Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from Indira Ganesan’s essay "Resisting My Family History," which appeared in Glamour magazine (©1994 by The Condé Nast Publications Inc.).

In June 1978, in suburban Nanuet, New York, home to a famous mall, I wore a sari [a garment worn by Indian and Pakistani women] to my high school graduation. The next day it was raining, and my family and I set off for India. Watch out for the cows, wrote my favorite English teacher, tongue-in-cheek, in my yearbook. I’d keep a wary eye out, I thought, packing a dozen cassettes on which I’d recorded my favorite music. My friends stood in the rain with a banner proclaiming Goodbye, Indira! I was a heroine, a star for the moment. I was leaving the country.

Though I’d been born there, I didn’t want to go to India. What I wanted was to knock on a Broadway producer’s door and say, "I’m brown, I’m talented, let me write you a play." My parents, however, believed I needed to embrace my Indian past. I wanted only to escape it, as I wanted to escape anything that spoke to me of tradition or old-fashioned ideas. I was too cool for India.

I remember the heat in Bombay’s airport, so thick it was sliceable; the crush of people who wanted to help after our car developed engine trouble on our way home; the glare of the outdoors; the cool dark of the interiors. My uncle’s family welcomed my mother and me into their home in Madras, a city on the southeastern part of the subcontinent, famed for its music festivals and its beach. In Madras I enrolled in a Catholic women’s college. Nuns were the teachers, the English language was the norm.

In high school I had edited an underground newspaper, bought my first copy of The Village Voice, readThe New York Times regularly. I believed I was a feminist. In India I was unsure of my role. Above all, I was deeply worried that I’d be married off, that I’d be forced to become a housewife, horror of horrors, and would lose my freedom.

What I discovered in India: people who looked like me. Girls who befriended me instantly. Girls who told me the truth at once. I was an American, and how everyone knew that—for they all did—escaped me. Wasn’t I as brown as they? Or was I giving off an American aura, wearing Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt, speaking hesitant Tamil?

I attended a wedding. I watched some of the funeral preparations following the death of my great uncle. I climbed 500 steps to reach a Jain temple where a priest gave me a blessing that translated roughly as "You will have seven years of good luck followed by seven years more of the same." During a ten-day tour of famous temples, I saw a snake charmer in a parking lot and visited an entire city of priests and ascetics. They let us into a temple’s sanctum sanctorum, where we saw the God image in all its splendor.

In India I had the unswerving consideration of my relatives, 25 of whom I met in my first six months. I remember our meals together, and the preparations: the pile of freshly shredded coconut—white, flaky, fragrant with milk; the way sweet dough for jellabies would be dropped in hot oil and bob up to perfection. In America I picked at pizza and baked ziti on the school lunch menu; in India I feasted. There were scores of delicious meals, piles of snacks in tins, water always available in an earthen vessel in the kitchen.

And still I felt I was missing out on a superlative year in America, and I was determined to dislike India. I dragged my aunt to see a Woody Allen movie and felt it superior to Indian films, even though they managed to reduce me to tears.

In all of this, I, the yanqui, was a source of amusement to the family. They bent over backward to please me that year, and I finally admitted to enjoying myself. I can still recall the din of the streets as I rushed to college in the mornings—bicycles, rickshaws, buses, pedestrians, bikes and yes, even a bull here and there.

Now a teacher myself in San Diego, I have just come back from giving a class on "the travel essay." One of my students suggested that the writer we were studying had formed her opinion of the country she was visiting before traveling there. In a sense, I thought, that is what I did with my year in India. I knew before going that I would like the temples and the food and the embrace of my relatives; I just didn’t think it was a place for me, a newly graduated high school senior who dreamed of travel. How wrong I was. It was my year abroad, a high-seas adventure from which I would draw for years to come. In India I took my dreams of becoming a someone and began to be a someone. A someone connected to a history, to a family, to a distinct geography. A someone who had traveled after all.