(no subject)

[raven]

I am having a lot of thoughts & feelings tonight about India, and being Indian, and how I often worry I’m not very good at it. Partly it’s because the BBC are doing a wonderful adaptation of A Suitable Boy, which naturally drove me to reread the entire book in a week and a half, and partly because it’s just that time again. (Every so often, one must Remember Mother Bharat!! I’m starting to sound like Amit Chatterji.) And partly because it is about to be Independence Day again, and my father taught me the words from Nehru’s speech from when I was very young. At the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India shall awake to life and freedom - and perhaps I had them even younger than most Indian children do, because I had English earlier? And there are plenty of adult arguments to be had about how much Nehru's conception of India has survived, and if it has, if it will survive Modi, and all the rest of it. And I feel like I've thought, and written, all of this before. India has to be an idea, not a religion or a language or a culture or a geography. We aspire to it as well as embody it. And I've definitely written the rest of it before, about Partition and colonialism and all that history which is right under the skin. (I don't think that we can let whiteness and colonisation define us - there's more to us than what we are not - but that's got to be part of it, hasn't it? You can't love your country, you can only fucking carry it.)

What makes this go round different, I guess, is my dad. He's the only Indian whose opinion on my Indian-ness has ever really mattered to me, and he's no longer with me. He’s still living, of course, but in a real sense I'm doing this alone now. I will never be in India with him again; I'll never see it again through his eyes. And if India is an idea we each have our own version of it and mine is the one that he wanted me to have. India shall awake to life and freedom! India in the capital city and the small towns; India in Roorki and Lutyens' Delhi and long train journeys across half a continent. India in the steel cups and the dust. It's my dad who told me that I write short stories about the small details of life, and so did RK Narayan and Premchand. I speak to him every day but he's not the same person as he was before the covid and the stroke. He will never be again, and I miss him terribly.

Comments

[lovelythings]

♥

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for the post. I am sorry about your father.

[raven]

Thank you. <3

[kass]

I have no wisdom to offer, but I am here and I am listening.

[raven]

Thank you, I appreciate it. <3

[sir_guinglain]

I am terribly sorry, but think he would be proud of what you have written here.

[raven]

Thank you, my friend.

[longwhitecoats]

Without ever having known him, I can tell you're a lot like him. <3

[raven]

That is a lovely thing to say. <3

[hannah]

May you find the strength to carry your feelings in these coming days.

[raven]

<3 <3 <3

[goss]

<33333

[extrapenguin]

I have a similar situation with my dad (there, but not the same person), and it sucks. Very few things can be worse than mourning a person who still lives. I'm sorry you have to deal with it as well.

[raven]

Oh, I'm sorry you have to deal with it too. Thank you.

[zero_pixel_count]

Ohhhh.

Parts of this resonate incredibly strongly. Obviously not all of it because your experience of the things that we do have in common - that cultural gap, what do you hold on to, what do you let go, what did you never even have the chance to hold because it was always too distant - is inextricably bound up with the things we do not have in common - the racism and colonialism directed at you and yours but not at me and mine. Our equivalent defining moment of birth as a nation is centuries in the past and half-mythical and Diane Duane wrote a book and I still feel conflicted about the fact that she did it.

But you speak of the steel cups and the dust, and I feel the smell of the steam-ship engines and the cool of stone-shadow, and what you have lost and what I have lost and I'm crying again, I'm a bloody waterworks these days, it's my age, but. You know. <3

[soupytwist]

I love you ever so much.

This doesn't make it better or easier in any way, but I think your dad told you those things precisely so you could take them forward when he's no longer able to. I think if he could tell you, he would be incredibly proud of you and of the India that you take with you wherever you go.

[raven]

I love you too. This helps a lot.

[oursin]

Deepest sympathies.

[raven]

Thank you. <3

[rmc28]

<3 Reading and listening.

[raven]

Thank you, you're very kind.

[toft]

<3

[celli]

<3333

[macadamanaity]

<3

[forthwritten]

Much, much love.

Our Indias are not the same but they overlap; with that great song humming underneath them, in the grumble of bad-tempered traffic and scent of cows lying on hot tarmac and bright splash of water into steel tumblers.

[brainwane]

India has to be an idea, not a religion or a language or a culture or a geography. We aspire to it as well as embody it. And I've definitely written the rest of it before, about Partition and colonialism and all that history which is right under the skin. (I don't think that we can let whiteness and colonisation define us - there's more to us than what we are not - but that's got to be part of it, hasn't it? You can't love your country, you can only fucking carry it.)

Thank you for this.

And my deep condolences on your father's condition and how you have lost part of what you loved about him and your relationship with him.