Delhi Memories X: St. Peter and Other Gatekeepers

This post is part of a series of posts on my Delhi trip last year.

I had promised a detailed, regular snapshot of my year in India — and what have I given you instead?  Nothing better than a few scraps and fragments, scattered here and there.  Betrayed and lied to, I realize you may never come back to me.  It might not be enough to say that something called “the Occupy movement” has transformed my life since the time of my last post.  Yes, I’ve found someone else…

And yet I’ve returned.  Because India has latched onto my brain and won’t let me go.  I need to tell someone about it.  And I’ll try to be more faithful.

I waved goodbye to you at the doorstep of the National Archives of India, which is well and good because you cannot enter anyway without proper documentation and permission.  Why don’t we linger here a bit?  Gaining entry into such institutions gives as much of an insight into the processes of knowledge production as anything that you might read inside.

First of all, so many bureaucrats lovingly made my research project their own, from the Indian Consulate in New York which issued by visa to various US and Indian border authorities to the Home Department of the Government of India.  What they made of a project entitled “Insurgency, Violence, and Anti-Colonial Resistance” I cannot say, but I certainly didn’t choose the most subtle title.  It was only after being duly stamped and scanned by these gatekeepers of knowledge that I could make my way to the NAI.

In the early days at the Archives I had not let learned how to get through the gates of the compound—surrounded by tea-drinking policemen with long rifles and big mustaches—if I got there before the wizened and silent old man who is supposed to issue the pass.   The Archives might be open, but if you don’t have your official pass from the Home Department, nothing will get you past the gates.  This St Peter of the NAI must have signed your paper and entered your name into his ledger, skillfully copying your information at the exact same moment that you enter it onto the form, reading your handwriting upside down. How many years has he sat there, entering name after name so diligently?  Researches from all over the country and the world, laborers working that day in the compound (who often either signed with a mark, or have a supervisor sign them in), and all others who did not have some sort of permanent identification queue up outside that office.

No matter how long the line, no one could force St. Peter to fill out the form before he had completed (deliberately, methodically) his daily routine.  I can see him now: he slowly comes up to the padlocked office, brings out his big ring of keys and opens the door, takes off his jacket and places it on the hook, walks back to the desk and sits down, turns on his small fan, if appropriate, produces a thick, dusty ledger which slams on the desk with a cloud-creating thwack, opens it up to the right page, places the forms in front of the lines of eyes, watching him impatiently now, and taps once or twice to tell you he’s ready.

These were the early days.  Later, I discovered how to get through on my own terms.  A smile and a nod to the policemen who had seen you there before, a tug on the official-looking badge hanging on your neck (who cared that it only indicated you were a parent at your kids’ school), a brisk walk with your head held high indicating you’re a man of some importance (underline and bold on “man”) – all of these were sufficient.  But you couldn’t be arrogant about it, and you had to accept the offer, once in a while, of tea and ‘interrogation’ (Where are you from? Why’s your Hindi so bad?  How much are you paying for rent, and why not move to another place?  How many kids do you have? ).  And you had to know what day it was and adjust your behavior accordingly: a few weeks before days like Republic Day, the place would go into lockdown mode, new cops would rotate in, and even the ones who knew would act officious.

Can I emphasize enough that whatever informalities developed not a single rupee passed from my hand to theirs?

Since I’m at the compound anyway I might as well tell you about it a bit more.  As we all discovered over time, sharing information with newcomers to the NAI, there were two main eating places: the canteen and the dhaba, just outside the side gate (the one leading to the Krishi Bhavan bus stop and Central Secretariat metro station).  Both really inexpensive, both very tasty, both liable to you a little sick every say, sixth meal or so.  In other words, a good deal.

The ‘bread-omelets’ at the canteen – well, I remember them every time I saturate my bland, US omelets in salt and pepper.  And the chutney that they give with the samosas at the dhaba—my god, if you never understood why the treatment of “ear, nose, and throat” are often combined in medical practice  you would after tasting some of this.  That chutney sears through your system like a wildfire, and begins an entire cycle: you go for more, you get stomach upset after the 6^th time, and then once you’re recovered, you go back for more.

Remember: the fresh samosas at the dhaba come in around 3.  Don’t go before; the old oil reduces the rate of upset stomach to once every 4 or 5 meals.

