by Sejal Shah
The Gujarati Girls Go to (Hindu Heritage Summer) Camp, The Gujarati Girls Go Skiing, The Mystery of the Prasaad Plate (A Gujarati Girls Mystery), The Gujarati Girls Go to Panorama Plaza (to see the latest Molly Ringwald movie—Gujarati Girls Mystery #13), The Gujarati Girls Get Malaria (also titled The Gujarati Girls Go to India).
My friends now laugh (it seems almost like a novel) at the stories about how I grew up, how we grew up. We took cup baths, never used the dishwasher except as a drying rack, saved tin foil, almost never ate out. Is that world gone? We were more Indian once, I know this. We were something else once. I feel this as a nearly physical ache, this knowledge, because it means I am something else now.
Still, I am telling you this story, I am telling myself this story as a way to remember how we laughed, how we read, how we knew our friendships were different. How we knew our lives were more interesting than Nancy Drew’s. I don’t know if I was the only one who wanted to see our faces in what we read, to see our split-level houses, our Corningware dishes and Duralex glasses, our fake wood coffee tables with their stacks of Time and Reader’s Digest (not a New Yorker anywhere)—our particular blend of suburban Rochester and middle-class Gujarati—but I am the one who became a writer. I am writing this, on a Wednesday afternoon in Western Massachusetts, thinking ahead to when I will see them, my Gujarati girls, next. Wondering if those books, were I to see them now—if they would mean the same thing to me. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. Trixie Belden. The Girls of Canby Hall. Anne of Green Gables. Nancy Drew. Sweet Valley High. How could they?
THE GUJARATI GIRLS GROW UP
Sejal Shah, Manisha Patel, Sonal Dubey, and Rupali Grady were headed to another wedding. “Don’t worry,” Sejal said, confidently. “I see the way over here to the left.” And she led the way to the door, and she opened it.
[2004]
The World Is Full of Paper. Write to Me.
Shahid was the first and only person to call me a Yankee. I met the poet and professor Agha Shahid Ali in 1996 in the Lower Common Room of Adams House, at Harvard University. It was a winter evening in late March, and I braved the cold to attend his reading, part of the series organized by the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop.
In my memory, Shahid wears a Nehru jacket, something pale in color, and he glows, the way snow glows on certain winter nights. He must have been reading poems from his forthcoming collection, The Country without a Post Office, which held the political violence in Kashmir as its backdrop. I can hear him reciting one of my favorite poems, “Farewell”: “The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves . . . / My memory keeps getting in the way of your history,” and the repetition of those evocative words, history and memory.
Shahid brought the audience to laughter throughout the reading, with his quips and witty asides, before and after reciting his beautiful, haunting poems. When I spoke to him afterward, he was kind and encouraging. I told Shahid I had just applied to the MFA program at UMass Amherst, where he was director, and that I hoped to study with him. “Come, come,” he said.
Shahid had previously taught at Hamilton College in central New York State. Hamilton is a couple of hours from where I grew up. Shahid once told me that when he landed in that remote part of New York State, he called on everyone—poets and professors—who lived within a couple of hours, to say he had arrived.
Shahid was warm, charismatic, and irreverent. I fell for him the way you fall for someone across the room at a party and then feel compelled to approach. I had not read his poetry extensively at the time, but as soon as I saw and heard him in Cambridge, I was transfixed. My name was a part of his name; I decided it was destiny.
Knowing almost nothing about Kashmir and its history of occupation and violence by the Indian military, I thought of Shahid as simply an Indian American writer. I hoped to find in him a mentor. At the time, I had met only one other South Asian American writer: Bharati Mukherjee, who declared herself an American writer, rejecting any hyphen or descriptor such as Indian American or Bengali American or South Asian American or Asian American. In the mid-1990s, while a student at Wellesley College, I attended one of Mukherjee’s readings at Waterstones bookstore in Back Bay, Boston. Other South Asians were in the audience, and we looked at each other with interest and at her with a kind of hunger. We wanted to see writers who looked like us, who wrote about South Asians in the United States, or who embraced a bi-cultural or multiethnic identity. I was disappointed to learn Mukherjee did not want to be read in that context. However, I can’t blame her—I believe in self-definition. She wished to be understood and accepted as an American writer—as American as anyone else.
