Conduits

I had this recurring dream for years, especially when I was a graduate student and fairly new to America.

I’m sitting in my little apartment in Kentucky and I walk into the kitchen to make myself some tea. As I wait for the water to boil I notice a little door I’d never seen before. A hidden door. I marvel at this, berating my lack of observation. I could have discovered this door months ago. I walk through the doorway and emerge onto a long walkway, a strangely familiar walkway.

I walk quickly; knowing something amazing is at the end of this corridor. I make it to the end. And there it is, my home in Allahabad, large, rambling, old and inconvenient. But home. I’ve found a conduit, the one place that’ll let me come and go between my two lives—past and present—at will. No need for airfares, no planning, just the ability to go back and forth between my two worlds. The alarm clock shatters the dream and I awake, at first confused and then sad.

This is the reality, for most of us who live outside our countries. We’re always looking for that door… the conduit that connects our new home to the real home we long for. Because really, it doesn’t matter how our homelands change—in good or bad ways—it remains home, which is why we of the Diaspora are so obsessed with them much to the bemusement of those who still live back in the old country.

But we also become part of the fabric of our new homeland, attending block parties and Little League games. We try to distill the essence of one into the other. We strive for the perfect balance and in doing so we falter. This is where the strange NRI behaviors, some real, some stereotyped come from.

Outside India, we have our little Indias, the desi grocery stores, the movie theaters that show the latest Bollywood extravaganza, the stage shows where Shah Rukh Khan dances with Rani, Preity and Urmila. We have the Indian get-togethers, the lavish temples and bhajan-kirtan/Gita Mandal/Iftar and Eid parties. Classical dance and music mesh with movie numbers at the many variety shows. Desi festivals and holidays are celebrated with enthusiasm, from Holi and Diwali to Republic Day and Independence Day. Most of us fall into this world to some degree or another. Some live immersed in it. Others visit from their mainstream American lives.

Those who don’t be seen dead at the temple or mosque happily attend pure classical recitals and mushairas at concert halls. Those who turn up their noses at gaudy stage shows rent Indian movies on the sly. Most of us cook and eat Indian food at home. It all depends on our own levels of comfort and on the activities we participated in back in our home country. There are varying levels of being Diasporic.

But this is not a one-way street. I’ve also seen pockets of India being turned into an approximation of a generic West. From ballet lessons in Mumbai to American-style apartment buildings that could be at home in Los Angeles or Scottsdale. Last year I visited a friend in Bangalore. She lives in a giant, posh apartment complex that looks like it was transplanted from another country. It has a clubhouse, underground parking, a gym, pools and saunas and a 24-hour security gate.

The names of the individual buildings are Cypress, Pine, Oak, Sycamore---trees that most people in Bangalore had probably never seen. I idly wondered if it would have made a difference if the buildings were named for Indian trees—Banyan, Ashok, Tamarind.

I realized that like my dream, this apartment complex too was a conduit. Once you get past the security gate and into the lush, landscaped grounds, you are no longer in India. From the layout to the construction and design, even the marketing information about the place, that seemed to be the intent of the builder and the desire of those who lived there.
That is the fantasy for which people are paying tens of lakhs, sometimes crores, in these cities.

The Indian upwardly mobile class, ride from their American-style homes to their American-style offices—all steel and glass—in their American and Japanese style cars. They shop at supermarkets and at upscale malls, forgoing the neighborhood shops and thela-walas who still sell vegetables and fruits. Their children play with Western toys--Barbie, GI Joe, even baseball-- watch American cartoons and live a life very different from the ones their parents had lived or that countless other regular, middle-class kids live even now. There is small but growing community of well-off satellites of the West living in India. There was always a percentage of ultra-Westernized Indians but now it’s a growing group. And now, with liberalization, they can actually surround themselves with the accoutrement of the life they want to live as long as they don’t mind the overpriced cost of this life.

As the world becomes smaller, the gaps between us grow narrower as well. We are all re-creating something, becoming part of an international social and economic class who live the same way no matter the country we live in. If we live outside India we re-create India wherever and however we can. If we live in India and can afford the hefty price tag, we re-create a life foreign to the country but somehow comfortable for us. Ultimately, we are all creating conduits, pathways to other worlds in whichever way we can. And, in doing so, we are actually creating hybrids, not truly Indian, not really Western (or whichever other places the Diaspora scatters) but something in between.

What is the drive, this urge that makes us create these conduits? Why do we feel the need to find these secret doorways that connect different worlds, diverse realities? Is this positive or negative, desirable or not? That may be the unanswerable question because the individual realities of living this way are so complex and tangled.