12:00 AM, Saturday morning - Downtown with a big group of friends, dancing to the newest beats, and just generally having a great time in Austin, TX. Maybe the dresses and skirts are a little form fitting, and a few inches shorter than I would normally see on campus at the University of Texas at Austin, but the downtown nightlife is a completely different world. What we are wearing somehow manages to border on conservative. A few drinks, bars, and a long walk later, we leave in the mass exodus of students to go back to West Campus. The next morning will inevitably be a bleary eyed late awakening at a friend’s place.
Three hours earlier- Standing in a small crowd of similarly dressed Indians at the Austin Hindu Temple for the big Navratri celebration, I clasp my hands piously before my chest and murmur Sanskrit slokas . I comfortably defer to the elderly as they make their way to kneel before the statues, and nod my head shyly in greeting to the others standing around me. Namaskar, namaskar. I can close my eyes and breathe in the scent of incense, sandalwood, ghee, and other puja items. They mingle together and evoke a sense of security and peace in me, helping me serenely float away in my adoration of Maa Durga.
A year and a half ago, 4:00 PM in the afternoon- It was a cold and dreary day, and my world was crashing down around me in that dramatic way everything seems to when you’re young. I wept dramatically to the turtles at the turtle pond on campus. My organic chemistry skills were causing my dreams of being a physician to slowly swirl down the drain. Were they even my dreams? Maybe I was just crying because I did not know what the hell I was doing.
I guess I should have figured out I had problems when I started talking to the turtles in Hinglish.
One week before the Organic Chemistry disaster- I had finally and happily started an official relationship with a really good friend of mine. Everything else was going to hell in a handbasket, but at least the love life was flourishing!
I had the best luck in that I was able to date my best friend, someone who had no false illusions about who I was. As a teammate from Taekwondo for two years, he had seen me bloody from injuries and on medication, exhausted and disheveled from all night study sessions, and at my best for festivals and parties.
He was an all-American, blonde-haired, blue eyed, hunting, cowboy boot wearing, more Western than you would believe, nice and intelligent kind of guy. He would be an Indian parent’s dream, an electrical engineer from a good family- if he was Indian. This is where the problems started. It was in some very important ways a one-way relationship, and I felt helpless, torn between my respect for my family’s standards of behavior and my desire to have a lasting relationship in the American sense.
Two years and eight months after the beginning of the relationship, I finally let go. It was the third to go by the wayside after a long attachment, and by far the most revealing. The only thing I could conclude was that I was too Indian for all of this “dating phating”. How can you go spend Thanksgiving with another person’s family AND travel with a boy alone?! Besharam! I discovered no matter how hard I tried, I could not separate my individual values from those of my family.
Though I met his family and spent some time with them the way Americans do in dating relationships, I could not introduce him to mine or even attempt the typical dating steps, like family holidays, vacations, or even just hanging out. To his family I was a sort of phantom girlfriend, and even after I told mine about my relationship, they vehemently denied its existence.
He and I claimed that the distance between his graduate school and our homes was the major issue in our parting, but most people will say that distance can be overcome by two mature individuals. The truth is that long distances become gaping chasms when they are aggravated by cultural differences.
Now, I have come full circle back to this question : Why? Why can’t I just fit in? Why can’t I be happy with one culture or the other? I was born in the bread basket of this country, surrounded by Americans, and for all twenty-two years of my life, I have been raised in America. But I am not American. And try as I might, being raised with Indian cultural values does not make me Indian either.
This one deep insecurity plagues me, the feeling of being alone and apart from everyone I am around, be they Indian or American. I used to just brush aside the idea of an identity issue - I told myself that it was a fabricated problem for people who were just confused about everything. Or maybe their parents did an awful job of raising them.
I can party with the best of them down at 6th Street on a weekend, and then go to the temple the next day, without a qualm. I can jam out to Girl Talk, Cee Lo Green, and Pitbull the same way I can to Jagjit Singh, Anup Jalota, and new Bollywood artists. I can celebrate Christmas with the same fervor that I celebrate Diwali and Janmashtami! I can tell you the history of India from North to South, century after century. I can explain all the traditions of Hindus and Indian culture, and the majority of Jain, Sikh, and Islamic customs too. I can quote to you from the Bible and tell you about the founding of America.
But there are some things in life that are just hard for my American and Indian sides to meet on:
* Making sex jokes, swearing, or drinking around your parents.
* Dressing in clothes that are not “modest”
* Realizing that you’re expected to be a part of your birth family until you’re married into another one
* Avoiding eating beef- even though you’re strictly historically not obliged, but you were raised that way. Or maybe even avoiding meat altogether because you’ve been raised vegetarian, prevalent in traditional Hindu families.
* Not wearing shoes in the house, which you wouldn’t think is unique, but it is.
In a relationship, all of the little things add up.The differences in routines are also differences in perspectives. They suddenly magnify hundred fold, and you are no longer comfortable in your own skin. You feel absolutely bipolar about your habits with your American counterparts and those with your Indian ones.
I did not even realize that I would suffer culture shock when I met my boyfriend’s family. My goodness! The entire family attitude is so much more straightforward. The idea of independent children and adulthood is a concept that just does not exist until you are married in Indian culture. Even then, I am not entirely sure you are “independent”. In American families, once you are eighteen or nineteen, suddenly your parents treat you like an adult and become your friends as well as your parents. I cannot honestly say the same of Indian families. Specifically in mine, there are some things you never talk about or do around your parents and older family friends.
There is an unfortunate burden, or maybe an amazing gift, that comes with being a first generation American: that of merging two cultures. Three long term relationships, hundreds of conversations about compromise, and that aching emptiness later, I am slowly resigning myself to that outsider status, and seeing the unique perspective it gives. But sometimes, when Indians think you’re American and Americans think you’re Indian, there is not much place left for you to just be comfortable.
So, why do you care? You might not. I did not care about any of the contradictions until I was over a year into the relationship, in love, and really confused. Or maybe, better than most, you have already resolved these issues, and figured out how to be Indian American.
Twenty-two years young, and I’ve almost given up on the American model of dating and relationships. How can I embrace it and Indian traditions at the same time? Until I can answer the question of who I am, I cannot imagine another relationship. It seems important to find the answer.
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