Double vision

Watching The Namesake felt somewhat like being in an alternate reality, if it can be called that- Imagine being in a glass case that is your life, looking out on a blurred reality, which is just as much your life as the case itself, only a little more out of your grasp than the present. In a darkened movie hall filled with ‘strange foreign voices’, I felt so much like reaching out and explaining, when I heard whispers and laughs over “those foreign customs”. I felt like asking- Do I seem foreign to you, in my Aeropostale sweatshirt and Nikes? I speak your language, with your accent when I need to, and you see no foreign-ness to me then.

Yet I understand the need to wear sindoor, the ululating to cast off evil eyes at a wedding, the mother who expects her son to call her when he gets home, even though he is 35. I see no strangeness in an adult who feels a sense of responsibility towards their parents.

Yes, I hold my boyfriend’s hand in public here, but in that darkened theater, I cringed with Gogol as Maxine reached out to hold his hand in front of his parents.

Too many facets of life can get confusing, sometimes, refusing to blend into one coherent reality. I have been Ashoke, traveling in a second-class railway compartment, reading of English children and their nursery teas and apple trees where pixies lived. I am Ashima, held by the melodies of my land in strange foreign places. The rhythm in my feet when I walk in New York is the dhol and the tabla, not the rap that fills the air of the streets. I have spelt my name a million times, as she did over the phone. I am sometimes Gogol, my American friends impressed with my knowledge of rock music, fast food, and American customs like hot dogs at the ball game, and still, I choose to come home to good home-cooked Indian food.

And through the length of the film, I could hear in my head parallel voices. Firstly, my mother, who once lived Ashima’s life, or something fairly close to it, I imagine. Secondly, my friends, wonderfully open Americans- one read the book before watching the film, and another who so wants to visit India, to come for my wedding. Yet neither of them would understand the depths and the reach of the little things in the movie- When R. asks me if people in India really buy vegetables like that, what answer is there? When I am asked about wedding customs, how hard it is to separate the layers of religion and region, past and present… And of course, my own- a voice that shakes in nervousness with Ashima as she learns to drive, and laughs with Maushumi over the silliness of frying samosas with your mother-in-law every Thursday.

I rarely think about my roots- it would be almost as silly as remembering each step in the Krebs cycle each time I take a breath. (For the uninitiated/ non-biologists, the Krebs cycle is the biochemistry of what your body does with oxygen). While it would be foolish to recite the cycle each time I breathe, it would be foolish also to deny its importance.

Yet random conversations in the lab, and a movie like this one, can call it all into question- And I am left fumbling for my own reality, my own voice, and somewhere, my own country.