My Sari Missouri
Introduction
“I want to thank you,” the middle-aged white American woman told me, in the Francis Scheidegger Recycling Depository in Kirkwood, Missouri—a suburb of St. Louis, filled with graceful old homes, and nearly all white except for a tucked-away pocket of blacks—“for choosing to live in our country.”
It was just a day or two after 9/11. I’d never seen this woman before, who approached me as I was dumping a bag of magazines in the magazine-recycling trailer. Not knowing quite what to say, I blurted, “Oh, actually I didn’t choose to live in this country. I was born here.”
She seemed a bit bemused. Not many Indians resided in St. Louis in 2001, after all—certainly, many more than when I grew up here, in the 1970’s, but still, a relatively small population, hidden away in doctor’s offices and university engineering classes. And very few Indians had actually been born here.
“Well then,” she said, “Thank your family for choosing to live here.”
“Sure,” I said, smiling. “And thanks.”
I wasn’t quite sure what I was thanking her for. She meant well, certainly. But if it weren’t for the color of my skin—a milky-chai—she would never have assumed me to be foreign.
But then, I wasn’t foreign, really. I was born right here in the heartland. St. Louis, Missouri. Home of the Gateway Arch, and the St. Louis Cardinals. Or, as a friend of mine, Tom, a local librarian, calls it, “Flyover country.” Because no one really visits St. Louis, they visit the airport while in between destinations. Or, so it seems.
But I said, “Thanks” anyway.
Because Americans are always thanking one another, for everything.
**
I still meet people in St. Louis, the quietly elegant city upon the banks of the quietly mighty Mississippi, who are shocked to hear I was born here. In 1968, at that.
After all, I’m not part of the recent IT wave of Indian immigrants. Not only do I not work in IT, I never even had my own computer until five years ago, when my grandma, 85 years old at the time, bought me one.
I’m a writer. It’s a very odd occupation for a professional South Indian family, especially as– in the grand tradition of several of history’s most imaginative writers– my work (novels, poetry, lyrical short fiction) has been turned down for years. And not just by the publishing industry in the US. In England and India as well.
Twelve years of rejection. From all over the globe.
Damn. I must be good.
And after all that time, I continue to write.
That’s very American.
**
I envisioned this little book as a primer of sorts, for getting to know someone who’s as American as they are Indian, and along the way, explore the nature of what it means to be American today.
I see each chapter in this book as a “pleat” in the sari of my identity—which, I suppose, is really an American identity. For those of you who are not familiar with saris, they are lengths of cloth, about six yards long, which adorn a woman’s body with an extraordinary, lissome, grace. They are made of silk, cotton, and a variety of synthetic materials. The colors and patterns of saris are literally infinite, as is the breadth, lyricism, and depth of the collective Indian imagination.
Saris are one-size-fit-all. The trick is in how you pleat the sari. You can make small pleats, or large pleats, and tuck them neatly—very neatly and smoothly, or the older Indian ladies will take note!—at your waist. A few pleats leads to a longer pallu (the flowing segment of the sari that drapes over the left shoulder). More pleats lead to a shorter pallu. The pleats support the whole piece—although of course nowadays most women use the help of safety pins to keep them in place.
So many pleats necessary for a neatly-worn sari. So many chapters necessary for a richly- cherished life.
Let’s begin…
Pleat 1 Skin Coloring
“No kidding, you’re Indian?” the African-American customer in the Washington University bookstore asked. I nodded. “I’m a quarter-Cherokee!” he exclaimed in delight.
This happened in 1994—the last time I can recall being mistaken for a Native American.
But this was by no means the first instance of mistaken identity, of confusing one kind of Indian for another. And all because of skin color, the intriguing mix of melanin in me that stamped me as being neither black, nor white. Growing up in St. Louis in the 1970’s, it happened all the time. Apparently, there are tons of people here who are a half, quarter, or an eighth Cherokee. For some reason, everyone was Cherokee, I never heard anyone say they had Apache or Sioux blood in them.
I’d usually correct people when they made such incorrect assumptions. I do recall one amusing incident, however, where I remained silent, and simply smiled.
This happened in Schnucks—which, odd name notwithstanding, is a long-standing family-owned grocery store chain in the area. I was in the bakery, in the early ‘90’s, and a clerk asked me what my ethnicity was. I said, “Indian,” and as soon as I did, realized I’d made a mistake. Because her eyes widened, and she said, excitedly, “Really? I played bingo in a reservation in Oklahoma once!”
I didn’t say a word. Later on, when I related this incident to a coworker in Borders, the once-cool but now struggling bookstore chain, he quipped, “Did you ask her if she’d seen your uncle Running Bear?”
St. Louis has become so much more cosmopolitan in the first decade of the twenty-first century that it seems incredible that such incidents not simply happened, but happened recently. After all, no matter how much technology has rendered the concept of history absurd—a product is obsolete within months of being on the market, if not moments—fifteen or twenty years is decidedly not ancient history.
This kind of confusion never happens anymore. I recall I used to even receive “Hola’s” at times, when I was out and about. But now, everyone knows I am Indian. And therefore they are shocked to learn I am not a doctor, nor do I work in IT or some other high-salaried field. Their surprise is multiplied when I tell them, “Oh, I work at Borders,” as I did in the first few years of the twenty-first century, or when I tell them, “I work at Barnes & Noble,” as I do now. I recall an Indian woman who used to bring her child in to storytime at Borders. She asked me where I graduated from school. I answered Washington University. She waited for me to say more—perhaps something along the lines of, “I’m going to med school in the fall.” But I didn’t say more; I didn’t feel like saying I’m a writer, because I knew she wouldn’t understand that. So I just smiled.
And my silence silenced her. She had no idea what to say.
On top of my career choice, I’m not married. The pressure to marry in Indian culture is enormous, and is exceedingly practical in nature. It doesn’t much matter whom you marry, really, as long as they are earning well, and come from a fairly decent family, because you’ll grow together over time. At least, this is the ideal. And it’s worked, for millennia, because divorce was never an option. A lot has changed recently.
Perhaps one day I will marry, if it is written—I do believe in destiny, that’s a very Indian concept which is as much in my blood as marriage is in my culture—but I don’t believe by any means my life is a loss if I don’t. Many Indians still believe that—and many Westerners do as well, by the way, although they never put it so plainly. An Indian woman, who liked me a lot, once told me, “Oh, I hope you will get married. It will be such a waste if you don’t.” She meant it as compliment—i.e, I’d be a sweet, caring wife— but it’s simple to take it as a slur. This is how ingrained the ideal of marriage is in Indian culture.
And so, I’ve gone from being an Indian curiosity to a curious kind of Indian. In just over fifteen years.
If this is how fast St. Louis is changing, where the Midwest always lags a few years behind the coasts, just think of how fast America is changing.