The literary landscape was different then. This was before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer in 2000. It was before Salman Rushdie curated the special Indian fiction section of the June 23 and 30, 1997, issue of the New Yorker, which marked India’s fiftieth anniversary of independence from British rule; the issue (with a statue of Ganesh in what looks like a jungle and two white explorers with Indiana Jones–type hats looking at him on the cover—the reader meant to identify with that white gaze) heralded South Asian writers’ arrival to American literary audiences by the powers that be. This was before UMass Amherst MFA program’s own Kamila Shamsie (Shahid’s protégé and student at both Hamilton College, where he previously taught, and UMass) published the first of several novels, and before Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in 2006.
When I arrived in Amherst in the fall of 1997 to study fiction, I asked Shahid right away if I could take his poetry workshop. It was more unusual then for poets and fiction writers to take workshops in a genre other than their own (it is a requirement now), but Shahid ignored the genre tribes and welcomed me into his class. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
In addition to MFA students, our workshop included a local high school teacher, as well as the poet Kevin Goodan, who commuted to Amherst from New York City once a week; Shahid, ever inclusive, turned no one away. In class critiques, around a long, rectangular table, Shahid often rewrote our poems, starting from the bottom, working his way to the top. He suggested new possibilities for each of us, reading his revisions in a lilting voice. This rewriting occasionally hurt my feelings, often bewildered me, and sometimes infuriated me. I remember the extensive reordering of my poem “Alexander Street” in Shahid’s distinctive handwriting in fountain pen ink. In that poem, the first line became, instead, the twenty-eighth. Shahid crossed out so many lines in another poem, “Palette,” that out of the original twenty-five lines of the poem, only eight remained. In “The Simple Dark,” which I had revised once, he reordered the stanzas to 2-4-3-6-1-5, taking a concluding verse in the poem, moving it up to the middle, and shuffling the rest.
I was horrified. In college my poems had received every undergraduate literary prize awarded. No one had taken my writing apart, line by line, and so swiftly dismantled their basic architecture, what I thought of as the poem’s intention and integrity. Still, despite my discomfort, I could see that Shahid was doing something interesting. I must have understood I needed to pay attention, because even after sixteen years I have held on to all of Shahid’s written comments on my work.
One month into the semester, Shahid delivered a piece of advice to me, announced to our entire workshop: “Never use the word soul in a poem!” he declared and then grinned. He was both teasing and completely serious. I winced. I had just brought in a villanelle, “Onyx, Obsidian, Phlox, Coal,” in which soul was one of the repeating end words. I have remembered his dictum through the years and have heard myself saying it to my own students: we want our poems and stories to be soulful—to possess qualities of the infinite in them—but it is difficult for the word soul to do the work of that desire, particularly in undergraduate writing. A word such as soul often functions too abstractly—it lacks the concrete detail and specific imagery to make a vital and elusive idea visible and material.
Though regularly miffed by his handling of my poems (Where was the unadulterated praise?), I was, like
everyone, still taken by Shahid—admiring both his exquisite poetry and his generous nature.
“The Simple Dark,” a poem I submitted to Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry workshop, fall 1997, Amherst, Massachusetts. Even my revision got revised and reordered!
In our workshop, Shahid would recite each one of our names as though it were a poem, brilliant, somehow miraculous and mysterious, complete and gorgeous in and of itself. “Daniel!” he’d say, delightedly. “Daaa-niel Haaaales.” (He loved Daniel Hales’s name, but in truth it seemed as if he loved all of our names.) “It’s the wonderful Kelly Le Fave! James Heflin. Carrie St. George Comer. Andrew Vaaar-non. Robert N. Casper!”
Shahid believed in gathering everyone together; he believed in joy—he embodied it. After our workshop sessions, he often suggested we continue the conversation over drinks in town at the Amherst Brewing Company. This, I thought, is graduate school. I didn’t realize then that this was just Shahid.
