raven | New Delhi, January 2010

On this day in 1950, the Constitution of the Republic of India came into force, replacing the Government of India Act, made in 1935 as an Act of (Westminster) Parliament. Driving out of Delhi at eight o'clock this morning, I saw the militia practising for the parade - on a row of camels with ribbons and bells and big fuzzy eyes. The fog was so thick they disappeared after twenty-five metres, merging with the rest of the early-morning traffic and I was thinking, all the way, this is my home and these are my people and please don't make me leave.

I arrived in Delhi four days ago, on Saturday morning, and the flight was very long and very delayed, and we waited hours on the tarmac, and when I reached the terminal building I was ushered through the "Diplomats and Officials" channel and very calmly taken home, where they greeted me with shouts of "Baaaaby!" and "Didi!" and various combinations thereof; I came through the door, put my things down, kissed everyone in sight, and then they did my mehndi, and I thought about coffee, and the maid brought me some, and it was thick, milky with far too much sugar, and occasionally you can go home again.

I was supposed to be there for a wedding. I wasn't, in the end; but I was there for my parents' silver wedding anniversary party, which is, for complicated reasons (to do with identity and disowning and difficult things like that), on the same day as my uncle's and aunt's, so it was kind of an enormous shindig. The moment I arrived, I was being fitted for things; my lehnga, when it came, was gorgeous, red, chiffony, covered in silver bits and and a gorgeous black background, and a perfect fit. ("We got it made in Connaught Place," my mother said, "to fit Misty, because I wasn't sure what size you were."

Passing over the fact my own mother doesn't know what size I am, I asked, "Why didn't you call me to ask?"

...cue stunned silence. I suspect my parents' entire generation thinks long-distance calls are still a matter only for weddings and death. Luckily, Misty is an inch taller than me but otherwise very similar in dimensions, and we matched beautifully. After years of borrowing Indian clothes, of awful, salmon-pink monstrosities and the like, I was a little bit in love.)

The event itself went well - not worth recording, though, as it mostly consisted of mingling, eating canapes, having people remark on how much I've grown (this, by the way, is a lie - I haven't grown an inch since I was fourteen), and halfway through it a small child settled herself next to me and said, "Mera naam Radhika hai."

"Aha," I said. "Tera ma-bap...?"

She shook her head. I had visions of frantic parents. Suddenly the aunts appeared; sent party guests in every direction hunting for said frantic parents; in the meantime Radhika sat there calmly while my grandmother tried to feed her jalebi. She ate it, also calmly. What if we don't find her parents, I asked a passing aunt.

"We'll take her home and look for them tomorrow," said the aunt, as though this were obvious.

At length, a Sikh woman of about my age came skidding in, shouting, "Radhika!" and that seemed to take care of that; but before she toddled off, she held out her arms. I picked her up, she gave me a decorous kiss, and off she went still sticky with jalebi. Her mother was incredibly relieved and grateful, thanking all of the family, declining the offer of food, disappearing into the night with Radhika in firm tow.

I tell this story merely to illustrate the Indian view of the world. Much as I have spent every day of my life lamenting the failings of my people, I think I should also take some time to talk about our good points. We are kind, and we love food, and children, and people, and again, we are kind: and as virtues go these are hardly glamorous, but they're ours.

The next day wasn't my birthday, but had been promised as such - but in the event I ended up in rather a sulk. Because, you see, families like mine are a little... monolithic. You either get one person, or all fifty - there's nothing in between. Plus there's a patriarchy, who knew. So the Grand High Patriarch (who is my father, to my sorrow) deemed that a birthday party could not happen anywhere but at home, with a cake quickly store-bought. And the thing is, it wasn't a family-politicking thing - it wasn't that I wanted to reject my monolithic family, or anything, it was just the very selfish desire of the very selfish English-speaking twenty-something to celebrate her birthday with other English-speaking twenty-somethings, quite possibly with drink.

(Yes, my Hindi is very bad. I'm working on it. One of my aunts noted that she'd seen a flyover in central Delhi somewhere with a sign - all signs in Delhi are bilingual - that features an interesting word, meaning "flyover", that she'd never seen before, and she meant to tell me what it was, but she forgot.

