The grey-purple of the evening sky and a bridge rising up to usher vehicles across the tiny strips of water connecting Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain. It was beautiful.
Just as soon as my parents got their internet hooked up in Chennai, my father dialed up Ye Olde VatulBloge and now checks it each time he’s online. So, the inevitable phone call came last night in which Dad asked, “Why haven’t you posted anything since the 22nd?”
Oh, I’ve created a lot of posts, but they’re all sitting in my head, whirling and tumbling down my creek of consciousness, being sorted until the rough edges are chipped off and the pieces fall into place. Regular blogging would also happen when not in constant physical transit since the beginning of November (Las Vegas, Houston, Houston, D in Orlando, Ohio, Wisconsin, Wisconsin again …). Add to that the slow-as-molasses-in-a-tin-can-out-on-frozen-Green-Bay, ~24K internet connection up at my father-in-law’s and there you have it.
Patti (Grandma) looked the worst I’ve ever seen. Her weight has plummeted because she doesn’t eat more than 300 calories a day. So delicate, so fragile, so old and so heart-wrenchingly sincere in her affection even through all of her pain that it breaks my heart and those of my parents, uncles and aunts to sit there and make happy talk with her. More than my Patti waning, their mother is going away before their eyes and there’s nothing any one can do about it but make her comfortable, ensure that she eats and takes her medication and love on her. How powerful are we really when we can’t stop time and keep someone like her from wilting? Death is not the problem, it’s the dying that’s so humiliating to self and loved ones. It doesn’t help that I’ve begun to think that things don’t happen for a reason, and that that line of reasoning is a cop-out to make ourselves feel better, to rationalize and categorize before we crash to earth like Hitchhiker’s sperm whale. We are what we are, a short-lived ball of ego and feelings in pursuit of the non-existent glove. This is what we are to come to terms with.
Not all is frightful, though. My beautiful Grandma (and she is still beautiful and regal through her illness) lit up when she saw me. Immediately, she launched into stories from when Thatha (Grandpa) and she kept me when I was a toddler (while my parents and brother went to Disneyland and Europe and lied to me that I was there but hiding in every single picture and no, I’m not bitter!) and I’d say the darndest things. Her favorite is mimicking my two-year-old Tamil as I described the various lights while standing at the window of our Madras home – the lighthouse, the radio towers, the streetlights and the lamp outside Dr. Parthasarathy’s office which miraculously stayed on even through the city’s frequent thunderstorms and brown-outs. How I would fasten a long towel to my cropped hair and pretend it was my long black tresses, which I would grow on eating a lot of spinach, naturally. And she never tires of telling everyone in earshot how I may have grown in size, but my face looks just like when I was five. Hey, forever young is not a bad deal when considering family mortality. What a memory the woman has! With her head lowered in pain, she gave us story after story of her grandfather and father who owned textile warehouses in Kumbakonam, how much stock they had, what they made, who they sold things to. The woman can talk while in the throes of distress, a trait obviously passed on to her daughter and granddaughter, and she’s a treasure trove of stories. If we lose her, we lose our connection to that past, history and traditions, too. We lose our roots, our context. Maybe there’s something to older relatives asking when our generation is going to have children. Without leaves, the whole tree dies.
Leaves, trees. D and I saw a lot of those on our trip up north and back on the amazing City Of New Orleans. I loved it! Everyone must ride a train at least once in their lifetime. The interstate is sterile, tree-cleared hypnosis and airplanes are stale sardine cans compared to the lush greenery and beautiful, old small towns that envelop the train and almost reach into it on its way back and forth. Moreover, while many were stranded in airports across the north during and after the ice and snow storms, our train made it up to Chicago, we got to our rental car (after frustration and unexpected extra travel caused by Enterprise Rental Cars – don’t rent from them!) and we drove up and past Green Bay to Christmas Eve dinner. I took a LOT of pictures on our train journey and, just as soon as I have my camera, laptop and a few minutes all in the same place at the same time, they will be uploaded to Flickr. My favorite picture is of Pass Manchac as we crossed it at sunset.
