Staying Connected

Jessica observed the other day that at this point in history it doesn't matter where on earth you live, because so much of your professional life occurs online. That is certainly true for her, and for the writing side of my career. I only speak to my literary agent a couple times a year, for example. A month ago we had an hour-long Skype call to discuss my latest manuscript. I was in a Holiday Inn in Goa. It was night for me, morning for her--but there is a time difference to negotiate between California and New York, too. It was a productive meeting.

Okay, so Jessica's statement is not so true for doctors, teachers, and others who work face-to-face with clients and colleagues. But she got me thinking about other applications of the phenomenon of distance-irrelevance. One of the things I like best about living abroad is that my long-distance friendships and familyships have been unchanged by the change in distance. I only see my parents two or three times a year, for example, but I have corresponded with them more since I've been in India and feel like I have a better sense of what's going on in their lives from 8000 miles away than I did from 400.

The same is true is with old friends. To a friend in Virginia, what does it matter if I live in California or India? Either way, our relationship consists of typed words. And because I have been corresponding more since I've been in India (because I have more time, because it seems like the right thing to do...) these long-distance relationships feel stronger here than they did when I was in California.

I also feel like a better US citizen here. Mostly this is because I have more time--you could argue that if I had more time to browse the New York Times online from my office in California I would feel just as well-informed. What I'd like to point out, though, is that for a writer (or a computer programmer, or a day trader, or anyone who sits by himself in a room all day) the feeling of "localness" is no longer defined by where you are. For example, I have a "Menlo Park, CA News" heading on my Google News page. News articles from all over the web that mention Menlo Park show up there. I find that by reading that list of articles, I feel more Menlo Parky than I did most weeks when I was living in Menlo Park--weeks in which I rushed up and down the peninsula by car and train sometimes twice a day, grading papers in every scrap of time. Even the most annoying hallmark of localness--reminder emails from the elementary-school class parents--have continued to find me here. And I have continued to delete them, unread.

So yeah, Jessica, you were right. As long as you and Violet are with me, it doesn't matter where I live.

Indian Fiction Roundup, Part 1

Maybe the best thing about being in India is that it has given me time to read. In the US there is always something to do besides reading--laundry, dishes, grading, mowing the lawn--that reading ends up getting pushed to the end of the to-do list. Here, with all those chores taken care of, we have been able to indulge in kitab khana (in Hindi: "book food").

I have read mostly Indian fiction since I've been here, and I thought I would write up my impressions in a series of posts exploring Indian fiction in English, past and present.

My greatest discovery has been the amazing novels of RK Narayan (1906-2001). I am ashamed to say that I had never read anything by Narayan before coming to India, but now that I have, I realize that many of my favorite Indian writers were influenced by his work. Narayan is considered the first major Indian author to publish exclusively in English (he is also derided for this). His first novel, Swamy and Friends, was discovered by Graham Greene in 1935, who recommended it to his British publisher. Narayan sets all his novels in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. His work was adapted into an extremely popular public-TV series in the 1980s, and if you mention the word "Malgudi" to anyone here, that is the connection they will make.

I have read five or six of his novels now, and my favorite is probably The Guide. The title character, Railway Raju, works as a tour guide for foreigners visiting Malgudi. I was especially interested in him because we have met so many of these guides during our stay here. Narayan--who always knew his audience included a large percentage of foreigners--surely counted on this. Anyway, the plot gets going when Raju takes a scholar and his wife to see some ancient caves near Malgudi. Raju promptly falls in love with the wife--and she, neglected as she is by her workaholic husband, falls for him. I don't want to reveal too much, but it is a fantastic story of reinvention and rebirth, and ultimately of disappointment.

My second-favorite Narayan novel is The Vendor of Sweets, a refashioning of the prodigal son story using a Malgudi sweet-vendor and his expatriate son. The son returns with a foreign wife and a new set of morals. It is reportedly Narayan's saddest book, although that honor would have to be shared, in my opinion, with The English Teacher, which draws on Narayan's own experience as a young widower. Finally, I also recommend The Painter of Signs, a copy of which was given to me by my sister (thanks, Megan!) just before we left the US. This one is about feminism, population control, and the way love sometimes takes a back seat to principle.

Okay, one more Narayan book. I would be remiss if I did not mention My Dateless Diary, Narayan's memoir of the year he spent in the US (I think it was 1953) on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He's not exactly the Indian de Tocqueville, but he's close. Maybe if de Tocqueville had hung out with Aldous Huxley in LA...

