by Sejal Shah
Now I wonder about the woman who came before me (there’s always one who comes before you; can I at least tell you that?), the one he left your mother for. She was young, younger than me, in her twenties, on her way to becoming a high-powered lawyer in DC, and also never met you. He told me he loved her, too. And that she broke up with him, too.
Did she study your doll stroller, parked in the corner of the living room, and tiny, shockingly pink shoes, strewn in the stark, gray foyer? Did she also stoop to help fold your star-patterned pajamas and sturdy purple underwear, your tiered dresses and miniature leggings? So many ruffles, so many kinds of pink, so many things. And did she also wonder if someday she might be a mother, maybe even a step, but still someone to whom you sometimes don’t say thank you, even when you know you should?
[2013]
365 Pelham Road
Ranch houses, when I was growing up, were not cool. At least in my mind, at least on that street, in the 1980s. People appreciate them now—or maybe it’s just everyone’s eventual knee problems. My neighborhood displays an odd mix of housing styles along its streets. The developers ran out of money, I read, during the Depression. By the time people were building again, well after World War II, styles had changed. Thus, ranch houses live next to Tudors, split-levels next to Colonials.
My life is a ranch house—laid out squarely, not coyly, in levels like the Colonial homes on the street. No dormer windows or dreamy second-story verandas or slight, whimsical balconies in my house. No attic bedroom or interesting third story. I am straightforward, to a fault, often without decoration.
Sometimes I think I am uncomplicated, but I know it’s not true. Ranch houses have their hidden spaces and places, too, even if they are not as old, not as interesting, not as layered as the fake Tudors and the Capes; they suggest a vision of family I could never quite get behind. Ranches present a large formal living room with picture windows and wide, open spaces. Pictures of a happy family. I never wanted anyone to be able to see into my home—houses are for hiding, a place to be invisible, to be visible and legible only to yourself, a place to read and restore.
The only other house my parents owned before that was also a ranch house. (They are, at any rate, consistent.)
At least we had an interesting added-on room—the blue room—a mother-in-law attachment. I am the addition, the mother-in-law attachment. I am not a mother-in-law; I am a returned child, boomeranging back every five or ten years. I think about the woman for whom it was built, this room with its own bathroom and a walk-in closet and a cedar closet and four bright windows framing two corners across three sides of the room. It has the feel of a sun porch. I must think about her weekly since I moved back here, and how kind (or necessary) it was for the Lemperts, the people who built the home, to do that for the parent who moved in with them. Everyone needs a little space.
One of the original owners asked to see the house once, years after they had moved, and my mother said no. It upset me when I heard this; I would want to be allowed back in if or when we move from the house, leave this house, lose this home.
Did he or she just ring the doorbell one day? I imagine it that way.
When I ask her about it again, my mother does not remember the previous owners stopping by at all. Did I make up the memory out of fear? That someday this won’t be my house.
This I know: this house meant something once, to people other than us.
We talk about the house a lot, still. We live here, still, my parents and me, now joined by my grandmother. My parents were grateful for it—the location, the large finished basement that doubled as a meeting place for their community. Pujas, bhajans, Hindu festivals, lectures, poetry readings, visiting swamis. On those nights, their friends’ cars lined the street and their shoes filled the garage. We kids played hide-and-seek or freeze tag, swarmed around the house, or swam. In those days, we had a pool.
I often wished my house sat closer to Highland, which bisects Pelham Road, or that we lived on Upper Pelham, which is what I called the other (older, stately, more elegant) half of the street between Highland and East. A ranch would have been out of place on that side. And I wonder about that now—my almost-obsession with the houses on the street. They seem almost like old friends or parents of friends—I have known their faces for so long, over so many years. Thirty-five years of driving by the same houses, walking by the same houses, years of disembarking from a yellow school bus and trudging home on uneven cement sidewalks. It’s an old enough neighborhood that the sidewalks buckle and grass grows between squares.