Tomorrow, we head back to Wisconsin for New Year’s festivities. Don’t ask why we came back for a few days and are heading back. Something about my friend purchasing a FIRE TRUCK and us riding on it in his hometown’s annual New Year’s Day parade, which lasts all of half a mile and 5 minutes. Pasadena, eat your heart out! And Madison, glorious Madison, to visit with our friends there.
Thanks for another year, y’all, although I hardly remember it for all the travel. Stay safe and warm through the pre-2009 festivities and don’t forget to drink a little extra bubbly for me! Happy New Year!
“If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.” — Sun Tzu, 6th Century BC
“I think the purest kind of holiday horror is not something designed to be offensive, but a piece done with all sincerity and good intentions that nevertheless makes you want to strip the skin off someone’s skull with a potato peeler.” — Greg Peters, ca. 2008 AD
Watch and learn, kids.
If I am in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve, my time is spent at home asleep or at Fahy’s in the Quarter after a short jaunt to Jackson Square and back at midnight. So, I’ve never attended that evening’s bonfire in Mid-City and probably never will. But, what irks me about the City government’s decision to cancel the bonfire is their sudden obsession with “illegal and dangerous” in this particular case. For God’s sake, there are dangerous criminals practically holding the streets of this city hostage with the illegal weapons in their possession and an enjoyable bonfire is what concerns NOPD? Time and resources are being spent on an anti-bonfire informational session when dead husks of homes go up in flames in various NOLA neighborhoods creating actual threats to safety? As Michael Homan asks, “Why not try to ticket the hundreds of people who shoot firearms in the air on New Years [which has resulted in deaths as opposed to the bonfire]?”
It sounds to me like someone wants to put something “proactive” on their End Of Year report and this is the most convenient scapegoat they could find. Punish real criminals, not the bonfire. And quit finding fluffy excuses not to do your job.
“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” — W. H. Auden
Posts even remotely serious have been missing from this blog for a while. The Hostilidays take precedence (oh, I will win yet!) and are an enjoyable distraction when my last living grandparent’s health worsens (D and I will visit her again this weekend), what some call Seasonal Affective Disorder is almost in full effect this winter and I want to kick myself for even entertaining malaise when so many are without jobs, food and shelter here in America and abroad. Now is not the time to read non-fiction but it forces me into someone else’s shoes and, momentarily, it’s not all about me and my young, miniscule troubles. What a luxury.
I am well into Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas Brothers after finally finishing Emily Raboteau’s wonderful yet deeply troubling essay, Searching For Zion. Raboteau herself is an interesting tale with a white mother, a black religious-historian father, relatives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina and a Jewish best friend who made aliyah back to Israel during very tumultuous times. Like a lot of us, she searches for her identity through analyzing what identity means and her own various avatars in a world that doesn’t yet understand Sorta Culture. You know, as in I’m sorta Indian, sorta Arab, sorta Midwesterner, sorta New Orleanian, sorta American, sorta Hindu, sorta world citizen, sorta everything and learning to be ok with it. She’s sorta white, sorta black, sorta Yankee, sorta Southern, sorta Christian, sorta Jewish and sorta everything, too. The search for identity is not a new phenomenon when you consider, for instance, Louis Armstrong and his life in post-Civil-War New Orleans. He was poor, black, not Creole who consider(ed) themselves culturally superior, could not pass the paper bag test (incidentally, I find it humorous that my skin color falls on either side of that test depending on whether it’s summer or winter) and loved being a marching musician because it allowed such a talented man as himself access into parts of the city people of his hue could not otherwise enter.
