Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

  The red foods were pizzas and pastas. These were easier on my palate, but it still took me the greater part of two years to appreciate oregano. I might have been an aficionado of the masala dabba, the Indian spice box, but I was scared of new spices from other lands. The white foods were easiest to like. Mac and cheese, Ma’s casseroles doused in Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup, grilled cheese sandwiches—it required relatively little effort to develop a taste for such food.

  Most of what Ma cooked included processed food. Bits and pieces from cans, boxes, and packets. These packages were beautiful. In Calcutta, our kitchen larder rarely had so many brightly labeled cans and boxes. Processed foods would invade Indian homes from the 1990s onward, after liberalization of the economy enabled foreign brands to penetrate the Indian market. There are two American dishes that Ma made from scratch during our first years that stand out in our family’s collective memory. The Architect’s wife taught Ma how to bake macaroni and cheese using freshly grated white cheddar, cream, and lots of butter. The cheesy elbow macaroni, topped with golden bread crumbs, was easily one of our new family favorites. The other dish was saved for weekends and special occasions. Ma had become friends with an older black woman in her office. Enid used to bring a date nut bread, her signature dessert, to office potlucks and one day she wrote down the recipe for Ma. I will always remember Enid’s date nut bread as the first American dessert we learned to bake from scratch.

  Enid told Ma that the bread had to be baked in an old coffee can. I marveled at her ingenuity because when the dark brown bread slid out of that coffee can it was shaped like a fat cylinder, complete with tiny ridges around the middle. Ma and I followed Enid’s recipe carefully. Dates were chopped precisely. The walnuts were broken into small pieces. We used brown sugar, never white sugar. The Folgers coffee can was greased liberally with butter. After the cake came out, we served it with softened Philadelphia cream cheese. I had tasted nothing like this in Calcutta. We would not have learned the coffee can trick, grasped the importance of brown sugar, or discovered that tangy, salty cream cheese pairs so well with a sweet bread, if it was not for Enid’s generosity. Hers was the first recipe we received in writing when we came to America. Now I realize that it was a bit of American cultural memory, written down and shared with a newcomer.

  Outside the home, I continued eating American with halting fluency. Hamburger meat smelled too beefy to a girl who had eaten well-spiced goat meat most of her life. The skin on fried chicken revolted me because we did not eat poultry with its skin intact in Calcutta. Rare steak was beyond our reach financially, but I could not imagine eating something that still bled. The oregano and basil in pizza sauce were always too strong for me. I could never finish an entire can of soda because I was unaccustomed to such large portions. The Architect attempted to show us how wealthy white people ate, people who had degrees from Harvard, tasteful furniture, walls lined with bookshelves, and jobs that carried prestige. He introduced us to sushi, sashimi, miso soup, goose liver pâté, smoked salmon, blue cheese, Mestemacher rye bread, and granola. He introduced us to farms in Lexington and told us that it was fashionable to buy produce from farms, not from Star Market. He told us not to put too much salt on our food because that betrayed our lack of sophistication. He told us not to overcook the vegetables or the pasta. Sophisticated white Americans ate everything slightly undersalted and undercooked. We gamely tried all these new foods with the Architect. Then, at home, we reverted to ramen, cheap baloney, and Little Debbie.

  The Architect bought me my first candied apple. He took us to Café Pamplona on Bow Street and gave me a taste of cappuccino and a sandwich called the medianoche. He took us to Pinocchio’s on Winthrop Street for our first pizza. He took us to Iruña on JFK Street and introduced us to paella, which reminded me a little bit of Indian biryanis and pulaos. He took us to a place called Genji, where we tasted our first sushi. The Architect tried to teach Ma and Baba the habit of drinking wine every evening. He gave them many lessons on how to drink red and white wines properly. Still, Ma and Baba never managed to become oenophiles and wine never became part of their evening ritual. There were so many rules, so many silent signals implicit in each mouthful. How an immigrant eats and drinks in America, I grasped quickly, was as important as how an immigrant speaks English. I redoubled my efforts to transform my palate as well as my accent.