Can you see what just happened?  Each entry gets so long, so focused on small things, that you feel like you can’t take the time to write more regularly.  What to do?  You begin to talk about one thing and get overwhelmed by the significances of the minute images and incidents that are associated with it.  But this was India for me, a series of experiences in which every moment stood out in rich detail.

Delhi Memories IX: Starting Research

This post is part of a series of posts on my Delhi trip last year.

Delhi High Court was bombed on Wednesday, killing 11 and injuring over 70.  Deep sympathies to the victims and their families.

***

Sometime in last August last year, I became well enough and we became settled enough to begin the project for which we had come to India in the first place: research!

My basic idea, in brief, was to study Indian representations and narratives of the 1857 Revolt as they have changed over time, from the 19th century to the anticolonial struggle in the 20th to the postcolonial period.  As I wrote in a post last year, I was motivated by the need to contest current ideas about “insurgency” and “counter-insurgency” that act as if they are neutral terms when, in fact. they are quite politically charged.  In addition, while many studies exist on the impact of 1857 on the British imagination, I felt there was a gap on studies on the complex associations of 1857 in Indian consciousness.

I was intrigued, one might say, by the process through which an uprising that was loathed by elite founders of the Indian National Congress in 1885 has became heralded, in mainstream nationalism today, as “the first Indian war of Independence.”  And this too while embracing the notion that India’s was a non-violent revolution!  My aim, even before doing the research, was not simply to point out the tensions in such thinking but to investigate how it had come about.

I quickly located three broad areas where I could investigate Indian voices on 1857.   The first, and most obvious and accessible, was what we might call the nationalist archive from the 20th century movements.  Newspapers, histories, speeches, plays, novels — all of these were relatively straight-forward to access, many from the Nehru Memorial Library, where Iw as an affiliated scholar.  Though limited in my knowledge of Indian languages, I could still find plenty of texts to investigate, both primary and secondary.

Next, and more difficult, was the task of locating 19th century voices.  Here, the fact that Indians has been crushed militarily and politically, and were subject to draconian laws after 1857, had everything to do with the lack of sources–not to speak of sources in English!  The few texts available turned out to be loyalist Indians, paraded about by the British and made available in India while other perspectives were suppressed.  And so one of the key sources for finding 19th century traces of Indian voices were the British colonial archives themselves.  Reading against the grain of the documents, I felt, I could try to derive some sense of Indian rebel thought and action.  For this I gained admittance to the National Archives of India.

Finally, I wanted to have an experiential component to my research.  Between the ongoing TV serial on the Rani of Jhansi, one of the 1857 heroes, the presence of sites in Delhi and surrounding areas relevant to 1857, and the currency of the event in the present moment, I wanted to get an understanding of what it meant to folks today.  Road trips and interviews, I thought, would be useful for this aspect of the study.

The research itself was to take me in many new directions.  And yet these three basic approaches remained generally the same.  I decided to begin with the most unfamiliar work, the National Archives of India.

And so one day, with great trepidation, I set forth to do my first bit of archival work ever, entering the world of historians, sociologists, economists, and other fantastical beings…

Delhi Memories VIII: The Politics of Cars

This post is part of a series of posts on my Delhi trip last year.

“No Honking!  Kutte Bhi Bina Vajah Nahin Bhonkte!”

Even dogs don’t bark without a reason!

If you’re not used to Indian city streets and the incessant honking that is their soundtrack, you’ll probably laugh when you see such signs posted outside the gates of colonies (residential areas) in South Delhi.

Depending on your bent of mind—or your mood at that moment—you might think something like: “At least someone has some civic sense in this country.”  Or, more charitably, “Yes, this honking is a problem and it’s good that people are aware of it.”  Which pretty much amounts to the same thing.

Around this time last year, I had been in India for a little over a month, and I too was firmly ensconsed in this sort of mindset, along with the neighborhood “welfare association” which had authorized such signs.

At least in terms of their content.  I had a problem with the metaphor being used, revealing a deep classism and snobbery in comparing drivers with dogs.  I also wondered whether the makers of the sign actually lived in Delhi, since the local community of street dogs often howled for absolutely no reason outside our windows in the middle of the night.

