authenticity blends that present a packaged version of what it is to be a disconnected brown person in the West – finding exactly what I was looking for when I began researching them intently was harder than I thought. That base blend I describe was certainly present in many books, but I was surprised by how many of them – Lahiri’s The Namesake, Ali’s Brick Lane – had markedly excellent qualities, weren’t just show-and-tell roadside zoos of exoticism and alienation. The broad emotional and cultural notes being struck, of an over-there and back-then being absent from a central character’s existence, resonated strongly in many of these books, but it didn’t make them all hackwork. When the genre is explored by thoughtful writers with unique insights, the result is a quality book – which makes it all the more difficult to step outside this genre as a brown writer. Still, there are also books by brown people that riff on the tropes without surrendering to them. Often, they have the same kind of fruit-and-silk-adorned covers, but books such as Canadian writer Pasha Malla’s recent Fugue States do something to eke out more space for stories unburdened by the tropes of the currybook. As Malla told Aparita Bhandari at NOW Magazine, his return-to-Kashmir novel explores a homecoming that isn’t a plunge into the past, but into the realities of socio-political change: