the post that conceals more than it reveals

Prey and Young man hides from Big Woman, Richard Onyango


I’ve known two people who should not have belonged here, but do. Two whose lives are implicated in this mire of Indians (mallus, punjus, tamils, bengalis, gujus..) with their varied accents and ways of being. Two people who are racially out of the mix entirely. In different and complicated ways both have chosen to belong and un-belong.

One plays up his race, making it an aspect that has to be dealt with again and again, and yet feels, touches, talks like one of us .. and ofcourse thinks like one of us. The other never mentions race, and only does so at the end of a seven year relationship to ask whether it felt strange to be with a Chinese person, a question that finally shatters the sense of normalcy that he had ensured around him. A question that revealed the questions of other newer lovers.

Both know this country and this city, are so rooted in this part of their borrowed world of Indianness. Neither could really handle Delhi though have tried, or probably any other city. One went abroad and navigated England stoutly claiming Indianness not Chineseness.. and avoiding the cringe-worthy category of Indian Chinese food. And the other hasn't set foot yet as an adult into a different world, but something tells me will find out soon enough how different he is from other black people. What marks him, his clothes, his facial expressions, the slight remnants of kajal in his eyes, the way his body would curve into the posture of the south Indian immigrant in London but not that of the black man who belongs there.

In some senses I'm dislocated as well, not racially/culturally as much as these two, but maybe my affinity to them is an indication of a dislocation so huge that I don't acknowledge it myself. I don't really have family. I do, they exist, but technically. we could belong to different planets. My mother said to me, while watching a trailer of - In her shoes (a movie I sincerely don't intend watching, just like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind) that you and your sister are just like that. There's nothing similar about the two of you (the depressing part here is ofcourse that I like Toni Collette far more than I like Cameron Diaz, and considering my family and my sister.. well there is no doubt that I'm Cameron .. none at all..)

We are in some senses an ahistorical family. It is only recently that my brother in law has unearthed photographs of my mother as a young woman, that allow me to see that my sister does look a bit like her. The presence of a proud, lonely grandfather ensured a sense of some kind of history when he was around, but also the extreme humility and almost benign ridiculousness of my father. The man who never liked the taste of alcohol and was often found pouring gin into plants at fancy dinner parties thrown by very rich members of my mother's family.

My father introduced me to the quirky outsider, who survived at the fringes of every party and managed to make fun of everyone just by not participating. But I think he was very embarrassed when I grew up and wanted to be there with him. He wanted to be the only shadowy presence at the margins. Often telling me to get back into the fray.. but somehow I don't think he understood that I thought where he was, was cool and the place to be. That I thought the others were idiots, but mine was an articulated thought about them, and his was an absence. An absence (as I have learnt quite well recently) is not allowed to speak...