Still, such signs made me smile because they seemed to resist the dominant politics of cars in Delhi: the wealthier the family, the bigger the car; the bigger the car, the louder the horn, and the less regard for the many other vehicles and pedestrians populating the road, which was itself usually too narrow to accommodate these new, monstrous goodies of globalization.

The neighborhood we lived in is a case in point.  Built in the 1970s or so, Gulmohar Park is much less swanky than other South Delhi colonies, like Sunder Nagar, Nizamuddin East, Vasant Vihar, etc., which are themselves a far cry from the flat cities in Gurgoan.  Yet, GP is chock full of journalists, lawyers, doctors, and businessmen who have redone their houses, often renting them out, and have jumped headlong into the new consumer market.  This also means getting bigger and bigger cars—despite the fact that the roads are (in my view) far too small for them.

Owners driving the cars themselves are often much worse than folks hired as drivers.  But to some extent the arrogance goes with the car itself.  I’ve seen drivers who have very little—living and sleeping in shacks, sending most of what they make to their families in Bihar or Haryana—turn into manics behind the wheel of an Innova or Pajero, bearing down on elites in their jogging suits, out for their evening walks.

So in the early months I kept getting into angry spats with drivers who got too close to me.  Standing out in the middle of the road and refusing to move.  Yelling at people and pointing to the kid they almost hit.  People thought I was crazy, and I was a bit.

But like everything else, I later got used to the state of things regarding cars.  Pretty soon, I’d have no problem walking about calmly as cars whizzed by a few inches from my feet.  Some of this had to do with a general acceptance of my shrinking physical space—on lines for recharging the mobile, in the metro, on the bus, on the street.

And a lot had to do with learning how to inhabit a different space, with learning how to move with the flow of the traffic, even as a pedestrian.  By the end of my visit I was able to cross major roads (like Aurobindo Marg) at any point, and at any time, whether or not it was packed with vehicles.  You learn how to do things—use rickshaws as blockers, recognize how various vehicles are moving at different speeds, realize that the fact that most vehicle are stick and not automatic means they can switch gears in a heartbeat, and slow down when needed.

I also got used to the idea that honking was a language, and often used strategically by the better drivers in the absence of street signs and traffic signals.  Some of the best drivers I’ve seen–one Ramavtar comes to mind—could inflect their honking incredibly well, with appropriate variations to convey anything from “I’m at the T and taking a turn” to “Please recognize that I’m passing you,” to “Get me three pakoras and a chai; I’ll be back in three minutes” (ok, strike the last line).

Look, I had a cousin of mine killed in a traffic accident in Gujarat, ten years ago now, and I would never take the question of car safety lightly.  I saw several accidents while in India, at least two of them within the few minutes of their occurrence, with the corpses of victims twisted in unimaginable shapes.  They haunt my memory as I write this.  They take the romance away from some of the incredibly dangerous situations I sometimes found myself in, like the completely crowded rickshaw taxi a friend and I took between Jhansi and Orccha.  It’s fine as long as it’s going; if it got hit by a truck, forget it.

So there are many things that could be better as far as traffic rules, etc.  But the longer I lived there, the more I realized that you can’t just blame individuals who are looking for a way of a situation that is less than ideal.  It’s not about drivers honking and being reckless, it’s about the proliferation of cars without necessary infrastructure, and the power hierarchy represented by car owners.

It’s not without reason that so many South Asian texts use the car as the site for power but also isolation, and the violence of cars as a sign of class disparity.  From Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; from Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines to Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography; cars and the violence they cause are signs of a reckless globalization that tramples non-elites underfoot.

Delhi Memories VII: Schooldays

My kids are off to school tomorrow, starting another year.  But along with all of the adjustments entailed comes a new one: their Central Ohio suburban, public school is worlds away from the international school they attended last year in India, the American Embassy School.

AES pretty much gave shape to our entire stay in India.  Of course, having kids in school at all grounds you in a specific place for a given length of time, for better and for worse.  And this school’s particular schedule for younger children, forcing us to make three trips to school per day, completely transformed our plans about what we could accomplish on the day-to-day level.  In short, we were doing as much balancing of childcare and work as we do in the US, but now with less support and independence.