I orient myself from that house. Number 365: the number of days in a year, we would tell our friends—that’s how to tell our house apart from the other tan ranch houses at the end of the street. Even though the bedrooms, like everything in a ranch, are on the first floor, I always felt safe. Both the bedroom in which I grew up and the bedroom in which I now live, the mother-in-law attachment, face the backyard. And I value that—the solidity and privacy of the house. A fort, for keeping the world outside at bay. I knew if a job ended, I could always come back. There was a place for me. I called it my house, still, though I hadn’t lived there in years, had in fact lived in other states. Maybe I always knew I would be back. I think I did. I think I always knew.
[2013]
There Is No Mike Here
In 1970-something, some kid from the neighborhood came knocking at the door: “Can Mike come out to play?”
“Mike?” My mom asked. “There is no Mike here.”
And then my brother pushed out from behind her. “I’m Mike,” he said. And he went out to play.
I was too young to remember this, but it is a story I know in the retelling. When my mother tells the story, though she laughs, I can still hear the shock and dismay, the register of hurt and bewilderment in her voice—that he would even have thought to change his name. Samir. She had to leave him in India with my grandparents when she and my father came to the United States to work in 1967. My parents weren’t told that once they started the green card application process, they wouldn’t be able to leave the United States, and my brother wouldn’t be able to join them. They didn’t see him for three years while they waited for their green cards and then applied for his. Samir’s name means wind—and this name is something my mother gave him.
I attended an elementary school outside Rochester, New York, called Council Rock, referring to a treaty made by the white settlers with the Seneca Indians. The white folks broke the treaty and named a school instead. These are the Indians we studied. The Iroquois Confederacy—that was our nation. These are the Indians I grew up thinking about. I did not set foot in India until I was nineteen. I have never visited Uganda, where my mom was born, nor Kenya, where she grew up. As is true of any writer, I wrote poems then about what I thought about: how to locate, claim, or create what or who is home—how you learn where and to whom you belong. It is still what I think about obsessively.
Names carry, influence, and even define one’s identity. Or sometimes we work in opposition to our names. I named one of my nephews Anand. I insisted on it—the paternal aunt’s customary right to name—and I wanted a recognizably Indian name. My brother resisted: “Americans will mispronounce it and call him An-And. Not Ah-nund. I don’t want him to be made fun of.” He’s right—some mispronounce it—but I wanted that name. Anand means happiness, and I had no greater wish for my nephew than for him to be full of joy, to be content.
My mother spells out the name of our street. (She has to do it. She has an accent.) P as in Pineapple, E as in Elephant, L as in Larry, H as in Harry, A as in America, M as in Mary.
I was married this year, and the nearly universal assumption that I would change my name startled and then irritated me. I have a name. My husband’s name is not my name. His name is South Indian, as is he. Singaravelu is far more unusual than my surname—would this make me seem unique, and therefore more valuable, to an editor? Would it give me better Google search results? (The answer to the last question
is yes.) Google my name and you will find a gaggle of doctors: the dermatologist I was once mistaken for when an editor wrote to me with skin care questions; the actress/dentist in New York; the (male) cinematographer in Bombay; the radiologist in Boston, who also owns a yoga studio (we were in a class together in college).
In Ahmedabad or Edison, my name might as well have been Sarah Smith—it’s that common a Gujarati name for women of my generation. But in western New York, it was always a topic of conversation: “What an unusual name!” “What does it mean?” “I love it!” Or: “That’s stupid. It sounds like Bagel. Or Rachel. Or Angel.” “Why is it spelled that way?” I knew what they meant when they said “unusual.” I understood I was unusual because of the person asking me the question, not because I am unusual—every person is.