Entry. Access. Who is black, who isn’t black? Who is white, who isn’t white enough? Who can enter, who cannot? These questions have been on my mind long before Barack Obama sought and won the office of the American Presidency, but are so immediate now. Do you think it’s over and black people have arrived just because a black couple heads up the White House? Oh no. Growing up brown in Kuwait had many perplexing moments (a topic for another post) which I foolishly thought would go away when I moved to the States. Even so, it took me until a few weeks ago to realize that no matter how brown of Indian descent I am and where I am in the world, no single racial population has it as bad as those of African descent. This is not meant to be insulting or exculpatory, but whatever racism I experienced in Kuwait, the Midwest and the South, be it being called “Hindi” or “dothead” or given looks as if I don’t belong there, is fluff compared to the fact that black people have always had to prove themselves as much more. As human. This is just unpardonable and only surfacing as westerners, in the waning years of the first decade of the 21st century A.D., are forced to look at our race relations in the hairy eyeball.
Emily Raboteau has visited Israel many times and bases her essay on this pull of identity (and push back by the self-ordained) so palpable there. This passage, in which a white Israeli acquaintance recounts the confusion that occurred when he protested alongside a Palestinian for the latter’s right to self-rule, still sticks with me. Apparently neither expected the black Israeli.
“I marched on their side because it was too much like apartheid for my taste. The Israeli soldiers came to stop us. One of them pointed a M16 at my chest. He was Ethiopian. I thought, ‘He could kill me. I might die today. What am I dying for? Which side am I on?’ Do you know what the Palestinian standing next to me said? ‘Look at that filthy kushi who wants to shoot us. I can’t believe it’s come to this. My homeland is being run by monkeys.’ I was scared the Arab would yell ‘Go back to Africa!’ and the soldier would open fire. It gets so confusing here sometimes.”
White Israelis fight against Palestinians while forgetting their own Holocaust and employ in their cause black Ethiopian Jews, who also made aliyah, and you feel all bad for the Palestinians until you realize that they themselves have turned and stepped on the next person down on the totempole because he’s black. And, face it, it’s almost always the black person. It doesn’t make sense and drives you to madness, but so it is. Real life isn’t black and white (in every sense of the phrase) and this is what I was trying to tell American jerks who so badly want to tie Obama to Osama until the Arab jerks, in a twist of grotesque irony and a manner that would make the KKK proud, “disowned” Obama.
No, we’re probably not all going to get along and sing “Cumbaya” together some day, but we have a long way to go in accepting the black race as very present and very human, much less as equal to the economically and dermatologically fair-skinned. I think that we have it in us to get to a place in which there is no fear that an American president of color will be assassinated and absolutely no fear that you will throttle the next person you hear who states, even in tasteless jest, that a black man who runs for president is selfish because he has automatically put himself and his family in harm’s way. Yet, you can’t let indignity like that stop you. Obama keeps walking. Black people keep walking. We all keep walking towards Zion, Shangri-La, New New Orleans, the west or wherever that lofty paradise is, on roads carved by our ancestors and a few in the making. They are long and hard for most, soft and easy for those in air-conditioned cars and better castes (and money is useful in inducing temporary color-blindness), but the journey continues. It has to.
Towards the end of Searching For Zion, Emily Raboteau speaks with Dany Admasu who walked to Israel from Ethiopia because it was the dream of generations before him to achieve the promised land. Though Admasu now lives in Jerusalem, he still hasn’t quite reached:
“Imagine you are walking. You walk from Ethiopia to Sudan. It takes two months. The weak ones didn’t make it this far. You made it, but you have to stop walking because you ran out of food and water. You are so thirsty you would gladly drink your own urine, only you are too dehydrated to urinate. You live in a refugee camp, and it is hell. Sometimes the Red Cross brings medicine, but forty to sixty people die there every day from starvation and snakebites. Israel finally hears about you, but they don’t think you’re a Jew because you’re black. You yourself didn’t know there were white Jews. You have never seen a white person before.”
We keep walking. On the ground and in our hearts, hoping for increasingly complete and decreasingly confusing lives for our children. Where else do we have to go but somewhere that isn’t here?
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Related Reading: Emily Raboteau | Mulattobama
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