by Sejal Shah
This Is One Way to Dance
Valerie Boyd and John Griswold, series editors
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Dinty W. Moore
Lia Purpura
Patricia Smith
Ned Stuckey-French
This Is One Way to Dance
ESSAYS
Sejal Shah
Published by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
© 2020 by Sejal Shah
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shah, Sejal, 1972– author.
Title: This is one way to dance : essays / Sejal Shah.
Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2020. | Series: Crux:
the Georgia series in literary nonfiction | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001681 | ISBN 9780820357232 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780820357249 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Gujarati Americans—Biography. | Children of immigrants—
United States—Biography. | East Indian American women—Biography. |
Racially mixed people—United States—Biography. |
East Indian Americans—Ethnic identity.
Classification: LCC PS3619.H3483 Z46 2020 | DDC 8/8/.603 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001681
Title page image: photo of the author at age four,
with her grandmother, Indumati N. Shah,
who is looking through the glass door.
For R
In memory of
LeeAnne Smith White
and my grandmother,
Indumati Natverlal Shah
Contents
Introduction
Prelude
Skin
Matrimonials: A Triptych
Who’s Indian?
Married
Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib
The World Is Full of Paper. Write to Me.
Kinship, Cousins, & Khichidi
Street Scene
Bird
Walking Tributaries
Castle, Fort, Lookout, House
Curriculum
Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent
Deluxe
Thank You
365 Pelham Road
There Is No Mike Here
Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps
Temporary Talismans
Six Hours from Anywhere You Want to Be
No One Is Ordinary; Everyone Is Ordinary
Ring Theory
Saris and Sorrows
Voice Texting with My Mother
Acknowledgments
Notes
Introduction
There was an intermission; it was that long. I saw Gandhi in the movie theater and still remember my indignation that the director chose a white actor to play the most famous Indian. Later I learned that Ben Kingsley is half-Gujarati; his birth name is Krishna. I was ten, growing up outside Rochester, New York, a part of western New York that’s both racially and socioeconomically hypersegregated. I have always thought about race and representation. I wanted to see something of the life I knew in a book, on a screen. I felt that way in the long-ago movie theater as a child; I felt that way when I was in my twenties and in graduate school. Sometimes I still feel that way. I began writing to make a point of view, people, and entire cultural references I never saw reflected in what I read or watched.
This book is in part about growing up Indian outside of India, in non-Indian places; about the formation of ethnic identity in small cities and towns in the United States, away from urban centers. Kakali Bhattacharya writes, “We [South Asian Americans] are sometimes either invisible or hyper-visible, coopted by ‘model minority’ discourses or caricatured in characters like Apu in The Simpsons. Our invisibility stems from being racialized as non-white and non-Black, so that even in antiracist discourses we disappear because we are neither.” I wanted to explore the feelings of both invisibility (of not even counting in the racial landscape) and hypervisibility (of always being other, a stranger, from somewhere else, the person expected to serve on the institutional diversity committee) for Asian Americans in this country. How do you make yourself visible and legible to yourself in a world that often does not see you or only sees race? How do you take up space? These essays meditate on objects and place. How do you move in a body often viewed as other? How do you claim the I, the person dancing, the person leading the dance?
Since my book spans two decades, and the United States and I have both changed in that time, I’ve noted the year(s) each was written at the end of the essay. In general, I ordered my essays chronologically by the present in each piece, though several move around in time. I wrote the earliest, “Skin,” in 1999. Rereading and rethinking these essays has been a kind of excavation. I lived in picturesque Western Massachusetts then, a beautiful college town, and was frustrated with the lack of any visible South Asian or Asian American culture. I never felt as aware of being Indian and brown as during some of the time I lived in Amherst while in graduate school. During those years, the weddings of the kids of family friends, who were my friends from growing up, gave me a place to be unselfconsciously Indian, to dance, to connect.
These essays wrestle with identity, language, movement, family, place, and race. I am the daughter of Gujarati parents born in India and British East Africa. My life existed both as part of the diasporic culture in which I was raised (home, parents, community) and where I lived and grew up (western New York). I wrote these essays across twenty years, beginning in Massachusetts in the late 1990s and continuing through moves to New York City and Iowa, for fellowships and jobs, back to my hometown of Rochester. These essays address the passing of time, the loss of a dear friend, the childhood pool that no longer exists, my ambivalence about wedding jewelry, the brother-in-law I will never meet. I wrote about my older brother’s wedding and ten years later, watching Monsoon Wedding. I wrote about 9/11. I wrote about what it feels like to lose a language you grew up with and to be able to express this loss only in another language.