I’m going to try to put into words some of the sharply contradictory feelings I had about this AES experience, as a way to try to grapple with it.  I realize, however, that there are potential readers of this post, dear friends of mine, who might take some of this the wrong way.  So I ask them to keep at the front of their minds what I always do: ultimately, AES provided the teachers, and exactly the kinds of friends and communities, that our hybrid kids needed in a place where they didn’t know the language and had no family.

Whatever the limitations of going to school at a place that basically feels like an armed camp for the wealthy, sitting in the middle of Chanakyapuri, the embassy district of New Delhi, the fact of the matter is that we and our kids met some amazing people there.  It’s not a coincidence that my younger daughter keeps a photo of one of her AES friends close by; and that my older one is only now getting over leaving her gang of friends and the memories that shared together over the course of a year.

If you’re looking for a really excellent school and curriculum, AES has got to be right up there.  A beautiful campus, complete with an amazing banyan tree in the playground, classrooms with state-of-the art equipment, dedicated and creative teachers, and an overall sense—one that is often trampled out in our test-crazy schools in the US—that education is about encouraging the full development of an individual.

The close-knit nature of the community, mostly American ex-pats in India, provided the right context for the intensive teaching and learning environment.  And yet there were also many other nationalities represented in the school: British (including British desis), Ethiopian, Korean, Israeli, South African, etc., as well as Indians.  Their presence depended on a mix of things: a desire for American-style education, the lack of space in other international schools, the influx of particular groups in India under globalization (Israeli, Korean), etc.  And so the students and families represented an interesting diversity in terms of nationality and ethnicity, even while being under the American rubric.

And yet in some key ways AES was not diverse at all.  For one, as we found out the hard way, this was not just a school for international students but for elite international students.  By “elite” I mean rich and/or well-placed.  The cost of attending AES is as much as paying for private school in the US, which means that it shot a hole through our finances.  Worse than this, we found that only a tiny minority were paying out of pocket like us; the rest had embassies, corporations, and others to pick up the tab.

To tell you the truth, governments and businesses are way ahead of academic institutions when giving their people international experience.  Whereas the academy talks a lot about global thinking, etc., we have to scrounge for money and time off.  My one year in India, with grants that are quite insufficient to cover the real costs, is nevertheless seen, among academics, as a coup.  But there we met people on 2- or 3-year stints and supported in terms of housing and childcare.

In any case, the material basis of the AES community translated into a social environment that sometimes felt like the old colonial clubs described in literary and scholarly texts.   There’s a great scene in George Orwell’s Burmese Days describing how the British would get together in their whites-only club and vent about the Indian weather, the Indian people, the need for a form hand to train the natives, etc.  There were conversations I overheard at the Open Hand, the on-campus café with its excellent omelets, that reminded me strongly of these.  The high stone walls, the high-level security everywhere, the insular atmosphere gave a tacit license, I often felt, to think about India in the sorts of Orientalist ways that international travel is supposed to contest.

And it makes sense that this should be the case, right?  Their purpose in India is largely for making profits and gaining political foot-holds, and places like AES become sites for such people to “take a break” from India.  There’s a way in which the folks who go abroad from the West need to be able to adjust to new places, and that’s well and good.  We often felt like we could not handle the sense of displacement as long as many of these people did.  But they often make these adjustments, as I saw at close hand, by building huge walls–physical and mental–between themselves and the place they happen to be in at the moment.  It’s one thing to look for something familiar in order to get a sense of home; it’s another to actively shun the place you’ve come to.

As the narrator of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines says, there is a sort of ex-pat who goes around the world but actually hardly moves, remaining trapped in his/her own mind and preconceptions.

But in the middle of all these complications, we found the right kinds of people—those that bond with you instantly, and make you think, when you’ve left, “If I ever lose touch with them, shame on me.”  These down-to-earth folks were from all over, including Africa, Great Britain, El Salvador, India, Pakistan, Spain and, yes, the US of A.—and shared the same goals of thinking and living past the boundaries created, like it or not, by being an ex-pat.  These friends enriched our lives, and extended our horizons.

Could there have been another place in Delhi for an American Desi family like ours?  Probably.  But such a place would also be a quite rarefied and elite environment, I’m told, and just a different kind of elite space.  In any case, nothing ultimately could have beat the smooth transitions, in and out, that AES provided.  And the relationships we made there: priceless.