“Through the Eyes of the Dark-Eyed Americans” is the title of the first poem I published, when I was sixteen. My high school literary magazine, edited by other serious, long-haired students who loved 10,000 Maniacs and gathered in the windowless office next to our cafeteria, chose it. Our magazine, called Galaxy, seemed to me to be just that—we were out there away from the cheerleaders, the future business leaders, and the rest of the East Coast even, but for me, it was everything, this world of words. I was not an editor, but I was on staff; we called ourselves “Galactites.” The discussions were not unlike those I would later encounter in workshops in graduate school, but people were kinder, the stakes lower. We looked at poems blind. I was one of two or three nonwhite kids at the meetings. Years after, I wondered if everyone assumed “Through the Eyes of the Dark-Eyed Americans” was mine.
Hanging Loose, a Brooklyn-based literary magazine that devotes a section of every issue to poets of high school age, also published the poem. Later, Hanging Loose Press (connected with the journal) selected my poem for inclusion in Bullseye, an anthology of high school poetry. Hanging Loose is also the same press that published Sherman Alexie’s first book. My poem had legs! “Through the Eyes of the Dark-Eyed Americans” placed in a countywide literary contest run by the downtown public library in Rochester. (I won fifty dollars, had my name in the local paper, and was taken out to lunch with the other winners at a fancy restaurant.) Even my parents’ friends, other Indians, knew I was a poet—everyone read the paper. My name was in the paper. I existed! The poem placed in six other literary competitions. I have never again won so many awards for one piece of writing. My poem was good—and not because of its title alone or because of my name. (I’ve kept these records for all these years, as though I needed evidence to say the above, to make the claim I am a writer.)
Here are the first two verses:
Once,
for once
I would like to see the world
Through your eyes.
Is it a different place
With green or blue irises?
Are perceptions different?
Can you see me—
—me as i see myself?
Yes, I used the e. e. cummings “i.” (Remember, I was in high school). Someone told me (a friend? an editor? a teacher? all of the above?) he/she had assumed that the speaker in the poem was me. Why? If you have a recognizably Indian name and brown skin does it automatically disqualify you from writing a persona poem? My college professor, Frank Bidart (white, male, American), published a now well-known poem in the voice of Ellen West, an anorexic woman living in Europe who died at thirty-three from her illness. That did not seem to be a problem.
I remember writing “Through the Eyes of the Dark-Eyed Americans.” It appeared in nearly finished form—an easy labor that for me almost never happens. I didn’t know then that poem was a gift. (I am still laboring over this essay.) I was sixteen. But I was also thinking back to when I was seven and spent second grade in California. I loved our textbook so much that my teacher gave me a copy before I moved back to New York. I’m holding it now. Paths to Follow was published in 1956. I read this book while growing up in the early 1980s. Like any kid, I was trying to make sense of my world. One of the selections, a Thanksgiving origin story called “Giving Is Thanks,” by Amy Morris Lillie, centered on a Native American boy named Morning Bird and a white girl he had never seen before. He found her golden hair and blue eyes intriguing.
The white-blonde hair of two of my first-grade classmates fascinated me; my classmates, in turn, were drawn to my hair, which my mother plaited into two long braids every morning. My hair was long enough that I could sit on it. I allowed one friend to hold both braids and we would gallop away, two kids chasing each other, horsing around, with my hair as the reins, the other kid holding the reins. I was the horse. This scene embarrasses me a little now, although these were my friends; I can’t imagine playing the other way around, and that says something.
I cannot imagine trying to publish under a name that is not mine—or changing my name when convenient to help my writing be seen. Perhaps I lack imagination. Or arrogance. Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
Alexie’s story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”—about history and intergenerational memory, ancestry, antistory, homelessness, despair, redemption, time—slays me. I have taught this story for years—often ending in tears when a student reads the last paragraph aloud or when I read it aloud myself. The characters are named Jackson Jackson, the pawnbroker, the grandmother, Rose of Sharon, Junior, Agnes, Irene Muse, Honey Boy, Big Boss, Mary, the bartender, Officer Williams, Mr. Grief, and three nameless Aleut cousins. Names matter.