Twice that fall he invited our class as well as other students and friends for hours-long, sprawling dinner parties. People spilled over from room to room—Shahid had many friends and admirers, and we all basked in his warmth. When I offered to help cook for one of his parties, Shahid laughed and said, “You American-born Indians are the most terrible cooks.” I couldn’t argue. I was taken aback, but had to laugh.
One evening, when the stove burners were not working and the food had to be warmed up elsewhere, Shahid charmed us for hours as only an exceptionally good host could, playing Hindi film music and ABBA. (Why not? The perfect Shahidian combination!) No one minded not eating for a while—we may well not have even noticed. I remember he broke into song. “Hey,” I said, “I know that song,” and began dancing in his Northampton home, performing the Bharata Natyam dance steps I had learned as a child. Shahid clapped his hands in encouragement. “Vah, vah!” he said. Finally—the subcontinental applause I had been waiting for!
His expansive nature was a striking contrast to the awkward self-consciousness so often true of writers. In Best American Poetry 1997, above his poem “Return to Harmony 3,” he wrote, “To my subcontinental darling across the continents—love—of course.”
In my copy of The Country without a Post Office, he filled the entire front page with his effusive script in blue fountain pen ink (now slightly faded):
for SEJAL—
—Shah of Shahs!—
—so royal, so princely—
so regal—so she
who couldn’t go to Spain
is going to Italy!
—Ah!—
He decorated this note with long dashes flourishing on either side of the “Ah!,” almost spanning the width of the page.
Warmly, Kisses—
Shahid
19 Feb ’98
Amherst
Later, he continued in another pen:
& now—where is lipstick?
Purple?—Of colour?—
Sejal has the magic!
Who else could have written about the purple lipstick I wore that year at his book signing, when all of us had crammed into Wootton’s, a narrow bookstore in downtown Amherst, for the Best American Poetry reading—in a way that transformed my name, travel plans, and shade of lipstick into near poetry? It was what we all wanted—what anyone wants from someone he or she admires—and certainly what I wanted—for him to see the magic that is only you.
I cannot imagine my time in the MFA program without Shahid—without those warming dinner parties in wintry Massachusetts, without remembering our poems unwritten, in order for different possibilities to be imagined.
As a professor and teacher myself for over a decade now, I understand his rewriting, painful as it was for me, as another form of attention, even as another kind of love. It is a strategy I use too—unwriting, rewriting, undoing—in the workshops I now teach. I think of Shahid when I attempt to respond to students’ poems honestly, generously, usefully. It’s much easier to shy away from the declaration that a poem is not quite working and to instead merely praise what is easily praiseworthy, but what has stayed with me all these years is the more honest, if often ego-bruising, critique. I can see now that Shahid was trying to lessen my dependence on strict narrative, my desire to tell a story within a poem, and to instead allow the poem to unfold, to breathe, to surprise, to live, through the generation of lyric possibilities.
During my first year of graduate school, Shahid was the director of the MFA program, and I had reason to call him once or twice at home. His answering machine message was simply, “I knew you’d call,” emphasis on the knew. No preamble. The first time I heard it, I hung up. As usual, Shahid had caught me off guard. His outgoing message sounded like a line from one of his poems, a moment of delight, of enchantment. His voice left me speechless and smiling.
Shahid’s message was to the point and too short—like his life. No time to think of what to say, to fill the space with unnecessary words. We flocked to him: students, poets, and writers—ambitious dreamers. I see him in his Northampton kitchen, turning toward me in a royal blue sweater, his shirt sleeves unbuttoned and pushed back: he is cooking for us. I’ve snapped a photo and caught him off guard in the picture—but he’s still posing, still gesturing—still lovely, still young. He would hate me saying so, but his eyes look soulful. I knew you’d call.