Delhi Memories VI: Facebook to the Rescue

We survived quite well without Facebook for many years.  And yet it’s quickly becoming part of my life–to the extent that I can’t imagine how we filled up time without all of this talking/typing.

In any case, FB helped me re-establish my link to communities at home.  Until about August 18 last year I rarely left the house, just trying to get as much rest as possible.  I was improving pretty rapidly, in fact, and getting stronger every day.

But my friend networks were all in the US, and they got the news at various points, in various ways.  Those on Facebook received updated links of my status, including the exact figure of my platelet count.  I remember thinking very clearly that if something horrible did happen, I wanted to make sure the maximum people knew about it!  I also remember thinking how morbid and exhibitionist I was for thinking this way.

For all that, Facebook gave me an outlet for sharing and exchanging information.  It was the conveyor of good wishes from worried friends, notes that made me feel relaxed and cared for.

One close friend wrote: “dear Pranav,i didn’t think to look on your FB page till now… i didn’t realize you’d be posting on here… (doh).  hope you got word from your dad that my dad and I called to see how you were doing…am so glad to see that the worst is over, and that you’re well enough to appreciate the silver lining [i.e., weight loss]“

and another,

” sending much love from brooklyn. my whole fam has been v. worried.”

and a third, whose expression of concern was well-meant though far from reassuring,

“Oh my god! Thats terrible. A friend of mine had that in Thailand once.  Dengue is pretty nasty. Hope you get better soon. “

All of these messages kept me going, and by August 18 I was able to finally get out to see my kids’ school for the first time.

Delhi Memories V: Break-Bone Fever

The scariest part about getting dengue fever is the awareness that what you considered to be a small, commonplace incident — getting a mosquito bite in the monsoon — could actually lead to your death.

Melodramatic? A bit too much self-pity? Well, I am that guy who gets a little sick and becomes a burden on everyone because he’s absolutely sure it’s the end. But this is completely different.

This is about actually having a disease that, if your platelet count goes too low and if you don’t get a proper transfusion, will lead to hemorrhaging (from eyes, nose) and then death.

The whole time is a blur for me. For a few days after the diagnosis I was just lying in bed, completely wiped out from a fever that would not go lower than 104, and unable to eat any solid food. I lost about 18 pounds over that period. Along with this was intense bodily pain — it’s why some called dengue fever “break-bone fever.”

In the meantime, with my dad at home, Mytheli was getting the kids settled in to school — going to the open house, getting all their school materials, taking them in on their first day, and all that. Then she’d get back and start working on us settling into the flat, with towels and bedsheets and soap and all that. She will never forget those days, worried about me, about the kids adjusting to a new school and a new country — and what to do if things got worse.

Research — the purpose for which we had come to India — couldn’t have been further from our minds.

After the fever goes down, as the doctor told us, the worst part of the disease actually begins: the attack on the platelets. Every other day, someone came in from the hospital to take some blood; by the evening we would get a report emailed to us. (I told you it was a state-of-the-art hospital.) Luckily for me, my platelet counts stayed up, I didn’t need a transfusion, and within a month I was able to get back to my usual routine, with a few hours extra rest.

So this is my story — but what about the many others in Delhi who were contracting the disease but had no facilities for checking platelet counts or getting transfusions? As I wrote about in a post last August, there was speculation in Delhi that the massive digging taking place for the Commonwealth Games and the construction work being done for the Delhi Metro had led to conditions for the proliferation of the aedes mosquito, and of dengue.

It’s worth knowing that dengue is relatively new in Delhi. One of the many benefits of globalization.

***

Sometimes I think that the dengue fundamentally shifted our mindsets. On the one hand, like all that happened there, it brought us all really close together as a family. Over the months we developed such a bond, and I think this dengue was at the heart of it. I don’t get sick much, and the kids are just not used to seeing me flat on my back like that. So they were really worried during the illness, and thrilled when it passed.

On the other hand, I think dengue also made us cautious, perhaps too cautious. Besides fear of getting bit again (which would apparently be very bad for me) we felt the kids could get it anytime, as the monsoon was still on several months. At that time, at least, there was a certain sense of “getting through the year.” Of course we all got mosquito bites many times after that. Odomos is not all powerful.