I once called this book Things People Say after my essay “Things People Said” because I found myself so often incredulous and then furious over things people had said to me. It took time to unpack and unwind my visceral responses and what those words communicated to me. I could feel the kick underneath, the teeth. Microaggressions. Writing was a way to have my say—to pick up those words like a piece of glass and turn it over in the sun and consider the sharp edges or blunted corners. Telling the story, rendering a scene, making a list, allowed me to puzzle, to make a mosaic of these different parts. I believed there was something to learn and understand in my responses. However, I changed the title after I realized I didn’t want to frame my writing only in response to other people’s words. Why give them more space? I’ll take that space.
I don’t subscribe to the notion of fixed genres—not when I and others move from one culture to another, from one kind of dance to another; from what looks like a poem to what looks like an essay to what could be a story. The world wants to know where to place you, how to classify you. I began my writing life as a poet, and later turned to prose. In the last several years, for me creative nonfiction has encompassed the wildest field of voice, thought, and performance. I view the essay as hybrid and nonbinary, the aesthetic as queer. Lyric or braided, traditional or flash, essays have granted me space to stretch, pivot, and grow. To meditate, ruminate, and weave. At heart, I’m interested in self-definition and invention. I worry the boundaries and borders to observe where sparks arise: they look like fireflies. We occupy space. I spin and twirl. I dwell and revel in the spaces between.
Prelude
[ ]
I am trying to describe what it feels like //
there is nothing but space in these words
;;
when language fractures in your attempt to speak //
when you are trying to talk back
;;
Here is my booth at the carnival.
What will stay, and what will go: Indian, American, and girl.
The body; bones, raced, erased.
;;
Stories are an argument between some words.
Weddings are a circle of stories, are bodies, streets, intersections.
This is the body, dancing.
[I am a triple threat]
;;
My mother speaks to me in Gujarati. (My father in the other room, reading.)
These two words were once linked by a hyphen:
___________-___________.
But that is not the answer. I answer her, usually, in English.
the space blooming now breaking now
[there is no answer; there is only a door]
is widening now
[ (I, too, call myself I) ]
words are surfacing, one way to dance
[2002, 2019]
Skin
This is what the white boys say: Your hair. Your skin. This is what the black boys say: We together, together. This is what the Asian boys say: You date out too, I can tell. This is what the Jamaican boys say: I never liked you Indians. This is what the desis say: Get out of Massachusetts. Move to New York.
This is what the white boys say: But we would have brown children. And: Color doesn’t matter. And: Why are you so obsessed with it. We’re all Americans, right. How are we that different? My parents would love you. My older brother would want to go out with you. Your skin is your best feature.
This is what the black boys say: You got such nice eyes, girl. Your people have such big eyes. If you dressed hip-hop, you’d be my wife. We’re almost the same. What is that dot, I like that dot. Never pay for a guy. What are you doing after. You saving it for your husband? Don’t give it away to the white boys. Why not come home with me?
The brown boys are silent. I can’t find them, can’t see them at all. Sometimes there is a table of them, sitting on the far side of the blue wall. They talk and laugh in Hindi. We pass each other on the street, embarrassed. If we looked, we’d have to say hello. If we stopped to talk, if we went out for coffee, friends would say: Hey, when’s the wedding, and: Oh, we love Indian food.
The brown boys, desis: They are too short after the white boys. You are too brown after their white girls. You look at each other helplessly. You are instant family, and then the instant passes.
Some of them remind you of your father when he was a student. He was thin then, wore the Third World mustache above his grin. How he looked in pictures: young.
This is what the brown girls say: Where are the good ones? There’s no one here at all. We say: Let’s go salsa dancing! Hit garba-dandiya raas. Let’s go bhangra-hip-hop-reggae dancing: Springfield, Hartford, Manhattan, Queens! We are driving up and down Route 9, up and down 91, up and down Main Street.
We pass Emily Dickinson’s house. Yeah, there was a woman who understood: Why even bother? Just stay in your house and write. We’ll go to Net-ip next year. We’ll think about going to India next year. We’ll think about finding someone later. In the meantime: New York.
