Yours, Mine, and Ours

I like being alone.

I’m resigned to power outages.  

I don’t like being alone during power outages. 

They are a fairly common phenomenon in India, but as I have always been with family or friends, the dark never used to feel so... overwhelming.

I think this fear took root when I lived with my aged grandparents in India for a few months, obsessing over something happening to one or both of them.  I would feel most helpless in the dark, with a grandfather in his early nineties - deaf as a post, and walking mostly by memory rather than with the help of vision or strength - and a grandmother in her early eighties and fond of planking (in that she’s most comfortable when horizontal).  One night, for example, after I had lit some candles to wait out the power cut, I watched Apachen attempting to climb Amachi to place a lighted candle God-only-knows-where while she asthmatically wheezed epithets he thankfully couldn’t hear.  In all fairness, he’d patted her grizzled head a few times to make sure, but still mistook her for a high stool or an armoire of some sort – an unstandable error as she is also brown and tends to collect dust. 

Of course, I was laughing hysterically at the time, but with subtle undertones of deep concern. 

...Dark days.

In any case, I’d become used to the Queen of Sheba and her solar-powered lamp during the regular power cuts here; even if they weren’t in front of me at all times, I knew they were there in an emergency.  Now that I’m alone, the dark gets me down.  Especially when it’s for three straight days in a row and the items in my freezer are toasty warm to the touch.  I realise that candles are an option, I have a cellphone with a flashlight and a battery that could outlast a zombie apocalypse, and I have a battery-powered lamp as well, but...

...It’s dark. 

And I’m alone. 

And I don’t like it.

But life is slowly improving in other ways.  You have heard it said by Paul to the Corinthians - and later by J.K. Rowling (peace be upon her) through James and Lily Potter - that the last enemy to be defeated is death.  But ye verily do I say unto you that the second-last enemy is squatty potties, and, lo, their end cometh.  

You may gather from the above statement (and from the fact that I'm reading nonfiction) that I miss Harry Potter and fantasy novels and libraries and Harry Potter books.  I've reached the third pass over my borrowed bookshelf - moving from Inspirational to Egyptian Dictators with very little rhyme or reason - God help me if I start reading Proust.

But my love for the written word has kept me (mostly) sane in a world with very little internet.  This also becomes a handicap in a foreign country when unable to speak the main languages well and faced with unfortunate word choices or spellings in English.  In Korea, t-shirts would just have a jumble of English words about owls, cats, glasses, love – basically just words in a funky font or beside a random picture. 

Here, the words make marginally more sense, which is still slightly unfortunate as they just don't belong.  For example, seeing a bus with an Emminem decal across the windshield is not ideal, but seeing a man in a Cocaine and Caviar shirt with a yarn extension is marginally worse. 

Do you like those like I like peanut butter and bananas?  Is this a new Rihanna single?  

The worst so far has been a woman in a t-shirt reading:

That kind of encouragement is unhepful

So music is sometimes my only salvation.  I’ve already indicated that I feel a deep sense of personal fulfillment when people know and like Indian things – partially because I’m Made in India, but also because, deep down, I know I’m not entirely Indian and am desperately trying to hold on to my heritage with my teeth.  Thus, I was incredibly overjoyed when the polite, genteel little doctor in my office (who once C-sectioned and saved a hemorrhaging mother and her baby with naught but a razor) turned on his Bollywood playlist at work.

He was actually whistling Kal Ho Na Ho.  Can you understand the gravity of this?!

It’s not so much that I think my culture is the best, one of the best, anywhere near the best, or has any possibility of being the best – but I’ve often felt that mutual respect for people and their cultures is sadly lacking, and it begins individually.

I’ve had Indians confidentially ask whether black people are normal or just thieves.

I’ve had Malians incredulously ask how Indians can be so backward as to believe in many gods and a caste system.

I’ve had Asians ask whether black people are cannibals.

I’ve had black people ask whether Asians are cannibals. 

Brexit happened.  

We’re adults in the 21^st century and our fears have matured - we want to know what color the boogeyman is and whether he has a passport and pays taxes to live under our beds.  

Is this rational.

Every people/culture has those they look down upon.  For Congolese, it seems to be poor Bangladeshis (who, FYI, are not Indians; they’re Bangladeshis).  And I have not the least doubt in my mind that if I were to speak to those people, they might bemoan their lives, but thank God that at least they’re not poor Africans.  Only white people seem to be free of any stigma (though Russians seem to be towards the dark end of that spectrum).   

When is this going to end?

Nationalistic pride is one thing – but not at the expense of another group of people who are denigrated for the way they live or what they eat or how they dance. 

Filled with inner peace, I shrieked out Mujhe Neend Na Aaye (a Bollywood classic from the 90s) and gave thanks that this kind, intelligent soul had not only heard of Indian music (beyond the usual head bobble that foreigners think will please us), but actively knew it enough to hum along.

In return, the next day I wore my Christmas dress from Mali. 

[Note:  Churches here tend to buy huge swatches of fabric for any special day (Women’s Day, marriages, Christmas, etc.) so everyone can buy a few yards and design their own dress/shirt/vest/whatever.  The fabric is usually... eye-catching, with a verse and a small image (for example, my dress depicts the three wise men in front of Mary and the baby Jesus, captioned with Matthew 2:2 in Bambara and English).  In this way each person is dressed uniquely and beautifully, but with the same underlying fabric - if this isn’t a tearjerking example of unity in diversity, I don’t know what is.]

I don’t usually wear mine because my (lack of) curves are not built for pagnes and it was a little too big.  After having taken it in on a recent stitching binge, it now flattens my butt and hides my waist so well that I look like an adolescent male in drag – high five to me and my high school Home Ec teacher! 

Public opinion, on the other hand, was astounding.  I was told I looked pretty on the street, people in my bus Swahili’d about how I was dressed well, how they liked it, and how I was integrating completely (I only understood this bit because it was in French), and my colleagues said that now – now – I was an African-Indian woman.

I don’t know what that means, but I like it.