It would take us some time before we felt comfortable again after this shock, so early in our stay. Luckily enough, I seemed to have a mild form of the disease and recovered quickly. As a few weeks went by, we started getting comfortable in the new place, we meeting friends and, beginning our research.

When I was in the middle of it all, my former prof and dear friend Bill Keach said he looked forward to the day when the dengue was only a distant memory. It was hard to even imagine such a day then. Unbelievably, though, it did come at last.

Delhi Memories IV: A Timely Visitor

On a humid, monsoon evening last year, on August 5, I was standing outside the domestic terminal of the India Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, waiting for my dad’s plane to land.

When I first heard that my dad would visit us during his short trip to India, I wasn’t sure about the timing. We were going to be just settling in, the kids’ school was going to start the next week, and we would just be adjusting. Not the best time for a visitor.

But as I stood there munching on some Kurkure, I realized how thrilled I was, and how great it would be to see a familiar face. Things had gotten pretty tough. For one, the apartment had decided to fall apart (the tube light over the bed fell down and smashed; once water was gushing out of the electrical sockets in the back room; a mouse had been making our home his/hers, etc.). But more important than that, we had received some serious bad news of the previous day.

As required for all foreign visitors planning to stay in India for more than six months, we had tried to register with the Foreign Resident Registration Office (FRRO) the day before—but we failed and had to endure a horrible experience.

Here’s what I wrote about the FRRO in a blog post last year: “I had the pleasure of spending four hours or so at the FRRO office — which were ultimately fruitless Though it was eye-opening to see that this office–where all foreign nationals staying for more than six months need to register–had a separate line just for Afghan nationals. Leaving aside the larger question of how Afghan nationals are treated once they’re here, seeing their faces reminded me of how removed we in the US are from the people who are impacted by the wars that our government wages around the world.”

Pretty accurate. An educational experience. But it skips over the bad parts.

The worst thing about the FRRO office was not the multiple lines, the long waits in each line, the lack of clarity on procedure, the filthy bathrooms, the mosquitoes, the lack of access to a photo copier, etc. These were troublesome, but bearable, even when dealing with the kids.

The absolute worst thing was the complete uncertainty about whether, after all that waiting, the work we had come to finish would be finished at all. There was an arbitrariness about the procedure, and no way to tell which form would set off which officer.

In other words, it was like going to the DMV.

Our application was denied, finally, because it wasn’t printed on the appropriate “stamp paper.” (When we finally got the FRRO permits several weeks later, it was because we prevailed over an officer trying to find fault with a form that another had already approved. No one even looked twice at the lease.)

And then there was a politics of it all. When one of the officers and I got into an altercation about the procedure, she immediately pulled out the nationalist card: “You people come from America and think that you can do whatever you like. But you must show some respect for the laws of this country.”

For a number of reasons I can’t go into, the FRRO debacle made us wonder whether we would have to move to another flat, a daunting task on many levels.

And so it was fantastic to see my dad as he walked through those doors. It was nice to see the scenarios reversed – the immigrant was returning to India in order to visit his son. And yet I felt myself reverting to childhood, trying to show my dad how much I had learned about India now, how happy my kids were here, how Indian I had become. It was like I was seeking his approval, to say yes, it’s worked out. You’ve lived in the US but kept your Indianness, and instilled it in your kids, too.

Little did any one of us know how much we would need him, and how quickly all other questions would shrink into insignificance.

The next day, August 6, started out smoothly enough.

We all piled into Mohan’s car and went to visit Rajghat, the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated. It was a blazing hot day, and the Rajghat pilgrimage is full of long, oshadeless walks, made all the worse when you have to walk the final stretch without shoes. But it was all overshadowed by the beautiful and serene black slab memorial, recalling the long and torturous road to an independence that was itself quite incomplete.

A wonderful lunch at Sharavana Bhavan on Jan Path followed, and by chance we came at the best time to get there: right before the 1:30 hour when the place is absolutely packed with customers. This was the first of many visits to this restaurant, head and shoulders above any other South Indian place around. Just thinking of those dosais and utthapams and chutneys make my mouth water.