Moving on. Few English majors these days earn their BA without having read Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. The book is a standard text in "post-colonial" literature courses, and with good reason: it is a masterpiece of historical fiction. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, was born at the strike of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment when India was declared independent from Britain--and so his life is an extended metaphor for independent India. Rushdie also riffs on three major Indian religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) and a host of other topics which make for excellent term papers. The thing is, few English majors really enjoy the book. I was lucky enough to have missed it in college--I say lucky, because when I finally read it a few months ago I did not have the baggage of a first, forced reading. I thoroughly enjoyed Rushdie's playful, rambling prose, his cartoonish characters, and his deft treatment of historical circumstances. If you know the basic outline of 20th-century Indian history, it is even more fascinating.

Another Bombay-focused novel that I enjoyed is Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. Somebody told me this was an Oprah book. I guess that's possible, but if so, it was an unusual choice. It's about two sets of characters--a group of Parsis and a group of Hindu Dalits (or untouchables)--who end up together in a small apartment during Indira Gandhi's martial-law Emergency in the mid-1970s. Mistry's narration is much straighter than Rushdie's, but no less masterful. Because his mode is more realistic, you see the characters and their circumstances more clearly. For example, Mistry takes you inside a jhopadpatti, or shantytown. But because his aim is not to shock you with the horrible conditions, he portrays it like any other neighborhood. Kind of.

If you are interested in slum life, I highly recommend Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. You may have heard of this novel. It's by an Australian convict who escaped a maximum security prison and fled to Mumbai, where he reinvented himself as a slum doctor and mob operative. There's no telling how much of the book is real and how much is fiction, but it follows the outline of the author's life fairly closely. But shock value is not the reason to read Shantaram: this guy is actually a hell of a fiction writer, and the 900 pages feel like half that many. He takes you inside the Cuffe Parade slum in Mumbai (where he set up his accidental clinic) and the notorious Arthur Road Prison, where he was beaten and starved to within an inch of his life. There is even a love plot--with some very flowery, Bollywoody sex scenes. I don't normally like crime fiction, but I loved this book.

Next time: Indian pulp!

Going Negative

On this blog I have tried to be as generous as possible in my reportage. I have given India the benefit of the doubt on everything from separatist riots to shitty New Years Eves in gay bars to negotiating the red tape of the immigration department. I never wanted to go negative. But a man can only hold off so long. Today, after another three hours wasted at the foreigners' registration office (and facing another three tomorrow) I have composed a list of things I really can't stand about this country:

Dishonesty

Academic plagiarism and political corruption get all the press--and rightly so, as both are endemic here--but I have noticed plenty of other kinds of lying as well. Our house staff, for instance, have both proven to be liars. We had to fire one of them last week because we discovered she was asking for time off not for physical therapy, as promised, but because she had another job. The other servant (the cook) basically pulled the same stunt on another family in order to come work for us. We found this out much later, when she locked herself in the bathroom one Saturday afternoon while Violet was having a playdate with a school friend. Turns out the girl was a family friend of the cook's spurned employer. Yes, you got that right: a grown woman was hiding from an eight-year-old. In a restroom.

Superstition

There was a holiday last month called Akshaya Tritiya, which was widely advertised by banks and jewelers, because astrologers had declared that it was an auspicious day to buy gold. As you might expect, the price of gold coins and bars (Indians buy these in astounding quantities) shot up that day, but people agreed to pay the premium because...it was an auspicious day to buy gold. Yes, people honestly believed that if you bought gold on Akshaya Tritiya, it would beget more gold. Like golden mice breeding in your safe. Here, astrology is not just a pastime of waitresses and cat ladies. Marriage ceremonies, for example, often occur in the wee hours of the morning because the family astrologer decried that time to be the most auspicious.

Oppression of Women

Like in America, the local-news page of the daily paper is filled with items from the police blotter. Most of these involve women being brutally murdered in the villages outside Hyderabad, and occasionally in the city itself. Most often the deceased is a young woman whose family was unable to pay the dowry demanded by her husband's family. Dowry is technically illegal in India, but plenty of families still demand it. Many observers decry it as a lower-class thing--a way for poor families to make a buck by literally auctioning off their daughters. But several reputable sources tell me that the practice is just as common among upper-middle-class families--and I would argue that it is more wanton in those cases, because the demands are more venal. (A rich family doesn't strictly speaking need a new refrigerator the way a village family might, but while they're making the list.... Think of it as marriage registry, Indian style.) Sometimes the bride's family is unable to deliver everything they promised. So the collateral (the bride) is repossessed. I wish I were exaggerating. I read this story three or four times a week. And the newspaper only covers this state.

