It all began when I moved into this house and was given a shelf all to myself in the pantry. One endless winter night I gazed at my roomie’s Swiss Miss with lust in my heart. She was so Nordic, so pure, so full of chocolatey goodness. I knew it was only a matter of time before I cheated with her. So I went to the grocery store the next morning and brought home my own powdery Swiss miss.
A week went by. My acquisition was quietly noted in circles that matter. In the meantime I bought a couple of Indian TV dinners. They come in silver pouches which would look perfectly at home on the international space station. I cook plenty of fresh Indian food, mind you. I know this vacuum-packed crap can’t be good for you. But some corners of my palate are not fulfilled by my palette. Sometimes you’ve just gotta have mattar paneer.
So I came home yesterday and unloaded groceries. And what did I spy on my Jewish roomie’s pantry shelf?
Over the weekend I was again chatted up by excessively-friendly brown people at suburban malls. Once was in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and the the other at a mall in Cambridge, MA, both pretty white towns. These desis weren’t aunties needing help with an escalator; they weren’t asking for directions; they weren’t engaging in genuine, friendly conversation, like running into a brown person at a café bored with his laptop and taking a break. Instead, they were chatting up and sizing up.
Once my bullshit detector trips, I try and zero in on exactly what they want. One was a bodyshopping headhunter, the other was multilevel marketing for skin care and energy drinks. It makes sense given the prevalence of Amway among desis. Their game is to hang out at malls and zero in on lonely brown people.
The funny thing is, I’ve become much less tolerant of ambiguous social chatter after spending a year in Bombay. In a city with few minorities, you might take note of a fellow desi; in a teeming city like Bombay, the connection needs to be far more specific. Yes. I’m saying it. Desis in America are brown-goggling like it’s five minutes before last call. And it leaves them vulnerable to getting ripped off by white-collar pimps.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is apparently circulating photos of Barack Obama in Somali nomadic dress while visiting a Somali-inhabited part of Kenya. It’s the turban which they’re calling attention to, of course — because we all know turban means Muslim means terrorist. Hillary herself wore a hijab on a trip to Saudi Arabia, and Dubya and Bill Clinton donned native dress too.
This is beyond childish, but there are a couple of politically interesting trends here. First, Clinton is transforming into the second coming of Karl Rove, running on fear of terrorism (’I can protect you in a dangerous world, Obama can’t') and fear of Muslims.
Second, Clinton’s campaign is stacked with desi women at every level, from policy director Neera Tanden, a Punjabi who knows turbans from Muslims, to personal assistant Huma Abedin, who’s of Muslim descent, to local fundraisers who are friends of mine. Any one of them should have called bullshit on this non-substantive strategy of smear. This campaign is turning into an embarrassment. It harms Sikh Americans, it harms Muslim Americans, and it’s anti-feminist, trivializing a candidate who claims to be running on substance, not fashion.
So WTF, South Asian sisters? You need to disavow this, like Obama decried his staffers’ ‘senator from Punjab‘ smear.
The only reason I’m watching this show is Jon Stewart. Just sayin’. But he’s doing cheesy Jay Leno-style one-liners and exhorting people to vote Dem this election.
Diablo Cody (Juno screenwriter) looks delish with a red starburst on her right cheek. Jon Stewart says she went from exotic dancer to Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, and ‘How do you like the pay cut?’
Despite her peekaboo bangs, Jennifer Garner’s shoulders are as broad as Oscar’s statuette.
The first Oscar goes to a desi-directed film. Elizabeth: The Golden Age wins best costume design, and designer Alexandra Byrne thanks ‘Shekhar.’
I’m pleased to report that raunchy passages aren’t the exclusive preserve of Hindu mythology. Here’s more on the adventures of Amar Ayyar, prince of tricksters (first mentioned in this post), from a passage in the Hamza epic where Amar has sneaked into the enemy camp and rendered everyone unconscious by drugging their wine. He then sets about having fun with their supine bodies:
...Amar shaved Bakhtak and Bakhtiarak’s beards and whiskers as well, and made seven plaits in their hair. Then he lined Bakhtiarak’s hair with minium, fastened his legs around Bakhtak’s waist, and after oiling the latter’s penis pushed it a little way inside Bakhtiarak’s ass. Amar then played the same trick on Zhopin and Bechin, leaving them similarly positioned. In short, nobody escaped disgrace at his mischievous hands...
