On Returning This Time

The Delhi airport is all glass walled bridges and soda machines. There are green Exit signs on the new highways. The gas stations are smartly lit. The buses are American style. It does not look like my old village anymore. It has come into some money.

I’m happy to see my parents. The city is getting younger as they are getting older.

***

I met a Kentuckian on my flight back to Atlanta. She said that she finds herself unwinding in India. There’s too much guilt and strife in America for her.

I felt myself unwind this time. It’s been virtually a decade since I’ve returned. My father calls people like me migratory birds. We have homes elsewhere, but we keep returning “home.” It’s very curious if you think about it.

I think that my home is where I am. I wonder if Delhi would be less my home if my parents no longer live there. Perhaps I seemed to unwind this time because I was relieved that the old certainties were still in place, that I remained locatable in my hometown.

***

I’ve already begun to lose my native spurs. I’m no longer allowed any in-jokes.

In my native days, they’d have laughed if I’d said that everything happened according to Indian Standard Time, meaning that we were a nation of slowpokes and laggards, which we once happily were. This time I joked about one of their computers being slow at a plush internet café, and they accused my German-made USB stick of having a virus.

The middle class seems to have become especially sensitive to this sort of thing. When I saw the cluster of makeshift shacks at the Tis Hazari Court, I said to my divorce lawyer in a good-humoured way that it looked like a fish market. He gave me a look that made me feel like I was making fun of his poverty.

***

I now notice things I didn’t before.

My divorce lawyer is quite a wonderful character. He is an upper caste Hindu in his early forties. He seems to think that his ample paunch is proof of his professional success.

He is married to a Muslim; but he represents the Hindu Mahasabha, and he seemed to be rightwing. He often mentioned caste in conversation, but he also represents several consumer forums. In this he is typically Indian. It takes a lot to make us see a contradiction. We are born Hegelians: masters of reconciliation and fine distinction.

I say “we” so easily. But could I have objectified him with such clarity if I’d never left?

***

There are things I don’t do that I would’ve done before.

I remember the exact moment when political disagreements began in my family. It was when the BJP became a mainstream political party in the 90s. I was shocked that my parents signed up without a second thought.

Only a few years earlier, I’d gone to see a documentary film on the RSS with my father. After the film, my father asked the filmmaker why he had chosen to make a film on an organization on the far Right instead of simply ignoring it.

I asked my father this time why he’d begun to support the BJP when he didn’t even want people to make films on the RSS at one time. But there was no BJP for many years, he responded. " As soon as it became a mainstream right-wing party, I began to vote for it".

It makes sense in retrospect. My parents were born to provincial landlords and raised in orthodox joint family settings. Their families had seen hardship post-independence, and so they’d come to Delhi, the big city, in the seventies with very little. Slowly, they built themselves a comfortable life: a three bedroom apartment and savings for their old age.

When the BJP began to preach militant nationalism, and religious and cultural conservatism, they heard their own repressed inner voices. They realized that they’d always hated Nehruvian cosmopolitanism and Western manners.

I have a visceral distaste for authoritarianism. I don’t know where it comes from. My father thinks it’s my red college education. But whatever it is, I’ve been passionately debating politics with my family for many years.

When I visited this time, I saw a yoga guru called Baba Ramdev railing against corruption while sharing the dais with Hindu saints and right-wing leaders. I saw it as yet another right-wing gambit. But my father and I did not discuss it as we watched him on TV at dinner. It would’ve galvanized us both a decade ago.

Maybe we were just too battle weary. Maybe we are so set in our ways now that there is no longer any room for debate. Or maybe I’ve become too much of an outsider to matter anymore.

***

There are thoughts I have that I would not have had before.

Those who travel on the new Metro are in awe of it. They behave like poor guests at a rich man’s wedding. Queues form spontaneously. There is little jostling for seats. This is the same crowd that tore into buses in animal frenzy a decade ago. They’ve changed, these petit bourgeois; they’re beginning to resemble the bourgeoisie.