The problem with white boys is not just that they’re white. That they would even think such things. The problem with black boys is not only that they’re black. That they would constantly be trying to cop a feel. The problem with desis is not only that they remind you of your father and your uncles. The problem with Western Massachusetts is not just that you like this place. That you stand out in the snowy whiteness, that their mountains are really moderately sized hills, that this is where you live. That you are a brown girl here, never just a girl.
This is what they all say: You’ll publish first. Hey Arundhati Roy, hey Jhumpa Lahiri, where’s your best seller?
Here is a story about where you live.
Here is your best seller.
This is yet another story not about India.
[1999]
Matrimonials
A Triptych
1. KALEIDOSCOPE
I had never before seen people in my parents’ generation dancing to Madonna, ABBA, and Kool and the Gang. They wore suits and saris; they flung their hands in the air. It all looked out of place, incongruous, dissonant. It was culture shock but also perfect: here was the moment I had been waiting for my whole life. I hadn’t even known it could exist. All of us in one room, aunties and uncles and cousins and friends; Hindi songs and dandiya raas and New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”—a sonic embrace. When I think back to my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding in 1992, it exists as one long moment in my memory: a swirl of skirts and sticks on the smooth wooden dance floor, my senses heightened by the deep jewel colors of wear-to-wedding saris—turquoise, fuchsia, purple, magenta—the high from hi-hello-kem-chos, bits of conversations in English and Gujarati with so many people from every part of my life; then words and colors and food, a five-tiered frosted cake, a kaleidoscopic blur of light and motion.
My brother married on a rainy afternoon in northern New Jersey. The mix of music at the evening reception—Hindi film music, American pop music, Gujarati dandiya music—mirrored the different parts of our cultural background in one setting. I had never seen anything resembling their ceremony and reception. Weddings join families and communities, spark joy, and suggest the possibility of cultures in balance with each other: a pure Indian Americanness I hadn’t experienced in any other setting. It’s an intersection I feel for a moment, before having to cross the street, return to my regular life, mostly in white America.
My brother’s wedding was one of the first for the children of post-1965 Indian immigrants in the United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished a discriminatory quota system that had been in place for decades and led to an increase in the population of South Asians in the United States. My father came to the United States on a student vis
a in 1967—an immigration history similar to that of many of my parents’ friends.
The 375 guests included several of my more distant relatives who lived in and around New York City, and whom I had not seen in several years. At the time, my sister-in-law’s mother had to convince the hotel to permit a small fire inside for the ceremony and allow outside catering (i.e., Indian food). I don’t even remember the food—only the dancing. The wedding guests included relatives and Indian family friends and my brother and sister-in-law’s friends from high school, college, and medical school.
I had never seen so many Americans (what we called anyone not Indian) dancing to Indian music. I had never imagined my brother’s American friends attempting to play dandiya raas, a folk dance with wooden sticks native to Gujarat—and doing it pretty well. In raas, two concentric circles of people dance in a pattern—the inner circle travels in one direction and the outer moves in the other. Raas offers an opportunity to greet people you’ve known for years and to meet those you haven’t yet met. In our other folk dance, garba, everyone forms a circle, moving right then left, changing direction, clapping then turning. Picture sea anemones washing first in toward the shore, then out, following the water, the graceful movement of a wave. Inside the circle is a smaller circle—the younger folks and avid dancers of any age bloom, spin, and turn faster here, showing off a bit, more complicated steps.
That June day in 1992 was one of the happiest in my life, Technicolor nearly. It was the first wedding for both families: my brother is the eldest grandchild on both sides, and my sister-in-law is the eldest on one side, the second eldest on the other. The occasion felt momentous, had weight. It rained that evening, but my strongest memory is of dancing—not the weather, nor that dinner was held up. It was the first time these separate cultures—Indian and American—and for me, distinct selves, coexisted, even merged, in one semipublic place. Hundreds of people dancing! The experiences of Indian Americans at this wedding, from the sheer number of people, the food, the music played, rendered our experiences, in Adrienne Rich’s words, “real and normative”;* the culture foregrounded was our own. This was the first time I caught a glimpse of our faces in a larger cultural space. We were beautiful, multiple, mirrored, carnivalesque. We filled the room.