  By the autumn of 1983, I did successfully change my accent. Or so I believed. I cut the neckbands and waistbands off all my sweatshirts and wore them inside out. I pegged my pants. At the end of eighth grade, I was named the class valedictorian. My homeroom voted me the “most attractive” girl and the “most likely to succeed” in our yearbook. I was never invited to a dance in the school gym. The popular white girls did not include me in their slumber parties. The popular black girls never invited me to hang out after school. I stopped missing my old friends from Calcutta and formed a tight friendship with my Italian and Chinese friends.

  I grew to enjoy the casseroles Ma was making, still guided by recipes from the backs of cans and boxes but with her own brave improvisations thrown in occasionally. When my friends asked me what Baba did for a living, I told little white lies or deftly changed the subject because I was embarrassed to say he was a salesman in a clothing store. Baba was clearly ashamed of his job and his shame infected me. To work in a clothing store, a place where a darzi might work, was considered beneath the social class to which we once belonged in India. Ma’s job as a library assistant had a bit more genteel respectability. We had come from the Third to the First World, but our continued downward mobility of social class was not lost on any of us.

  Nonetheless, there was one thing I refused to do despite all my early attempts at assimilation—I would not change my name. Many people asked me if I had a nickname, a shorter version of my given name. I did have another name. I still do. In fact, my natal family uses only that name and it is a very European-sounding name. Life in America might have been much easier for me in school, at university, and in the office if I had just told people my other name. I grow tired of having to spell my name out, letter by letter, while referring to other Western names. S as in Sam. H as in Harry. A as in Adam. R as in Robert. M as in Michael. I as in Isaac. L as in Larry. A as in Adam.

  Sharmila is my legal name, the name meant for the outside world, while the other name, my dak nam, is for the home, for my natal family. Not even my in-laws or my husband calls me by my dak nam. I might give the barista a fake Christian name because I just want to know when my coffee is ready without adding more drama to the interaction. I might occasionally tell the pizza delivery guy my name is something else. Those are anonymous commercial transactions with someone I will likely never see again. Sharmila is my name for all other social encounters. I would give up cumin and coriander, my mother tongue, my old city, my old friends, those cows sleeping outside our door, Darwanji’s spicy okra, Jamuna’s tiger stories, the paper boats we floated on rainwater that collected in streams during the monsoon, the festivals that marked the seasons, green mangoes dipped in black salt, the joyful sound of ululation at a Bengali wedding, the feel of my grandmother’s red-bordered white cotton sari, the happy sensation of bumping along sleepily on a three-tier Indian Railways train en route to see my grandparents, and even—one day in the future—my Indian citizenship. But my first name I would not give up no matter how many people in America complained it was too difficult to pronounce, too hard to spell.

  Chapter Three

  The Autobiography of an Ex-Indian Woman

  Going Native. Turning Turk. This is how we used to describe the actions of white people who wanted to look and act like people of darker complexions in exotic climes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Going Native meant shedding European trousers and putting on a billowy shalwar or setting aside a top hat for a voluminous turban. Imagine British travelers such as Wilfred Thesiger, an Englishman who traversed the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert in t
he 1940s, accompanied by local tribes. Look at images of the Victorian adventurer Richard Burton, who supposedly went to Mecca disguised as a Muslim. Consider the sculpture of Edward Lane, a nineteenth-century English translator of the Arabian Nights, placed in a prominent corner of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Wearing a turban and a loose robe, Lane sits cross-legged on a low platform—an archetypal image of the Oriental scholar lost in deep thought. A famous photo of T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, shows him dressed in Arab clothing with a curved dagger hanging pertly against his waist. That is what Going Native looks like. Going Native means reclining on daybeds, sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing turbans and kaftans, lining the eyes with kohl, smoking hookahs, eating spicy food, sharing bed and table with non-white women, exploring mosques and temples.