It is harder now to distinguish the students belonging to prosperous families from couriers, small-time shopkeepers and technicians. They all wear jeans and T-shirts and carry cellphones. The cheap trousers and tired looking bush shirts that once characterized the lower middle class have disappeared.

I watch their faces on the subway. I want to know if their expressions have changed. It’s an odd inquiry. But I try to convince myself that the run-of-the-mill face in Atlanta is not the same as the run-of-the-mill face in Delhi.

The face in Atlanta is exhausted and diligently polite. It has known defeat and guilt and despair. It is used to suppressing anger. It is a face that has seen the war against the Native Americans, the War of Independence, the Civil War, the World Wars, the Sixties, the Iraq war, and so on.

The face in Delhi used to be lazier. It was fatalistic in the face of hardship. It shied away from conflict. It did not understand labels like “mediocre.” It was a nicely puerile and unlined face.

It’s still the same, except that it looks busier. It seems to be learning very slowly, the art of this-worldly things.

I know that, by having thoughts of this kind, I’ve indulged in a terrible bit of romanticism and a rank generalization. I cannot forgive myself for it. I feel like an absentee landlord, or an 18th century European traveller to the East Indies.

But these are the thoughts I really did have.

***

There are questions that I do not feel the need to ask anymore.

We were worried that we’d all turn into Americans when India liberalized in my teens. We’d started to buy Levi’s and Nike, and to get our values from M*A*S*H. We’d begun secretly to wish for money.

I’d grown up bookish. I’d read European and American literature and philosophy. I didn’t understand the value of money. But still, I’d felt that the Far West had come a bit closer to me. Perhaps it was just the fact that there was something new and exciting in the air.

The fear of liberalization is now gone from the small talk of the café pundits. The so-called “Indian” mind seems to have calmly divorced the economic from the cultural with a surgical precision.

For my provincial rickshaw puller, the lack of adequate subway lines has meant new business. It has not led him to think of love marriage. For the capitalists, it has meant better clothing and snazzier restaurants. It has not stopped them from railing against premarital sex, or buying indigenous khadi products. For the Leftist, it has meant a daze of confusion. It has not meant a student revolution.

This time I, too, buried this fear. It’s time to reimagine the world order in any case. The old problems are disappearing quickly. And besides, they’re beginning to understand in the Far East that the West is just too damned far away for genuine envy. You can only truly envy your immediate geographical neighbours.

***

I cannot relate to the younger versions of myself anymore.

I’d lost touch with my Delhi friends. They came in two kinds: conformist and non-conformist. The former are making pots of money in the Corporate sector, while the latter are writing, or editing, or doing social work. I belong to the non-conformists because I teach philosophy at a small liberal arts college in America.

I met some of my ilk this time, and realized that I still felt a lot of affection for them.

One of my friends makes a living doing theatre with abused children. He is learning to paint, reading Jung and anthroposophy, and nursing a recently broken heart.

In the old days, we used to go together into poor Muslim neighbourhoods in order to eat kebabs. We would be surrounded by raggedy day- labourers and other proletariat, who laughed at us for wanting to slum it out by eating with them.

The other, PK, came to my wedding wearing a hat, because he’d been hit in the head by a mugger. We went binge drinking on an empty stomach when I visited him at Oxford at the turn of the century, with the result that I ended up puking on the Oxford graves in the middle of the night.

PK is a freelance columnist. His short story collection fetched some very good reviews. He shares a large apartment with two girls and a salsa studio. Once upon a time he had a ponytail and smoked pot. He is now balding and slightly potbellied; but he still smokes pot, and claims to do it with a good conscience.

When we met, we drank Kingfisher beer straight from the can. I remarked on the time when you could not get Indian beer in cans. We talked shop and gossiped. He complained that there is no real intellectual life in Delhi these days. I think we’ve both lost a lot of optimism. We’ve begun to see the more difficult side of things. I wonder if we’re the worse for it.