In the morning the unconscious men regained awareness and those who had been drugged came out of its effects. Because Bakhtak’s eyes were still shut in stupor, when he felt his member hardening, he began pushing it deeper and taking his pleasure, thinking he was inside a woman. Bakhtiarak began shouting and wailing, “For shame! For shame! You act thus toward me even though you are my father!” Upon hearing his cries, people gathered and saw this marvel of marvels: a father sodomizing his own son and carrying on like a beast.
A quick word about Amruta Patil’s dark, intense graphic novel Kari: it’s the story of an alienated young woman working in an ad agency in Mumbai while dealing with acute loneliness and the heartache of separation from her soulmate Ruth. (The book opens with a dreamlike scene where Kari and Ruth attempt suicide together. Both survive – or do they? – but while Ruth leaves Smog City for a place where “the palette was pure and bright”, Kari stays behind.) The drawings often reflect Kari’s tortured state of mind and restless imagination, and there’s some ambiguity in her version of events. In fact, it’s possible to wonder – as indeed another character in the book does at one point – if Ruth ever really existed.
Patil has an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and now lives in Delhi. I attended part of the Kari book launch/discussion a few days ago and then did a short Q&A with her.
Not that this is going to happen, but how cool would it be if Obama chose Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) as his running mate, and McCain countered with Bobby Jindal, a minority candidate from the South who, unlike McCain, has reliably voted conservative? It would be the all-macaca veepstakes!
As you know, Webb won office after Macacagate narrowly felled George Allen. As a Scots-Irish Virginian, Southerner and former Navy Secretary, Webb would add foreign policy credibility to the ticket and would help win over lower-income white men. Prior to his Senate run, he’d been out of Washington for some time; he’s as much an insurgent as Obama, in sync with the times. He’s been starkly against the Iraq war but has been a solid advocate for soldiers while in office. His son serves in Iraq now, and his family has long served in the military.
It’s helpful to have a VP who’s an attack dog in the general election. Webb is as much a curmudgeon as John McCain, and whomever McCain picks, Webb will probably be able to handle. He had a frosty exchange with Dubya when the frat-brother-in-chief tried to gladhand him about his son in Iraq.
The Dem presidential candidates briefly mentioned Pakistan at tonight’s debate. Obama reiterated that backing Musharraf has been a colossal mistake:
Obama: [About a U.S. soldier he spoke with] They were capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier for them to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander-in-chief…
On the question of Pakistan… we just had an election there… we have put all our eggs in the Musharraf basket, that was a mistake. We should be going after Al Qaeda… and making sure Pakistan is serious about expanding democracy. And I was right about that.
A Shah of Iran-type situation could result if we enrage the Pakistani populaceAs y’all know, the Prime Directive of Star Trek is non-interference in the internal affairs of an alien civilization. But America’s foreign policy apparatus, whether military or diplomatic, never bought into that hippie-dippy Roddenberry crap. The Prime Directive of our realpolitik is simple: any foreign intervention must accrue to the benefit of the United States.
That’s why what Dubya, Cheney and State are up to in the aftermath of the Pakistani election is so dangerous for America. They’re trying to place a finger on the scale after the fact to salvage their $10B investment in the strongman of Islamabad. Like any bad gambler, they don’t yet understand that it’s a sunk cost. Fully faltu. Doodh under the bridge.
Fresh from getting Benazir killed, the American ambassador summoned the PPP and leaned on them to ally with Musharraf’s trounced PML-Q rather than Nawaz Sharif. In between naachifying with Liberians, Dubya placed a mid-air phone call to Zardari and raised the possibility of taking away our marbles. We don’t know what was said, but we know Zardari placed his bet with Pakistani voters, announcing he would instead work with Sharif’s PML-N party.
The only thing better than this Texan mariachi band tribute to Obama is the certain knowledge that South Asians for Obama have to put out a counter. I don’t know when or where, but I know it’s coming. And it’s got to beat this. Ninja Obhangra!