  White Christians who converted to Islam in centuries past were said to have turned Turk. Turning Turk posed more of a threat to European identity, as it implied a change in creed. Turning Turk meant leaving Christendom forever and pledging fealty to a rival faith and a false prophet. Going Native, in contrast, could be a less permanent state of being. Thesiger left his tribal garb behind when he completed his travels in the Arabian Desert and returned to England. William Lane might sit permanently in a corner of London, frozen in his Egyptian robes, but in reality he too returned to English life and English clothes. White men who went native were almost always able to return to their white identity. Going Native is a type of drag. The pleasure of seeing a white man dressed as an Arab or an Indian springs from our awareness of his whiteness underneath the brownface, just as we can imagine male genitalia beneath female dress when we relish the performance of a drag queen. White Europeans who went native did not try to hide their whiteness completely. They flaunted their camouflage. They stood out precisely because they took such great pride in blending in. When I see these men in paintings, photographs, and lithographs today, I imagine them whispering, Look at me. See my whiteness beneath these native clothes. See how good I am at being able to emulate the natives. See how my superior racial characteristics can never quite be muted by my exotic disguise. When an Englishman went native in India in the eighteenth century he was disguising himself as someone who was not white. The power that Englishman derived from the disguise lay in the fact that he was not quite not white.

  As Europeans began to have ambitions to grow their empires across the seas, the idea of Going Native and Turning Turk slowly appeared on the horizon. It was a scary threat and a delicious opportunity. It was also a liberating idea. What if instead of converting pagans, missionaries began to worship multilimbed gods? What if instead of civilizing people with darker complexions and flatter noses, Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz became a savage himself?

  In many cases, Going Native was a tactic for surviving in the competitive marketplace of colonial expansion. It was largely a male activity, though occasionally a white Christian woman might choose to wear exotic garb and enter a harem in order to uncover the secrets of the Orient. In India, during the British era, white men who went native often moved into the native section of town and lived with Indian wives and mistresses. These men wore Indian clothes, lived in homes with Indian-style decoration, ate Indian food using their fingers instead of silverware. They fathered mixed-race children. (My primary school teacher, Miss Solomon, was a descendant of their progeny.) Some of them began to worship new gods. They learned the local languages and sometimes spoke these languages with native fluency. Some even began to forget their English. To be more precise, their English became so peppered with the local argot that the language itself was in danger of becoming something else—not quite English.

  In 1755, Samuel Johnson produced one of the most important modern dictionaries of the English language. The preface to the dictionary puts forth an intriguing argument for why the language was in need of standardization and codification. Proper English was in danger of Going Native in the distant corners of the British Empire as it mixed promiscuously in warehouses and ports with foreign tongues. “Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative,” wrote Johnson, “as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavor to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect, like the jargon which serves the traffickers on the Mediterranean and Indian coasts.” Dr. Johnson’s dictionary was intended to ensure that the English language remained invulnerable to conquests and wanton migrations and did not assume too exotic a façade. Englishmen in the eastern colonies, meanwhile, draped yards of paisley shawls around their bodies.

  Europeans who went native in India often lived two parallel lives. They had a brown family in the native section of town and a white family in the European section of town. They moved freely between the two. Their dual lives were an open secret and even considered an asset in their professional lives. Being able to go native—and then being able to return to the white world unchanged—could come in handy when there were vast native populations to rule. White women who married native men, lived in the native part of town, or gave birth to mixed-race children faced far greater difficulty in returning to the white world. They could not easily step out of a ghagra, tight-lace their corsets, and walk back to the European quarter. Their sexual intimacy with brown men would threaten European society in a wholly different way from the intimate relations between white men and brown women. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Going Native was largely what men did. And what men did was what counted as Going Native.