Later, we went to a party in Khidki. It reminded me of PK’s farewell party a decade ago. But no one in this new crowd seemed like a younger version of me. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

They’d put two medium rubber tubs filled with water beside each other on the unlit roof of their apartment complex, and were calling it a “pool party.” I remember hoping that they’d meant “pool party” ironically. I’d fall in love with them if they did. It was a large roof, and high enough to display the fact that Delhi is beginning to get a skyline.

At PK’s farewell party, I’d got into an argument as usual. I’d talked, and drunk, and puked. But I’d kept my head clear for the dialectics.

This party was nothing like that one. There were journalists and students, but there were no ideas. The most sober-looking folk seemed lulled by the prospect of Provolone and Miller Lite.

Some people were talking shop. Some were trying to make deals. Some horsed around with their girlfriends. I saw a girl apply cream on her friends’ lovely legs. I saw another giving expert massages. They sighed, and gurgled, and joked, and sang. They did not talk ideas.

And maybe that’s a good thing. For them, life isn’t elsewhere. It’s right here and now. It’s no longer shameful to have money; to relax on an unlit roof does not require any justification. Life had always been elsewhere when we were young. We were either mimicking the Left or the Right, or invoking Gandhi out of emotional necessity.

I think that you acquire a certain humility and self-assurance if you’re really involved in doing something. I don’t think we had these qualities when we were young. We were always pretending to be more than we were. We had egos because we knew we could not back up the big talk. Maybe these new kids on the block are humble and self-assured and effective. They didn’t seem to feel the need to show off. They just seemed alert, and eager to learn.

I was introduced to some members of an alternative rock group at the party. I liked their music when I heard it on the internet afterwards. They weren’t behaving like rock stars at the party, but like craftsmen taking a break. I liked that too.

Perhaps being a citizen of India is now a quality in itself for these kids. I didn’t quite see it in that way when I was younger. I saw myself as an awkward provincial in a westernised culture my ancestors had no hand in making.

Perhaps the circumstances can help explain this difference. When I was in my early twenties, I got my world news from the state-owned television. When they are young, the world is literally at their fingertips. When I was young, I wanted to be a non-resident American. When they are young, they have the option of being naturalized Indians.

But, then again, not everything has changed in my hometown. The fact that I’m getting a divorce seemed a little disconcerting for some people at the party, and they weren’t too subtle about it.

One of the girls offered me a joint. When I refused, PK said that I’d left off smoking it a long time ago. “You’ve divorced it, huh?” said the girl rather cattily. It was an insignificant episode, but it felt like déjà vu. It showed me that toeing the majority line was still alive and kicking among the most progressive of this land.

After the party, PK told me that these kids had learnt to sleep around, but wouldn’t dream of getting divorced. He seemed a little embarrassed about it. But it made perfect sense to me.

I’ve always known that for the Indian, as for the Chinese who said it, the proverb “May you live in interesting times” is a curse, and not a blessing.

As long as I have known it, the token version of the abstract middle class type has regarded the outsider and the radical as an idiot. Experiment is for fools, idealism for Lotus-eaters. If you don’t mimic the others in your piece of the world, you’re just bad or, worse, a loser.

At least one divorce-fearing kid at the party is not a loser in this sense. As a good Indian daughter to her parents, she understands the stages of life. There is a time to sleep around. There is a time to get married. There is a time not to get divorced. There is a time to bully your children the way your parents bullied you. And there is a time to die in your sleep.

I think I was lucky that I grew up with the right sort of books, and I had the marginal folk as my teachers. I was taught that nothing human is despicable, that plurality is the essence of existence, and that empathy and compassion are non-negotiable goods. That a good life is an interesting life, and that an unexamined life is not worth living. That trying out things is a good in itself, that failure is not shameful, and that success is merely incidental if you love what you do.

But who knows if I’d have believed all these things if I were growing up in Delhi now.

***

I felt the topography of Delhi change for me this time.

The cluster of routes, neighbourhoods, corner shops, and restaurants that were once related to me by marriage are already beginning to seem alien to me in the most radical way.

Some certainties remain, but they too are threatening to pass away. I did the usual rounds with my parents this time. We visited restaurants and bakeries I used to visit as a child. We shopped in Connaught Place. We went for movies and concerts.

