Skip to main content

Tracing Roots

I have never enjoyed visiting Kolkata - not while I lived in India or now that I don't. It was a like eating a bitter pill - the thing you had to do so you could spend time with people you cared about. That feeling has stood the test of time. Every morning, I walked with my father to the local market where he buys fish and vegetables. The banter with the fishmonger and vegetable sellers has not changed at all. There is some gentle teasing and haggling over prices - both sides know if it is low-stakes and part of the performative process of buying things in the marketplace. He knows many of the vendors by name - they in turn remember he has a daughter who is visiting for a couple of weeks and that he has a grandchild. One of the fruit sellers promised to get me jamun (Indian blackberry) before I left. He knows the tree that he'll need to climb to get me about five hundred grams of fruit. 

L gave me is WhatsApp number so I could call ahead and make sure he had the fruit for me. S, my father's favorite vegetable seller is making sure I get to try all the local delicacies I have missed for years - things that are so niche to the Bengali experience that it would be hard to explain the draw to anyone else. Back at home, I have taken over my mother's tiny kitchen to try my hand and cooking very complex meals, feeding family and friends. It has become a point of pride for me that my cooking is authentic and does not involve my usual creative leaps with recipes. I am back at my roots, being Bengali and nothing else. There is a certain joy in that act of simplification in my identity. As much as I detest Kolkata as a place, I care deeply about my cultural identity of which Kolkata does form an integral and unshakable part. 

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...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...