Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

  The last remove of DIY whiteface is what Western corporate jargon infamously terms “opening the kimono.” When you open the kimono you reveal a secret in order to gain the trust of the other party. It is a high art and should not be attempted by the novice. This was the postscript to my field guide to Going Native. You open the kimono in whiteface performance by subtly revealing something exotic about yourself. A bit of non-whiteness peeks out like the beautiful silk lining of a bespoke suit, and your heretofore hidden past becomes a commodity that can be traded to climb the social ladder. To this end, I started serving dal in teacups as a first course during dinner parties; I cut long scarves out of Ma’s old silk saris and twisted the soft textile around my neck; I framed a poster of an old Bollywood film and hung it up in a room carefully decorated with midcentury modern furniture; I left a book on Indian art published by a famous American museum on my coffee table when visitors stopped by. Everything was meant to look effortless. Everything was controlled and measured so as to offer only the subtlest heat of Indian spice. I wanted to appear worldly and sophisticated without teetering into Fresh Off the Boat territory. It was as delicate an act as putting on eyeliner before a party. Too much looks down-market and too little makes no impact at all. Revealing a bit of strategic brownness during whiteface performance is no different.

  In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson wrote that each black man possesses “in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality . . . even ignorant colored men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain this dualism in the presence of white men.” When I first read of this dualism, I imagined it to be a type of split personality. I thought that black men revealed their authentic selves to other black men, while presenting a false face with broad grins to white men. As I reread that passage over the years I saw that Johnson was pointing to a far more complex sort of dualism. For some, the dualism could be a prison house of doubleness, an inner sundering of an original whole. For others, the dualism could be the opposite of a prison house. It could be the escape tunnel that allowed one to go native and play the native at the same time.

  I opened the kimono. I wore a sari. To my dismay, those nine beautiful yards of handloom cotton that Ma once wore every day in Calcutta suddenly felt like a Halloween costume on my body. I had commodified my own past and offered it up for the delectation of others. I was an Ex-Indian Woman who had accidentally gone native in the old colonial style. I was reclining on daybeds, sitting cross-legged on the floor, lining my eyes with kohl, and smoking hookahs. I was a brown woman mimicking a white man pretending to be a brown man.

  Chapter Four

  Heart of Not Whiteness

  As a new immigrant I nursed high ambitions. Fresh off the boat, FOB, I refused to be. American-born confused Desi, ABCD, I could never be because I was not American born. I squirmed at the mediocrity associated with those we Indians derisively called “coconuts”—brown on the outside, white on the inside—with suburban split-level homes, two-car garages, finished basements with wet bars, Indian channels on cable, and Americanized names in the office. I desired the life of upper-class whites, the kind who had summer homes in Nantucket and their great-grandmother’s Spode china in the pantry. I wanted to be the sort of woman who frowned upon tourists and called herself a traveler. The kind of person who collected textiles, ornaments, spices, and decorative objects from travels to dustier, hotter, and poorer places in the world. I admired the confidence with which such people mispronounced foreign words and proudly displayed their cosmopolitan credentials by watching art-house foreign films.

  My dream of living the life of an affluent white American was not a consequence of forgetting India. Until I graduated from college, I spent a couple of months in India nearly every other year. They were hot summer months that melted into the torrential monsoon season. I spent many nights sleeping with the entire family on my uncle’s Delhi rooftop. I snuck away with my Lucknow cousins to eat chaat in Hazratganj and kulfi in Aminabad. I watched the rain clouds darken the skies of Goa. I whispered and giggled late into the night with my cousin in Santiniketan. My uncle and I traveled by train from Delhi to Bombay, feverishly repeating old stories of boring weddings and lively funerals, reliving the thrill of domestic scandals that tighten the bonds of large families with each retelling. One grandmother massaged Pond’s cold cream on my face each night when I visited her in Allahabad. Another grandmother complained that all her servants were thieves. India was changing rapidly during those first two decades of economic liberalization. Cars, color televisions, VCRs, telephones, fast-food shops, discotheques, and malls were becoming more common in the big cities. Moviegoers swooned over new heartthrobs. I watched Mr. India and Maine Pyar Kiya multiple times in the cinema halls. I purchased large piles of Filmfare and Stardust magazines each time I returned to India in order to stay abreast of the latest gossip about Salman Khan. I wished I could dance like Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. I longed for Dimple Kapadia’s lustrous mane. I dreamed of Shahrukh Khan waiting for me on the Swiss Alps, a sweater draped on his shoulders, his mullet blowing in the breeze, his arms wide open. And then, as soon as my plane touched down at Logan Airport, I stowed away that part of me—the rooftop-sleeping, chaat-eating, Salman-fangirl part—in the back room of my mind.

  In Boston, I left my Bengali locked up at home, spoke Hindi only in private with a few select friends, and was careful never to mispronounce English words. If I wore a sari to attend a Durga puja celebration in the basement of a suburban church with my mother, I made sure none of my American friends saw me. I avoided watching movies about India, such as Salaam Bombay!, Slumdog Millionaire, or The Lunchbox, with white Americans. The sincere conversations over a cappuccino or a glass of wine that inevitably followed such movies were dreadful for me. I was expected to discuss human rights, the poverty of slums, the plight of untouchables, child marriage, and widow burning. I had to play the native informant, as well as the assimilated immigrant. My presence completed the cosmopolitan experience for my white friends and reassured them of their own open-mindedness, generosity of spirit, liberal politics, and cultural superiority. And my cheeks hurt from smiling through it all.

  In college, I would sooner watch the newest summer blockbuster with my white friends than go for a marathon screening of Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak films. I would sooner discuss Nella Larsen’s Passing than Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora. I would sooner write an essay on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca than Ram’s return to Ayodhya. I lived in multiple worlds. I did not want my Indian world to touch my American one.

  Predictably, I was also drawn to those very places where my two lives collided. As an undergraduate, I enrolled in classes that focused on the Indian subcontinent. I gingerly ventured into the South Asian students’ association on campus, knowing that I would never be fully at home with second- or third-generation diaspora kids or be able to share the views of international students who had recently arrived on campus. I participated in our college’s annual South Asian variety program. In fact, back in 1989, I was one of the founding members of the show. During its first few years it was very much a small affair—attended only by desi students and their parents. Twenty-five years ago, bhangra, garba, and Bollywood dance were fairly marginal on American campuses. Few white students were interested in watching those shows, let alone gyrating along with us.

  We were a few years behind our British counterparts in bringing desi rhythms and style to mainstream American pop culture and to the dance music scene. By the nineties, I was listening to British musicians, such as Talvin Singh, who were crafting the Asian Underground sound across the Atlantic. “Flight IC408” and “Chittagong Chill” by State of Bengal and Apache Indian’s “Chok There” promised something cooler, more confident, more political, and more fun than anything an American life in whiteface had to offer. A quarter of a decade ago, if you were a young college student looking for this sort of music, you had to venture to the Asian c
lubs and South Asian student parties on American campuses. Those were the places where you might hear bhangra crossed with reggae, Baul melodies mixed with electronic music, or Indian classical instruments incorporated into drum and bass tracks. To not be part of the mainstream dance music scene was fine by me.