My parents have begun to talk about the time when they’re gone. My mother has stopped talking about the extended family. I wonder if that’s because it is disintegrating, or if I’ve just ceased to be part of it. I met some of my immediate family this time. I think about whether I’d ever see them again if my parents were no longer there.

The topography of Delhi would really change for me then. It would be as if I’d never lived there in my life.

***

Whenever I think of PK mimicking Baba Ramdev’s nasal voice and preening manner of speaking at the party in Khidki, I can’t help but crack up.

My father rued the passing away of the old days this time — the generation of Nehru jackets, and Harris Tweed coats, and black-and-white movies. He thinks of it as his time; and he believes that it was a simpler and a better time than now.

His sympathy for the Right is just a symptom of his deep dissatisfaction with the present. He has been brutalized by the changes he has witnessed: The breakdown of joint families; miniskirts; homosexuals; cosmopolitanism; and the dilution of traditional manners, and customs, and rituals. In some way he has not survived them.
Maybe I’m loyal to my own generation like my father. I felt this acutely when my parents and I stumbled upon a music concert. I saw a potbellied middle-aged man called Raghu Dixit playing Indian folk rock in a mundu. He was surrounded by a thousand people of all ages. There were screams of ecstasy, but no jostling or rowdiness; and there was no room for cynicism.

My mother sat in a corner while my father dove into the crowd. I followed him. A college student offered my father his seat on a ledge. He sat down, and listened to the music. I could see that he was feeling calm and happy.

I felt overjoyed. It was mainly the over-reaction of an absentee. But the music reminded me of the music of Indian Ocean. It was Hindi folk rock. They were doing to Indian folk rhythms what Bob Dylan did to American folk songs. They were playing the guitar as if it were an Indian instrument. The point was not to suit Indian folk songs to the guitar, but to suit the guitar to the Indian folk songs.

I recalled the Indian Ocean concert at the Max Mueller Bhavan in the late 90s. I was twenty three years old. I felt that I could claim their music as my own. It was rock and it wasn’t. It was Indian and it wasn’t. And it was played by musicians who had day jobs, and who spoke English like I did. It was delightful.

The Raghu Dixit concert delighted me in the same way this time. I felt like singing along with the others, except that now I did not know the songs.

Later, I bought two Indian Ocean albums that had appeared during my absence. I’ve been listening to them incessantly since I’ve returned to Atlanta. This music belongs to my past. The fact that it still exists seems to alleviate my anxiety about a future in which my past in Delhi will no longer exist.

I learnt how to cook from my parents this time. I absorbed the tacit knowledge my mother has gathered through the years. I wore an apron, and cooked under their supervision. I think I was trying to gather my bits of tradition, and a few more remembrances of my parents.

We can only return to the familiar. But the familiar does not remain static, and some changes change the familiar more than other changes.

In the future, when my parents are no longer there, I can return to Indian Ocean albums that are yet to come. I can keep up with the cricket commentary, and read Indian newspapers on the internet. I can watch Hindi films via Netflix. I can read Indian philosophy in my spare time. I can keep in touch with my old Delhi friends via email. I can also fly back sometimes to the particular quality of the seasons in Delhi.

I can spend my days running from abstraction to abstraction: from my bit of Delhi to Delhi as a city to India as country. I can reify my past in Delhi. I can celebrate it as good. I can also denigrate, and choose to forget it. I can return every year, or merely once in a while. I have a whole array of choices. I can do what I want with my past.

But I haven’t decided what I want to do with it yet. The uncertainty is unnerving me a bit, but, this time, I don’t want to work myself up into a panic. I don’t want to rush into any decisions out of fear. I want to learn the value of leaving as they are things which are not in my control.

At this moment, it feels like I want to be able to return to whatever awaits me in my hometown in the future. I don’t want to be afraid to change so drastically that no one recognizes me there, simply because I can’t be afraid of doing what I want to do with my life. I want to remember that my home is where I am. I’ve learnt this the hard way, and I want to be grown up about it.

Apaar Kumar is Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Oxford College of Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA