Monsoon

There is a stillness in the air: not a state of final rest, but a slowing down to a stillness that expects to be ruptured.

Grey clouds move in grim silence, like dacoits taking position before a raid. Birds warn each other and take cover. And then gusts blow through, shaking out the brooding foliage, hustling an impromptu parade of dry leaves down the street. Any washing forgotten on the clothesline is whipped.

Do not expect the rain to fall quickly, get its business done and move on. This is India. The rain comes in stages, like a pageant.

Grey clouds move in. The gusting winds settle into a respectful stillness. Then come raindrops, plump and slow, regally drawing dark circles everywhere they land. Then, the shower, pelting every surface, joining all the circles into a big, wet shininess.

Vendors gather up their merchandise, throw blue plastic sheets on anything too big or hardy to move and bolt to stand shivering under the nearest awning. The empty streets suddenly look wider and submit themselves to an overdue scrubbing. In an Indian city, rain enforces a compliance and respect for public spaces that no civic bodies can.

Soon, the street is awash in a muddy red soup with floating garbage that won’t stay hidden in clogged drains anymore.

We need this rain to wash away the evidence of our poor civic habits. We need it to bring up a wave of guilt to treat the city streets better. We need it so we can submit to the force of something bigger than us, and retreat with our clothes clinging to our bodies and think.

The rain forces us to slow down, to take stock, to feel the warmth of our loved ones leaning against us, to eat khichdi and methi pakodas, to reflect on saawan ki ghata chhayi and the cry of koels and peacocks while we can still hear them.

Hari, the Gardener

The bushes and trees in the garden were massacred. I had asked Hari the gardener to trim them. When I came back after running some errands, almost every leaf and flower had been wrenched or chopped off. The loud sprays of bougainvillea, the jasmine flowers that bloomed every night, the hibiscus flowers that little birds like to trapeze off were all gone. Only brown, amputated branches were left on stubby pedestals.

It happens. You ask for a trim, and you get a full-blown Tirupati-style shave.

You might have heard my disbelieving scream echoing through the city, sending volleys of birds off into the sky.

Bolo Hari, Hari Bol. Bolo Hari, Hari Bol. "Chant the name of Hari (God)." I remembered that chant rising from the streets through the window of my family's Calcutta apartment every time a funeral procession passed by.

I took several deep breaths and stewed inside the house. When Hari showed up hours later, I had calmed down. There are thousands of gods in India. And one of them had just saved Hari his job.

“Pervah nahi,” Hari said casually. Don’t care, it translates. I took umbrage the first dozen times I heard it. You mess up and then you tell me not to care? What Hari actually means is, “Don’t worry.”

“It’ll grow back in no time.” It did. But now Hari indulges my peculiar attachment to leaves and flowers and only takes off a hand’s length of branches at a time.

I’ve long been dubious of Hari’s botanical knowledge. He claims he grew up on a farm has been an agricultural laborer all his life. But since the city’s expansion east has swallowed farm land, Hari now tends some of the gardens in my subdivision, including mine.

In India, people ring your doorbell asking for work minutes after you move in. They know because someone who knows someone who knows someone else told them.

When Hari showed up, I told him I didn’t need a gardener. His shoulders sagged with disappointment. No, no one else had beaten him to the job, I assured him. I was planning to tend our garden myself. I had my own tools. I just needed someone to cut the grass a couple of times a month.

Hari was skeptical. He was thinking: People go abroad and come back all funny. What about jhadu? he asked. Na-ah. I didn’t need someone to sweep the garden every day. I was determined to do as much of my own work as possible and turn nobly away from the nitpicky Indian habit of having everything in the house swept and cleaned every day. I’d lived with that in America and grown to enjoy my privacy and self-sufficiency.

India is a place that tests all your resolves and turns them upside down. In a few days, my garden looked ready for intervention. I couldn’t just spend a few solitary hours a week weeding and watering and snipping I imagined I could. The garden begged for the attention of a broom. There were leaves blowing from everyone else’s garden and my own. Little foil packets of paan masala and pieces of plastic showed up from nowhere. Was a secret league of under-employed gardeners planting these in their efforts to persuade misguided expatriates to employ them?

I showed a friend my little green patch that had already come up in three weeks. “What’s the green tile you have there,” he said pointing to a bed of methi greens.

“What do you mean tile? Why would I put tile here?”

It was a green snake with black markings on its green body.

I only tend to potted plants in the front of my house since. Hari has charge of the garden.

Rakhi's Big Fat Groom-Hunt

I have a confession to make. I have been watching Rakhi Ka Swayamvar in sneaky snatches.

Rakhi Sawant is a self-promoting, baby-faced bimbo who has had her pug nose pressed to the glass of fame for a few years. She doesn’t have family connections, seems uncomfortable speaking in English, and clearly is small town small fry desperately wanting to make it big. Much of the buxom starlet’s fame comes from shaking her ample butt and cleavage in music videos and item numbers and kissing ass on reality shows.

Now, the trashy cherub is no longer a wannabe but the star of her own fake reality show, Rakhi ka Swayamvar.

Rakhi started with a line-up of 16 eligible bachelors who arrived by horseback and limo bearing gifts (a Ganesha to remove obstacles … a Bible … an outfit I designed for you) in this network extravaganza. They were Hindu, Muslim and Christian, perhaps even gay, and from a range of professions. They woo her as the show progresses and are gradually eliminated. Supposedly, she will marry Mr. Right at the end of this competition.

The show is the brainchild of NDTV Imagine, which televised the Ramayana. This has to be kalyug for us to have a reality show help us dredge up a 21st century Sita from our midst.

For the first time in Indian history, we have a television network pimping a parade of prospective eligibles for a starlet. How liberating that the woman gets to choose from a line-up of bashful men! And here’s the most amazing thing: it’s all approved for family viewing during prime time.

Why not take it a step farther for ratings? Since the network is picking up the tab for Rakhi’s big fat wedding, why didn’t its programming staff push for a Pandava style wedding where she ends up with five grooms like Draupadi (Didn’t the Pandava mother Kunti tell her sons they should share everything they won?) Think of all the shows and ratings they could have spun out of a five-some.

Rakhi ka Swayamvar is not a bad idea for a show. Indians love marriage. Most primetime television dramas have marriage as their central theme. Courtships that mature over months of sidelong glances are cemented in grand weddings with busybody relatives and vixenly in-laws in tow. Age is no barrier. Even adolescent brides play hopscotch in sarees and weep buckets at the slights of cruel in-laws. TV marriages are tested by infidelity, disease and every trick in the book, but prevail solidly.

My all-out favorite soap opera wife is Bani Walia in Kasamh Se, a character who surely must satisfy the fantasy of so many Indian men and women because the show had a run of 743 episodes over three years and propelled Prachi Desai to stardom.

Bani married and broke up with her husband so many times over the show, I lost count : She stepped in for her eloping sister and married him. She married him again to solidify her vows. She was wronged by him again and again, even divorced, but still stuck around. She was ejected from the house but worked secretly as a cook so she could serve him. She came back and married him yet again. She was killed, but had plastic surgery and still came back as another woman and married him again. These shows are under no pressure to be realistic; their audiences are willing to believe anything as long as the values and traditions they believe in come out strong after being battered by the impossible plotlines.

This obsession with marriage isn’t off mark. For most people in India, marriage is the central event of their lives. Everybody wants to get married. When you are a child, you live with your parents. When you become an adult, you “settle down” with your life partner. It is considered an aberration to live alone or to even want to.

Here’s something that would make a hilarious but truthful TV spot, on the lines of “I’m going to Disneyland:” a bunch of Indians from every walk of life … beggars, would-be astronauts, village girls, superstars each smile straight at the camera and affirm with thumbs up: “I’m getting married.”

But back to Rakhi’s show. There’s no such thing as too much marriage on Indian TV. So why should Rakhi be left out? As Rakhi tells us, she’s just a simple girl and all she’s ever wanted is to be married happily. Every week, there are surprises. Coy secrets tumble out of Rakhi. The grooms court her and have heart to heart talks with her. As in any reality show, the competitors are gradually eliminated. She ticks off one contestant for kissing her (not on the lips, but still! She’s not that type of girl!) and later eliminates him.