  By the time I was a senior in college, our little student variety program had grown to attract bigger crowds. We performed in a real auditorium and the people who came to watch us were not all desi. The growing popularity of our show gave rise to mixed emotions. It felt good to receive a small amount of mainstream attention. Yet, a part of me also felt uncomfortable with our growing audience. It was one thing to perform a so-called classical dance in front of white students. I danced kathak and some of my classmates performed bharatanatyam pieces. Even if the people in the audience did not quite understand the stories enclosed within each gesture or glance, or the distinct mood of each piece, the dances were perceived to be dignified. The presence of a tabla or a sitar onstage lent a touch of respectability to the entire performance. It was something else entirely to wear sparkly synthetic saris, with stacks of glass bangles on each wrist, and throw myself into the delirious beats of a garba or to gyrate and whoop to loud bhangra beats. This was the popular culture of the place I had left behind. It was about having fun, and not about showing white America that we were the proud heirs of an ancient civilization. Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha flirted to the tune of rang barse. Sridevi sang naughtily about the nau nau churiyan on her wrists. Madhuri provocatively asked us to guess what was hidden behind her choli. This wasn’t the India of art-house films, or the India admired by the brown-haired man who learned how to make paneer, or the India of the Student who wrote about potters in villages and wore high-water saris. It was not the India of Attenborough’s Gandhi. This was the India I relished; the movies I liked to watch at home with my parents when we missed our old neighborhood; the songs I enjoyed in private; the dance moves, the jhatkas and thumkas, I tried out in front of the bathroom mirror when no one was watching. I was not ready to share this India with America.

  My carefully partitioned worlds brushed even closer together when I took a job as a freelance interpreter. Throughout my undergraduate years, I always held down a variety of work-study jobs on campus. Occasionally, I needed to look outside the college for opportunities to make a little extra income so I could pay for textbooks, late-night snacks, and discounted clothes from Filene’s Basement. One day I saw a flyer advertising a job for freelance translators and interpreters. One of the languages the flyer listed was Bengali. I’d never imagined my mother tongue could lead me to a job in Boston. A few weeks after I sent in my resume, I learned that I was selected for the position.

  Almost all of my freelance assignments involved deportation cases. My experience as an interpreter could be summarized as this: I stood in Boston courts and told Bangladeshi immigrants that they were to be deported. The court officials instructed me to repeat what was being said by each party during the proceedings and not add any of my own opinions. I was not to engage in side discussions with the defendants. I listened to what the lawyers and judges said in English and repeated it to the Bangladeshi men as accurately and concisely as I could. The men usually spoke to me in rural dialects of Bengali. Our shared mother tongue made the disparity of our circumstances amply clear.

  I was a Hindu Bengali from Calcutta who spoke with the accent of an upper-middle-class educated woman. I spoke what was “standard Bengali” in Calcutta—the way radio broadcasters who read the Bengali news during the 1970s spoke. In the courtroom, I was dressed in American clothes, speaking American English that had been further honed at an Ivy League campus. I was light skinned enough to be mistaken for white. The defendants were Muslim Bangladeshis, often from the rural areas of their country. They spoke Bengali with a “regional” accent—the way someone from a village with little access to formal education in any language speaks. They were sometimes dressed in orange. They were invariably much darker in color than me. No one would mistake them for white in America. If I was the model minority, the young immigrant who had made it, they were the unwanted minority, the immigrants who caused trouble. They were the problem—the reason why immigration is bad for America. I was the solution—the reason why immigration is good for America.

  Did we follow the court’s instructions? Not always. The men who were unable to speak English often slipped in some questions for my ears only. What are they saying, sister? What is going on? Is there any way you can help me? What should I say? Please tell me what to say and I will say it, sister. My answers were brief, spoken almost coldly. I had to slip them in while I was relaying the official utterances of the judges and lawyers. If I spoke for too long, or if I showed any emotions, then the court would know I was not following the rules. Don’t ask me these questions, brother. I am not supposed to speak to you directly. I don’t know how to help you. I am sorry. I am sorry. Please ask your lawyer to help you. I cannot answer your questions. I am sorry, brother.