Experts tell us the first stage of grief is denial:
… the first election returns were barely in Monday night when the U.S. government began pressing victorious opposition leaders not to impeach the former military strongman… U.S. diplomats pushed hard against any effort to dislodge the retired army general who had just suffered a public rejection, unprecedented in Pakistan’s 60 years… Only the State Department still takes him seriously…
Foggy Bottom’s stubborn policymakers are frozen in an irrelevant mind-set… The United States again guessed wrong in pinning its hopes on an authoritarian, anti-democratic foreign leader. Musharraf follows the pattern of South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, the shah of Iran and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines…Minimal Election Day fraud can be attributed to Musharraf’s weakness rather than his strength. The army refused to provide the cooperation needed to really steal votes. [Link]
The moon is burnt sienna out my window, but it’s far too gelid to stay and watch. My last eclipse, I stood atop a Bombay apartment building in the slumbering hour between midnight and two, threading my way between a cat’s cradle of cables, trying not to wake a worker sleeping on the roof. I was alone and locked in. The watchman locked the gate at midnight, and nothing but an act of God would wake him before daylight, which was quite irritating when the urge for a late-night chai from the bicyclewalla took hold, or the power went out and there was nothing to do. Your sole consolation for your insomnia was whinging to overseas friends by text, lying in the firetrap darkness imagining sleep and looking forward to 7 am when the idli-sambar place down the road fired up the kitchen. Sloppy, hot, burning and delicious.
I took shaky burnt sienna photos that warm March night facing the Arabian Sea while celeb-stuffed parties leaked filmi music across the rooftops. There’s grace in eclipses, like Sikh weddings. Sacred things are best done first thing in the morning.
I think I have a new favourite literary character. Meet Amar Ayyar:
In Amir Hamza’s cortege marched the Father of Racers, the Lord of Mischief-Mongers of the World, the Clipper of Infidels’ Whiskers, the King of Dagger-Throwing Tricksters, Khvaja Amar Ayyar, sporting his headdress of brocaded silk, brocade singlet, broadcloth tasseled shoes, and trickster’s sling, and bedecked with many such contrivances. He was accompanied by his pupils and continuously sang in six high-key notes, twelve musical styles, and twenty-four melodies in twenty-eight manners of improvisation.
I’m halfway through Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s excellent The Adventures of Amir Hamza, the first complete English translation of the great Islamic epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza. The story, which evolved over hundreds of years through a rich oral tradition, is about the many conquests of the adventurer-hero Hamza, an uncle of the prophet Muhammed. One of Hamza’s companions is the mercenary rogue Amar Ayyar (ayyar being the word for trickster or spy), the most colourful character in a book populated with them. Many of the funniest passages in the epic are the ones about his incessant mischief-making. When he is born, the wise vizier Buzurjmehr studies his face and pronounces:
Manil Suri began his reading of his second novel, The Age of Shiva, at Brookline Booksmith tonight with a purplish scene, a bouquet of nipples. A pinch-faced auntie in the audience shifted in her seat and glared daggers. The second passage he read was a woman doing puja with a thhali. Quaint! The final one: a wife doing karva chauth. Exotic!
The latter scene was set up with some originality, but a lot of Suri’s compatriots in fiction are in the import/export business: simply transcribe a version of Indian culture, adding little literary originality, and non-Indians are satisfied. I don’t include Suri in that critique, as I haven’t read the book; but what he chose to highlight in the reading had the aroma of self-conscious exotica. American publishers might call it ‘effective marketing.’
The cover has a fabric border and a photo of a woman in a sari. Upstairs, Chitra Divakaruni’s latest novel, The Palace of Illusions, sat on the new fiction shelves with sparkly silver bits, flashing a back-cover review calling it a ‘masala.’ In contrast, none of the Rushdie editions were sari-mango, except for a subtle fabricky border on Shalimar. No doubt he has signoff rights.
It all began when I moved into this house and was given a shelf all to myself in the pantry. One endless winter night I gazed at my roomie’s Swiss Miss with lust in my heart. She was so Nordic, so pure, so full of chocolatey goodness. I knew it was only a matter of time before I cheated with her. So I went to the grocery store the next morning and brought home my own powdery Swiss miss.
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