Only a few are left. Among those Rakhi has eliminated:her ex-boyfriend’s best friend who allegedly surprised her by showing up on Day 1 declaring that he had always loved her (you can tell it’s all acting; if Rakhi was really surprised, she’d have beat him up with her chappal). Also gone: a Muslim cop who is married and has kids. Too good to eliminate: a sweet-talker whose mother shows up and tells a stunned Rakhi she will have to give up showbiz and cook and clean once she becomes their bahu.

I doubt Rakhi will end up marrying any of these guys, or that they even want to marry her. Her mother is nowhere in sight, and hardly any Indian, even a trashy publicity hunter like Rakhi would marry without her family’s consent. That’s why I call this a fake reality show.

Rakhi’s fakery doesn’t bother me. I expect nothing less from her. It is the fakery of those you expect more of that should be more bothersome. So much of what is passed off as news in India is manufactured. Rakhi’s tramp-to-true-love shenanigans are at least more honest than anything one sees on the news channels. The constant fare on news channels is politics. Rakhi’s show wins hands down when it comes to intrigue, and she’s cuter than anyone in politics.

Coming to India

We’re leaving, I told myself.

I looked out at the red and yellow heliconia dangling like brilliant earrings in the postcard-sized garden of our Singapore condo. A sunbird groomed and fussed over one flower, then another. We’re leaving all this.

But for where?

We could go back to America and become insomniac mortgage slaves, our lives transmogrified into a whirl of commuting, picking up lumber from Home Depot, cutting our grass, spraying 409 around the house, whipping up plasticky macaroni for our kids, and whizzing them off to daycare and Little League games in the minivan we’ve washed and detailed and vacuumed because we spend so much time sitting and eating in it. We won’t have time for ourselves or for friends, an affordable luxury one gets used to in Asia. In America, parents of young children do not have much of a social life of their own. They wring themselves into their wage work, and squeeze any other time they can fight for into their children. The only friends they have are parents of their kids’ friends.

We could of course go to India. Home is where you go in the end to put your head down, and India is home, too.

I suppose, says a part of me niggardly. All right, I grant that it is more than a small part of me. Bigger than I care to admit sometimes.

It is home. I have tried at various times of my life to spread the branches of my self, pushed them with desire and ambition to places far away. But the kernel of my seed, the roots of my being are here. I hate and love this place intensely.

I didn’t leave India because I hated it. I could have stayed on, although looking back I am glad I did because it set me on the trajectory of finding and making my own happiness.

At the time I left, long before liberalization, there wasn’t very much that was interesting for me to do other than get married like the rest of my cousins, or get a job for not much money because my family didn’t have the connections to help me find something that my grades and ambition deserved.

My professors at the elite Calcutta college I graduated from clamped their lips into polite smiles when they heard I was sacrificing more years of feasting on Elizabethan poetry and Restoration drama for the prospect of studying – if it’s possible to really call it study – journalism in America. Why after the privilege of studying with some of the best literature professors in the country, did I want to soil my hands at some trade school for some dubious qualification?

“Why do you want to study about telegraph poles?” mumbled the head of the English department when I went to pick up a letter of recommendation he had written to a school of mass communication somewhere in the Midwest. I looked at him. He was not being ironic. His face showed concern and disappointment. He was a kind man who had electrified our class with his mournful interpretive readings of Yeats’ tragic drama, transporting us from the dank classroom with its pigeon crap-stained benches. I was taking the jeweled heirloom he had shared with us and was traipsing off unworthily to use it to fix plumbing.

I glanced at the recommendation on my way downstairs. The praise in it made me flinch with guilt and confusion. Was I throwing my life away?

As I stepped away from the Victorian columns and skittered across the street dodging pushcarts and trams and rickshaws and buses, I was grateful for my choice. I didn’t want to worship the embalmed. I wanted to throw myself into the hungry ardor and the sweat of the living as they pushed and elbowed a space out for themselves.

I’m going to fast forward here. I got that master’s degree in journalism. I worked for an American newspaper, traveled to incredible places, met my future husband and married him, had a baby, got burned out at my job, took time off, became a full time mother and had another baby.

Now, two decades, dozens of moves and two children later, I’m back in India.