Stuffed but ready to continue the trip (my dad had to leave again on August 8), we decided to continue our Gandhi theme with a visit to the “Gandhi Smriti” at Birla House. That’s where Gandhi was fatally shot by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fundamentalist, who felt Gandhi was too soft on Muslims. Gandhi Smriti (on Tees Janvari Marg) features some excellent multi-media exhibits that bring the time period to life, representing an amazing collaboration between historians, curators, and technicians.

And then it hit me. I had been going around with the others, feeling a little head-achy and tired, but at one point I just sat myself down and told the others we needed to either get home or to a hospital right away. My temperature was soaring, and I could barely sit up.

We dropped the kids off home (with my dad) and went to Max Saket to get a test for Dengue fever. At the office, the doctor took me through a long list of symptoms, and I happily replied to all them in the negative. With each question I felt I was closer and closer to a simpler, manageable, diagnosis.

But at the end of the questions the doctor said: “We’ll take the test, but I’m sure it will come out positive. You clearly have Dengue.” What? “You see,” he explained, “Dengue strikes without giving any other symptoms; when I saw you had no other ones, I knew it was Dengue.”

The results proved the doctor right. I had Dengue fever. And I had not a single clue about what it was, what it did, and how to cure it. But illnesses don’t wait for you to figure them out, and I started getting weaker as the thermometer remained stuck on 104 and above.

How fortunate we were to have another adult in the house at this time, when we had such a crisis right at the beginning of our trip? To have someone who spoke Hindi well and could help get things done? And who already knew our kids? My dad promptly cleared his whole schedule, to be there as long as necessary.

And so, as it turned out, we weren’t just reverting back to the parent-child relationship, we were just experiencing another iteration of it. As I learned, a parent’s responsibility is as long-lasting as their love.

Delhi Memories III: Class Matters

By August 1 last year, less than a week into our India trip, we were getting a taste of a very different life than what we’re used to. For better and for worse.

On one level there was the quite unfamiliar feeling of being considered wealthy–mainly because of the dollars to rupees conversion. By then we had moved into our South Delhi flat, into what was a relatively affluent and quite green neighborhood.

As we were to learn, what we lost in rent we saved in terms of our excellent location given that we were 5-7 minutes away from the Green Park Metro Station, scheduled to open in September 2010. And being in that neighborhood meant having a nice park with swings and a jungle gym 2 minutes, away, places to walk and exercise, and safety in an unfamiliar city that, friends told us, was suffering from some instances of crime in light of a widening class gap. We fell in love with our neighborhood. Nevertheless, living there situated us in particular ways in relation to others.

The second big adjustment was the idea of being the employer of domestic workers. It was very clear to us that if we did not hire the person who usually worked in that flat, we would be taking away someone’s job. Not that we hired “Nazneen” to clean the house and cook dinner for us only out of altruism. From what we heard about the dust in Delhi, we needed some help, and having a local person cook meant we got to eat all sorts of local foods that we might have missed out on. Still, it was quite awkward to be paying wages to someone else, and to be taking on some of the responsibilities implied in this relationship. Even though we would talk together relatively freely, the relationship of money caused a barrier that felt insurmountable.

I’ve always subscribed to the idea that workers across national borders, regardless of the specific kind of work that we do, have a common interest in reorganizing society around human need and not profit for the tiny minority. I continue to subscribe to it. But nothing challenges this idea more than actually having to negotiate and pay a wage to someone, month in, month out.

With our driver, let’s call him Mohan, the relationship was a little different. But let’s back up a minute. A driver!?! Yes, sir, we had a driver, and this gives you a sense of how cheap labor remains in India. Rather than buying a car for such a short time, it seemed like the best arrangement for allowing us to negotiate our complicated schedules with one car. Better yet, Mohan owned his own car, and took care of all the maintenance from what we paid him. This also changed out relationship: it felt a bit more like we were paying him for specific services rather than hiring him as an employee. While the structure of our relationship created distance, my regular conversations with Mohan became a staple of our time there.

How can I explain what this situation was like? In the case of Nazneen, even after a conversation in which we gave our opinions as equals, it was impossible for her to sit on the same level as us, whether on the table or on the sofa. If we insisted, she would get agitated, as if we were bending the rules too much–or even secretly displeased with her work. Mohan, who made about 4 times hat Nazneen did (through he was full-time and she was part-time), was much less constrained, and yet the hierarchy was quite solid.