  Could the native travel in the opposite direction? When you go native, where does the native go? If the British could speak my language, wear my clothes, eat my food, read my books, and occasionally even disguise themselves as me, then what was left for me to do? I do not know how my ancestors responded to the Europeans who went native in eighteenth-century India. But I do know that even now we Indians get a little overexcited when a white foreigner manages to say a few basic sentences in a local language. Their accent may be atrocious to the point of being unintelligible, but we praise them to the skies, pour them an extra cup of sweet chai, and immediately extend an invitation to the next family wedding. Such positive reinforcement is rarely on offer for non-white foreigners. Nigerians who might have picked up a few words of Kannada, or Chinese who can speak Bengali, do not get the sycophantic compliments reserved for whites in India.

  When I was a young girl, an American woman who was working on her doctoral dissertation became acquainted with our family. From time to time, she would visit our Dover Lane flat unexpectedly. The Student used to spend many months in Indian villages and small towns for her fieldwork. When she came to Calcutta, she liked to go shopping, stock up on clothing and other necessities. Ma would take the Student to our favorite shops and help her choose saris she could wear during fieldwork. Ma also took her to our tailor so she could have blouses stitched. The Student was uncomfortable with the thin cotton voiles that were in fashion back then. She did not like the silhouette of her brassiere to be discernible beneath the semitransparent cotton. She also did not like the necks of her blouses to be cut too low, or the fabric to be fitted tightly around her chest. The Student felt shy about baring her midriff when she wore a sari. She tied her sari in a way we city dwellers considered frumpy and rural—trying to hide her midriff by tying her inner petticoat too high, which resulted in exposed ankles.

  Ma was bemused by the Student’s fashion debacles. Yet, we were not dismissive of her. This was a white American woman who cared enough to learn about India, to wear a sari, to eat rice and fish curry with her fingers, to ask us for the Bengali names for things. We felt honored by her interest. Her high-water saris or frumpily cut blouses made of thick cotton were not considered a failure to assimilate, or a sign of her inferiority. Some years later, when we moved to the United States, we learned that the Student, having completed her doctoral degree, was now working at a prestigious East Coast museum. We never met her in America. I wo
nder what it would have been like if we did cross paths. Would the Student patiently take my mother to clothing stores and explain the latest styles? Would she be as forgiving if we made fashion mistakes or if we were unable to speak English clearly?

  What is the opposite of Going Native? In colonial India, it meant becoming a babu. In the nineteenth century, the British referred to Indian men employed as clerks and administrative workers as babus. The label always carried the sour aftertaste of derision. Over the course of time, babu became the name given to any middle-class Indian man with Western pretensions. Babus were reviled by Europeans and Indians alike. They were brown Englishmen. They spoke English in a comical, florid way. They aped English manners and habits. The Indian orthodoxy hated them as race traitors. The English mocked them as wannabes. Being a babu is not really the opposite of Going Native, just as whiteface is never the opposite of blackface.

  The opposite of Lawrence of Arabia is not Sharmila of America. When I decided to go native in America, to blend in with white dominant culture, I was following in the footsteps of a different group of people. Without knowing the word for it, I was passing. I am a seasonal Indian. My complexion is light enough for you to mistake me as Mexican, Greek, Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Spanish, or a Sephardic Jew. On the streets of America, I am often asked, “¿Hablas español?” When my skin darkens in the summer months, you might deduce that I am from the Indian subcontinent. If I wear a sari, line my eyes with kohl, or speak in the accent I once had, then you will see more easily that I am Indian. But I use camouflage frequently to lift the weight of visibility off my shoulders.

  By the time I started high school, everyone had forgotten I was the foreign kid with a funny accent who had recently emigrated from Calcutta. After only two years of living in America, I was prepared to distance myself from my past. As countless American children before me had already discovered, the summer months between the end of middle school and the beginning of high school offered me the opportunity to reinvent myself. I was determined not to be a female version of a comical babu. I would not sound like Ben Kingsley in Gandhi. Nor would I look like those scrawny brown extras—the teeming masses of India waiting for the white man to give them independence.