Filth

Let me be clear about this: I am not a germophobe. But I am a pissing-in-the-street-a-phobe. And a hocking-loogies-in-the-pool-a-phobe. And a restaurant-restroom-grosser-than-a-set-from-Naked-Lunch-a-phobe. I am too young to remember America pre "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute" but it could not have been as bad as this. On the train home from school I once watched a woman methodically unwrap six skeins of yarn, throwing the clear plastic wrappings one after another out the window of the carriage. I feel like a prig reporting this, because who cares about litter when people are starving, right? But I don't see the benefit of littering to the litterer, or street-pissing to the pisser. Is the convenience worth the cost? Friends here have told me that they know Indians in the US who obey all the strictures about trash bins and recycling and so forth when they are in America, but when they come back here they revert to throwing their trash on the ground. It pisses my friends off, too, but obviously it's going to take more than an (unenforceable) littering fine to change the culture.

The Music in Restaurants

Last Sunday afternoon Violet was over at a friend's house. Jessica and I decided to go out for lunch, just the two of us. It would be nice, right? Maybe even romantic. But it was ruined--as every restaurant here is ruined--by a soundtrack of American lite hits from the eighties. Here's a playlist from last Sunday's lunch: "Stuck on You" by Lionel Richie, "Only a Woman" by Billy Joel, "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins. There was a Hall & Oates number, too, but I don't remember the name. I think I've heard "I Had the Time of My Life," from Dirty Dancing, in half a dozen restaurants around town. Why? Beats the fuck out of me. And in the case of Sunday's restaurant, it wasn't even Lionel Richie singing: it was a sound-alike.

Oppression of Women, Part Two

You know it's time to leave India when your eight-year-old daughter says she can't wear shorts in 110-degree weather because "it would not be modest."

Oppression of Woman, Part Three

In India it is illegal to use ultrasound scans to determine the sex of a fetus. This is because male children are strongly preferred, and the government recognized that the scans were leading to sex-selective abortions. But this has not solved the problem. The sex ratio (defined as the number of girls born per 1000 boys) has fallen over the last thirty years from 945 in 1981 to 914 today. In the northern states of Haryana and Punjab (near Delhi) the ratio is only 830. Some doctors are still performing sex-determination scans, but there is also a crisis of "disappearing" infant girls. Experts disagree on the root cause: some say it's economic (see the discussion of dowry, above), while others argue that it is patriarchal (the need to continue the family name, etc.)

The Mango Poems

This mango once had 4 brothers and sisters. It wants me to eat it.

1.
Sublime mangoes embody India. 
Earthy and hot like the summer sun. 
Bright orange pulp. 
If the juice doesn't run down your chin, 
you didn't eat yours with the proper fervor.


2.
Words cannot describe the flavor of a mango.
Today's had yellow flesh.
A nation-wide past-time, mango-eating.
The endless debate of which variety from which region is superlative.
Juice between my fingers.

This mango is cut and ready to be eaten after dinner. Goodbye, dear sister!

3.
Mangoes like butter.
I am told they create heat.
Monsoons are coming.


4.
June showers today.
Cheerful golden balloons.
Mango festival.

Violet's Birthday

Soon after we arrived in India last December, Violet started talking about her birthday. It was clear that she was anticipating the occasion much more than in years past.

At first she was worried that she wouldn't receive any presents, but after we'd been here a while, and she'd seen the wares for sale, she realized there were plenty of suitable gifts in India, and that she would probably receive a few of them on her birthday.

Then she got this notion that no one was taking her birthday seriously. She decided that her birthday should be something like a weeklong festival, with life literally coming to a standstill (no school, no summer camp, Mommy stays home from work, Daddy doesn't write, and so on).

Jessica and I eventually figured out that her birthday had come to represent all of the slights and indignities she endured in moving to India. She was worried she would have no friends, for example. And that her parents would be too busy to pay attention to her. Neither of these is true, and last Friday we set out to prove it.

We took a vanload of girls to Hyderabad's best Italian restaurant, bringing with us a delicious cake baked by a neighbor.

The evening had its rough spots. Some Indian children reach school age without ever having been disciplined, so they had a hard time with "Jessica Aunty," who was happy to help them make up for lost time. And we had an incident in the restroom (but what's a birthday party without one of those?)

Tell me, does this look like a fake smile to you?