  I recall a particular deportation case especially well. When the judge finally handed down the verdict, I had to tell two men—men who spoke the same language I spoke, who came from the same part of the world where my grandparents had been born, who knew how to eat fish curry and rice with their fingers as I did, how ripe jackfruits smell in the hottest months of summer and how green guavas taste with a little sprinkling of black salt, how day can turn into night within minutes when a kal boishakhi storm descends upon Bengal—they were to be deported. The truth is I do not know the exact Bengali equivalent for “deportation.” I had no call to learn that word in Calcutta. I turned to the defendants and spoke in the politest Bengali I could muster, as if we were conversing about poetry over a cup of Darjeeling tea: Brothers, these gentlemen are requesting you to please take your leave from here. Their expressions clearly betrayed a rudimentary grasp of English. They had guessed the verdict even before I started addressing them in Bengali. Yet, I felt the need to use our mother tongue with great care and eloquence. The English of the courtroom was bureaucratic, lacking in beauty and heart. Their English told the truth. But my Bengali told it slant. A few weeks later, I received a small check in the mail as payment for my work. I never took a freelance job with that company again. It was time for me to find other ways of augmenting my student income.

  Bangladeshi migrants are a common sight in the gated communities that have sprung up in Delhi suburbs such as Gurgaon and Noida. Many of these migrants work as maids in the homes of middle-class Indians, including Bengalis. Some of these Bangladeshis are Hindus. Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation, continues to be home to a sizable Hindu-minority population. Nonetheless, the Hindu Bengalis of India still see these migrants, who speak their language and worship their gods, as inferior. They are illegal immigrants. They do not have the same rights as Indian citizens. They are poor. They are the underclass. They live in slums. They exist to keep the floors of high-rise apartments sparkling and wash the newly affluent class’s dirty dishes. Muslim Bangladeshis are treated with even greater suspicion. They are the familiar stranger in the same way that Mexicans are familiar strangers in the United States. They speak with an inferior “regional” accent. They belong to the minority religious community of India. In the eyes of some Hindu Bengalis, their religion trumps their ethnolinguistic identity. Is she Bengali or is she Muslim? That is the unspoken question hovering in the air. I have heard this question—whispered and shouted out loud—since I was a child living on Dover Lane. Is she Bengali or is she Muslim? Is he Bengali or is he Muslim? The answer is predestined. They have to be one or the other. They cannot be both. Versions of this very question can be heard all over Europe and America today.

  They have to be one or the other. They cannot be both. In that courtroom, I was both. The men whose Bengali I Englished were both. I was American and Bengali. They were Bangladeshi and Bengali. I was Hindu and Bengali. They were Muslim and Bengali. I was a Resident Alien and Ben
gali. They were undocumented and Bengali. I had skin light enough to pass and was Bengali. They had skin so dark that they could never pass and were Bengali. The court saw me as a solution to their linguistic problems. The court saw them as the ones who caused a problem. I received payment in U.S. dollars for the part I played in court. They were deported out of the country.

  When I was a little girl in Calcutta, I had learned to unsee the children who lived behind the garbage dump, the children of the basti. Yet, one afternoon, as I lay on the bed pretending to read a book, I had exchanged glances with a boy not much older than me who was squatting on the floor and sweeping it. I knew the space between us was slim enough for me to end up on the floor beside him, sweeping someone else’s terrazzo floor. Mine was not a Hollywood fantasy in which a rich man imagines himself swapping places with the poor man as a lark. My terror was darker. I saw us all sliding into the slum hidden behind the rubbish heap.

  When I told the men that they had been deported, adjusting my Bengali as best as I could to blunt the sharp edges of the verdict, I looked straight into their eyes across the nondescript courtroom. We needed no language—Bengali or English—to understand that I had been dealt a luckier hand than them that afternoon. Afterward, I rushed out of the building. I could still recall with perfect clarity the morning when I had stood outside the entrance of the U.S. consulate in Calcutta. Only a decade before, I’d had no papers to prove that I was a legal immigrant, the lucky possessor of a green card. If Baba, Ma, and I had not given satisfactory answers (in English) to the man interviewing us, we would have no visas and I would not be standing in a courtroom in America, acting as the official interpreter, relaying a judge’s verdict to another Bengali. The space between me and the two defendants was frighteningly narrow.