[2013]
Postscript
There was little room for my voice in Shahid’s workshop, and the cutting away of my words did hurt. I was not entirely honest when I said it didn’t. I don’t teach that way now. I appreciate what Shahid did and who he was and loved him for it, but I also learned that was not the way I wanted to help my students find their voices. I will never cook like Shahid, and I will never teach like him. I miss him, and I am grateful to have found my way back to writing, writing letters to my younger self, to people I have loved and lost, to people who left and people who wounded; the impulse to write is mine. The world is full of paper. I am writing now. I am writing to me. I am writing to myself and others like me.
[2018]
Kinship, Cousins, & Khichidi
1. AMHERST
Several years ago, when my Italian boyfriend returned to Italy and to a girlfriend he had told me was an ex, I stopped eating. Even a steady diet of soap operas as a child had not spared me from a clichéd story line. I suffered in all of the usual ways. Why eat? I could spoon ramen noodle soup from cardboard and Styrofoam cup containers in which food = add hot water—if I had remembered to buy the containers. The prospect of going to the store overwhelmed me: all those lights, all those choices, brands, people. I lived on what was in my fridge and cabinets: orange juice, coffee, the occasional package of ramen. I have always been thin, but that fall I dropped to under a hundred pounds. I am 5'6". In not a particularly graceful way, I fell apart.
I spent much of that year in Amherst on my uncomfortable couch (older brother’s old futon), watching an embarrassing number of Party of Five and Beverly Hills 90210 reruns and uniformly uplifting stories on the Lifetime “Television for Women” series Intimate Portrait. I sat through multiple episodes of Behind the Music—anyone else’s fall from grace, subsequent despair, and triumphant recovery cheered me. My friends rallied and took turns showing up at my door with takeout or dragging me out of my apartment to brunch. “We’ll be over in half an hour,” they’d announce to my answering machine. “We know you’re there.” Eating together, laughing and talking, helped me realize that although I did miss the Italian, much of what I missed was companionship. Eventually I took up the cause; he wasn’t going to call or come back, and I had a life to live. (You know: One Life to Live—even if I’m Hindu and supposedly have more.) I downed cans of coffee-flavored Ensure between meals, finally admitting that it was too tiring and costly to choose not to eat. If I didn’t eat—couldn’t eat—I was not going to finish graduate school or write a book or even be able to finish a thought, let alone be able to repay the favor and cook for my friends.
I fell for the Italian partly
because he cooked. He often called to see if I wanted to come over for dinner on his nights to cook for his host family. I lived around the corner from them in Amherst, maybe four houses away. The meal I remember most: Chinese eggplants the color of a bruise, gleaming as if they had been waxed and buffed, sliced into circles the thickness of three silver dollars, sautéed with garlic and garnished with single leaves of basil, beautiful disks shining with olive oil. We polished our plates with slices of his host mother’s homemade bread, punctuating food and conversation with swallows of cold, slightly sour white wine. Nothing fancy, but I felt civilized. I was so happy with this food: it brought me back to a recent trip to Italy, the setting of a few of the happiest days of my life.
It seems to me now the most intimate kind of relationship and socializing: cooking and inviting others over to eat—although when I was younger, it just seemed to be about work: more and more work, always for women.
2. ROCHESTER
I never wanted to learn how to cook. I saw what it did for my mother and all of the other aunties: who wants to spend their life in the kitchen, wiping oil splatters off the stove range, scouring the kitchen sink with Comet, hands in plastic yellow gloves, filling Corning dishes with leftovers?
Moms in the kitchen, making chaa. It was the 1980s: everyone piled out of station wagons, those Cutlass Cruisers with fake wood paneling. We trooped into the house, shoes off without being told. Moms boiling milk, getting out the glass container with ilaychi for swaad. The rising and falling of voices laughing-talking in Gujarati, different to my ears from English-on-the-phone, English-with-the-neighbors. Moms trying to find the saansee before the milk boils over, getting out the naasto: peanuts and potato sticks and crisps, hot mix. They dispatched one or two of us to the backyard, out by where the scraggly grass grew at the far side of the yard, to pluck a few mint leaves for chaa. The men slouched on the sofa and easy chairs, talking about whatever men talk about. (Sports? Kids? Jobs at Xerox/Kodak? I never listened closely.)