The Two Sides Of A Hyphen

I’m Indian, but my son isn’t. He was born in the US, and, in accordance with USlaw, automatically granted American citizenship. And so, as a matter of convention, inthe eight years he has spent there, he has been brought up as an Indian-American, ahyphenated moniker he has neither had the capacity to understand nor the experience toappreciate.

I’ve often wondered how to raise him: how to maintain a sense of equilibriumbetween the two sides of the hyphen. This dilemma seemed almost existential when wewere in the US. I wanted him to understand why his skin was brown, why his namedidn’t sit easy on his teacher’s tongue and why we didn’t go to church but insteadworshipped a ten-armed goddess on a lion on a convenient weekend rather than a specificholiday. The forward tilt probably got reinforced as he picked up cues from our Indianfriends who would come over for the occasional potluck parties in the US. If not for thegathering of similar looking brown-skinned people with heavy accents and the perennialconfusion between their "V’s" and "W’s", a healthy amount of time amongst the inviteeswas devoted to criticizing American foreign policy, its culture of consumption, itscovetous capitalism and its declining morality. I suppose it was cathartic to vent about asociety where we lived and prospered, but didn’t feel integrated. How could we when ourrole in the consciousness of that nation was confined to being motel owners or gasattendants? Recently, a new phenomenon called outsourcing, had left us with the epithetof ‘high tech job-stealers’— a tag as desirable on our community as a leech on one’sskin. Without political clout, without representation, we were left to commiserateamongst ourselves within the confines of our homes, the predominant sentiment beingthat our motherland had so much right with so much wrong, while our adopted country,despite having so much right, wasn’t what it was touted to be.

However, ever since we’ve moved back to India and concerns about culturalchauvinism have eased from my mind, I find myself debating the issue about the twosides of the hyphen even more fiercely than before. I am missing that satiety that Ithought I’d have upon seeing my son being raised amongst his own. As expected, now-a-days he likes cricket more than baseball, he thinks of football and soccer as being thesame thing, mumbles Bollywood songs that he doesn’t understand, and looks forward tocelebrating Holi rather than Halloween with his friends.

Then why the disquiet in my heart?

I suppose it comes from the concern that when he’ll return to the US in a decadeor so— as he no doubt will to avail of the superb higher educational system in AmericanUniversities that I had benefited from— he might face the same alienation that I did whenI had first stepped on those distant shores. Was it unfair on my part then to let him onlyhave a second hand experience of the country he was born in and belongs to? Wouldn’t Ihave done him a disservice by turning his citizenship into paperwork, making him animmigrant in his own country?

Thus, paradoxically, I find myself making a conscious effort to balance the scalewhile we are in India, weighing the America side of things so that the hyphen bears downto the right and reminds him of his other identity. When relatives and friends comearound to congratulate us for making the move, often bad mouthing American foreignpolicy or it’s hedonistic society in the same breath, I’ve found myself defending Americaduring these instances, telling them that much of their impressions are drawn fromHollywood or the sensationalistic international press feeding off the tendency ofAmericans to wash their dirty laundry in public. What about racism they ask me. Whatabout it, I ask, making my case that discrimination exists in every society. If anything,American consciousness prickles to its insinuation with greater sensitivity than anyoneelse’s, and their laws against it are certainly more watertight than ours. Americans areselfish and live for themselves not for their children they claim. Have they ever attendeda Parents Teachers Association meeting, I ask them? But their divorce rates are ten timesours and their children suffer because of this. I shrug and accept the argument, nevervoicing my opinion that such discrepancy exists because Indian women choose to sufferin silence. What about Iraq… the great American misadventure that has cost thousands ofinnocent lives? Of course it is a travesty… I tell them, but drawing inferences about aculture and a society from the country’s foreign policy is as fallacious as the Americanconclusion that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from a few satellitephotos of broken trailers and aluminum tubes.

I’ve watched my son follow these discussions with his big probing eyes, perhapsindirectly registering my subliminal message in his eight-year-old brain. More directly,I’ve reminded him how lucky he is that his American passport will allow him visa freetravel through much of the first world and that he will never have to suffer the ignominyof standing in serpentine lines outside consulates while worrying about tricky questionsfrom shifty consular officers. We’ve looked over books on American presidents anddiscussed Lincoln’s assassination with the same drama as Abhimanyu’s bravery. I’vemade a conscious effort to keep him abreast of the 2008 American presidential race andreminded him that people look to the US for inspiration about the greatest concept ofpeople’s empowerment otherwise known as a democracy. And occasionally when he hitsa superb cricket shot all the way to the boundary and shouts ‘home run!’ I’ve chosen notto correct him.

The paradox boiled down to the morning of November 5th when he and I sat watching Barack Obama give his acceptance speech on television. Here was a man with adecidedly unusual name, born of a white American mother and a Kenyan father, broughtup by his grandmother and step-father in places as far flung as Hawaii and Indonesia; aman who had just shattered the racial glass ceiling with dignity and a fierce belief inhimself, and was now getting ready to step into the most powerful office on earth,carrying on his young shoulders not just the hope of Americans but the entire world —while, in my own country, brown skinned people were killing fellow brown skinnedpeople because some were from the north and some wore skull caps while praying.And that’s when the answer struck me and I knew what I had to teach my son tobe. A good human-being. Human-being: with five letters on each side, the perfectlybalanced hyphen. Actually, according to my spellchecker, we can get rid of the hyphenaltogether.

My moment of epiphany was short lived. When I told my son that he should takeimmense pride in Obama’s victory, he nodded his head and said he knew why. Wasn’t itbecause Barack Obama was African-American and not simply American?

Anirban Bose is the author of  BombayRains, Bombay Girls