Skip to main content

Checking Out

I remembered my grocery list too late and Walmart was my only option by then. At the checkout lines that evening was predominantly Afghan. I live close to the neighborhood in my town where refugees arrive are helped by a number of community and faith-based organizations to establish in America. So seeing a bunch of young Afghans at the store was no surprise. There was only one among them that could speak English. The young man who was checking my items out had to match the item to a picture and he truly struggled to get things right. Behind me the line of frustrated and impatient customers was growing. The woman right before me had waited a long time as he struggled with her debit card. The English speaking friend was summoned many times during the process. 

It took forever but I was done. It had been a long day and I was not expecting my quick grocery run to take this long. I am sure the same was true to others there waiting behind me. As I put my things in the car and drove home, it occurred to me how a community gives and withholds at the same time. Many among us are working as volunteers to help these refugees in our town. Yet in this particular interaction with a young man seeking a new life in America as a refugee, no one was feeling kind, giving or charitable. We were just frustrated that a simple task took him as long as it did and with the number of mistakes he made along the way. We were not in the mood to think about the series of events that brought him here. A minute of consideration would highlight not getting the type of tomato right was very many orders of magnitude less wrong than the wrongs of America in that country

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...