Some of us are not able to change our names. Some of us don’t want to. Some of us will have to spell out the name no matter what that name is. These things matter—language is not separate from power. All poets know this.
One of my all-time favorite poems, “The Love of Travelers,” was written by Angela Jackson. The last lines have stayed with me for over twenty years: “I have died for the smallest things. / Nothing washes off.” That’s basically how I feel about childhood and, really, all of life—some experiences do not fade. I found Jackson’s poem, originally published in Callaloo, because it was included in The Pushcart Prize, XIV: Best of the Small Presses (1989–1990). Anthologies matter—they help circulate a poem, extending the life of a poem.
I texted my brother this morning (now forty-eight and a gastroenterologist in Rhode Island). I wanted to know how old he was when he decided to change his name and why. He texted back:
I think the summer between 3rd and 4th grade. Was tired of people mispronouncing my name, making fun of the name, and not being able to get the bicycle license plate with samir. So that was the summer of mike.
If you are going to call yourself Yi-Fen Chou, survive an American childhood with that name. Make it through a midwestern childhood. Maybe a South Asian name will help him get into Yale or keep her out of Brown (they had quotas, you know, for South Asians). Spell out the name for your health insurance company representative over the phone.
Here is a fact: if my poem were rejected forty times, I would have believed that I was not a (good) writer. Five years ago, I had a story rejected a few times. I put it aside for two years before summoning the ovaries to send it out again. My cousin, a writer, read the story and liked it; he suggested I send it to Granta. Although he had never said this before, I still believed he was just being nice. Who was I to submit to Granta? I will always regret I did not send my work right away. By the time I sent it, the editor I had been told to send to was leaving. Finally, I sent my story out once more; it found a good home at The Literary Review. The story, “The Half King,” is about my usual obsessions: Rochester, Native Americans, ethnicity, South Asian-ness, imaginary homelands, the past, growing older, being young in New York City. Evoking a sense of place. How to make a life as an artist, what it means to live in the rust belt, in a city whose best days may be behind it.
There’s a line attributed to Toronto writer Sarah Hagi I saw on Twitter some time ago that has stayed in my head: “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” (I’ve also seen
this variation: “DAILY PRAYER TO COMBAT IMPOSTER SYNDROME: God give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude.”) Any writer needs confidence and resilience to persist in the face of inevitable rejections. A writer of color needs more. I needed more. I have persisted for many years. I believe in the written word, and I believe in my writing; still, I did not have the confidence to risk widely and repeatedly, to risk enough. I doubted whether to send this essay out, about whether to even write this essay. I did it anyway. Feel the fear and write anyway. Write in spite of it.
Lord, give me the confidence to submit anything forty times and then nine more! I want to believe my words are worth listening to, worth reading, worth the time and agony of writing. Any writer does. S as in Sufficient, E as in Enormous, J as in Jealous, A as in Anyone, L as in Loophole. S as in Samir, H as in Happiness, A as in Anand, S as in Sejal.
[2015]
Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps
1. But did your husband ride in on a horse? South Indians don’t ride in on horses; that’s North Indian.
2. Was it a big Indian wedding? I mean how many people? I mean how many hundreds? You didn’t wear a white dress? But was it a traditional wedding? Did you wear a midriff-baring outfit? I saw a midriff-baring outfit in that Marigold movie.
3. Even my shrink: Which Indian restaurant would you recommend in the area? I tell him I don’t eat Indian food out. I tell him that I only eat Indian food (and we just call it food) at my parents’ house. I tell him I find this question unprofessional. If he wants my recommendation, let him pay. I’m here for his recommendations—and I pay. Do I look like a country or restaurant guide? My husband (Indian; not that it matters) says you’re just going there for a reason. Ignore everything else. I ruminate; I steam. I think about changing doctors, but there’s a shortage of shrinks in our area. And he takes our insurance. The shrink tells me he has been to India, too. He can’t remember the name of the city, but it’s a big one.