We made small gestures in terms of having our kids play and eat together and all that, causing some surprise and even amusement. But at the end of the day, all of these felt like little more than acts of noblesse oblige. It was frustrating to see so starkly the power differential underlying all of our interactions.

One final example of class dynamics and how we were situated there as Americans: hospitals. Towards the end of July, our older daughter seemed to come down with the cough that triggers her mild, seasonal asthma, We decided to use the opportunity to check out the hospital, and we were recommended to Max Hospital in Saket. What amazing, state-of-the-art facilities! And that we could pay for even without insurance, while the vast majority of others were crammed into public hospitals like AIIMS, if they were lucky, or Safdarjung Hospital where, according to Mohan, people were packed in like animals.

It was on one of these visits to the hospital in late July, while we waited in the lobby for a spate of torrential monsoon rain to end, that I noticed an announcement about the symptoms of Dengue fever. It was a bit unnerving to see what I then regarded as a deadly tropical disease being discussed so matter-of-factly; the announcement insisted that early detection was central to stopping what was already appearing to be a rise in Dengue cases in Delhi.

And so I mentally prepared myself to learn the symptoms of Dengue in case it would even strike any of us. Little did I know that my body had already hosted an eager Aedes mosquito, attracted to my foreign taste. I was thus, in fact, not really readying myself for a future but for taking on what was already within me, just waiting for the right time to make its presence known.

Delhi Memories II: That first week

Week 1 in Delhi presented some unique challenges.

First of all we were at the house of a friend who was kind enough to allow us to occupy it with our bags and kids and jet-lag needs until things were settled in the new place.

Then we had to get used to the whole dependency thing: no vehicle, no phone, no clue about where to go or what to do.

This came along with a certain challenge on the level of identity. We were among the India experts back home, the ones to lead a study abroad program–so we’d better be calm and collected about all challenges, right? We had never lived in India with kids before, but it was gonna be a piece of cake, right?

In other words, it was challenging to live with the fact that certain tensions persisted on the level of national and cultural identity–tensions which we had grown up with but thought we had more or less transcended.

Well, we started getting settled eventually. Pretty quickly, I learned the directions from Mathura Road (at the Ring Road intersection) to the Yusuf Sarai and Gautam Nagar area (where our flat was). We got mobile phones at South Ex II with one Surinder, the kids tried their first McDonald’s Happy Meal ever (they’re friendly to vegetarians there), and we discovered a place we’d visit often, the Full Circle bookstore.

On my third or fourth night, our host gave me the opportunity to attend the book launch of Mahmood Farooqui’s ‘Besieged’, a wonderful book piecing together the story of what it looked like in Delhi during the five months of it’s liberation from the British during the 1857 uprising. As I had come to India precisely to study 1857, this book–which I had just picked up the day before at Full Circle–couldn’t have come at a better time.

Not only did I get to meet Mahmood that night, but I even had the honor of having Shahid Amin, whose work I had just been reading, sign a copy of his brilliant book on Chauri Chaura: ‘Event, Metaphor, Memory.’  In Amin’s hands, Chauri Chaura is transformed; known in nationalist histories only as the violent event that led Gandhi to call off the mass Non-Co-operation Movement, it becomes the site of a contest between various strategies of fighting British and elite rule.

It was a wonderful monsoon night in Mehrauli.  I was happy and curious…and could not yet hear the quiet buzzing of a tiny, persistent creature with black and white stripes on its legs, that, we can say in hindsight, had been persistent in trying to make my acquaintance.

Delhi Memories I: July 26 2010

…we stumbled out of the Delhi airport, tired, confused, pulling three carts of suitcases, and not knowing what the next 11 months would look like. Would the kids adjust? Would we? Neither of us knew Delhi well at all, and had no relatives there.

I remember thinking all of this as we stood in the darkness and humidity with our bags, waiting for a taxi.  I had the best Hindi of all of us, and that’s not saying much as I barely had the confidence to speak.

With help from the AIIS office and some dear friends we made or through that first week, just getting acclimatized. We barely had time to get settled before some big shocks came.