I have two degrees and am quite smart generally, but in the country of my origin I have a reading age of five-and-a-half. I can read with a moving finger on the words, slowly, carefully sounding out things like "dhar-pan nished" and "mera naam Iona hai", with all of the five-year-old's careful deliberation, and I love roadsigns. "New Delhi Railway Station" can keep me happy for hours. A couple of years ago one of my cousins was helping me with the signs on the way up Vaishno Devi, sounding out "sauchalaya" and "yatriya" carefully, and consequently the passers-by treated me like glass, having reached the not unreasonably conclusion that here was an adult with learning difficulties being shepherded up with the pilgrims in the hope that it would help.

But, the thing is, roadsigns in India have a gorgeous, epic formality; they use words that no native Hindi speaker has ever said aloud. So the words I learn are... idiosyncratic. Around me, fluent native speakers learn words like "pradhikaran" ("authority", as in a sign for the Railways Authority of India), and "ganatantra" ("republic", as in please keep the streets clear for Republic Day), "andharashtriya" ("of or pertaining to the internal affairs of a place", from the signs towards the domestic terminal).

My family find this very hilarious. According to them, it's like hearing a five-year-old talk like Herodotus.)

Anyway! No one had found the word for flyover and I was in a sulk. And then somehow various people manouevered around the scenes, I was told to go and surreptitiously ask a few people if they fancied dinner out. "I'm having a birthday dinner at Chittaranjan Park," which is an hour across the city on a good day, and it was already late in a long day, so I expected him to say no, "would you like to come?" Sunny, my favourite cousin, punched the air at this and then looked embarassed; he grabbed his brother, we fished Misty out of the bathroom, where she had been stuck for forty-five minutes (a long story), and then I called for the driver (whose name is Dev Nandan, but is unfortunately ubiquitously called Dev Anand), and we set out across the evening traffic.

And, you know what? For all my sulking, both on this end and that, it was the nicest birthday I could have asked for. We washed up in CR Park, which is one of my favourite places, and there was red wine, and my beloved grandfather, Dadu, who is looking old these days - which really horrifies me; he was never meant to get old, he was meant to be his happy fabulous Buffy-watching political-animal self forever - toasted us all with joy. Sunny declared he wanted Bengali food for dinner, to the mystification of all - he was the only non-Bengali present (me, I'm half) - but accordingly, the party rose and went to the city's best Bengali restaurant, Oh! Calcutta.

Where we had a food experience. Fish, hilsa and ilish, with crab and shrimp, and coconut malai, and delicately spiced rice, and luchi, and what in Hindi is called imli-puddina and what it is in Bengali I have absolutely no idea, and then the birthday cake I wanted, which was a delight. I asked Shloky, the beloved baby cousin (who most inconsiderately turned eighteen a fortnight ago), if he was liking it - acutely conscious, you know, that I had piled a bunch of people in a car and made them cater to my whims, and also he hadn't been talking much - and he set his fork down, looked at me, looked at the restaurant, and said, in the broadest accent possible, "I think I would like to live here."

I was pleased. (Alas, poor Shloky - he had decided, in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm, that he wanted to celebrate both Republic Day and Australia Day together, these being the paired halves of his nationality, and being the enterprising sort, he called the Australian embassy to ask where he might get an Australian flag. "We're not telling you!" said the embassy. "We're afraid people are going to burn it!")

Unfortunately I find this entirely hilarious. I am a terrible person. I am even more of a terrible person for getting three of my cousins, plus my mother, drunk, and bringing them home to my grandmother's house at two in the morning the night before I plan to get them all up at eight to see me off to the airport, but I never pretended to virtues and good qualities.

I could go on forever, but I won't. I went to the airport past the camels, I got there in good time, flew out, delayed through the fog, landed in Heathrow among the sad gap-year travellers looking out of place with their silly beads and sarongs, and the sad middle Englanders with their silly murmurs about "Jai-eye-pur" and "plain honest food", and I took three trains and a bus, and now I am in Oxford, but I woke up in Delhi. What I am saying is this: I am pleased and proud to be who I am, to be all of who I am; I am not, any more, angry about being Indian and British and half-Bengali with hundreds of cousins; I am not sorry, and I am not sad. But flying across the world, twice, in four days, twists out the melancholy in me, and the maudlin; I took a shower just now, and washed the thick Delhi road-dust out of my hair, and watched it swirl around a plughole while all the hot water I wanted landed on my head, and all the electricity I needed shone down, and I missed home.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Oxford, England
Current Music: Dar Williams; The Great Unknown