My grand-mother had a bald spot on top of her head. Women are known to have hair loss that can lead to balding, the causes quite different from those in men, ranging from skin diseases to errant hormones. In my grandmother’s case, it was attributed to the vermilion she put generously in her hair parting. The family surmised that the chemicals in the various brands of vermilion she used containing traces of dubious metals could have been the cause of her balding. It was a shiny patch, that bald spot, and she took meticulous care of the rest of her tresses, combing them out constantly until she knotted them in a small shiny mass at the back of her head. She could not hear very well. She burst an ear drum during the birth of her youngest daughter. Her hearing aid squeaked and shrieked loudly when she turned the volume all the way up. The listener was assured that she was doing her best and something could possibly trickle in leading to a possible conversation.

She was a stickler for rituals, my Didima. She refused to eat before she showered. She undressed completely before she went to the bathroom. She prayed to her Gods in her prayer room for hours. When my grand-father died, she rubbed the vermilion off from her forehead never to put it on again. She was forbidden from eating fish and meat and onion and garlic. She wore white for the rest of her life. Her other habits though remained the same. The prayers, the chanting, the singing of hymns, the flowers placed in front of the deities, the particular ways of cleanliness that involved every item from the bed being cast off, brushed and dusted when the bed was made every morning.

She was aging well enough, managing without the fish she could never have imagined living without when her husband was still alive. I like to imagine that those fish oils kept her brain alert and could have maybe averted the stroke that eventually laid her in bed for three years before she died. It is whimsical and perhaps non-scientific of me. For the last few years of her life, after the stroke, she gradually stopped recognizing her children, she slowly forgot the hymns she sang every day, like a baby she had to wear a diaper all the time and her children kept her clean.  Sometimes lying in bed, she brought her palms together in prayer and bowed her head; her body remembering what her mind had erased. After she broke a hip, she stayed in bed almost all the time. Did they make her bed every day for her just the way she used to like it or did it stop mattering like everything else? One of the last words she said before she died was the pet name of her youngest daughter who sat next to her when she breathed her last. Did she recognize her? I like to hope so.

Life has a curious way of coming around. I am always on the alert for it. I make sure my mother changes her hair parting every day and I do the same for my daughters and myself. I cannot sleep in my bed unless it is completely free of any grime. I am the princess with the pea, jumping out and upset if I feel grains of dust or sand left by the feet of my children. My youngest aunt, the one whose name Didima took before dying is getting bald too. She has problems with her ears. My mother, my aunts and uncles are now without parents. It will happen to me. Whose names will come to our mind in our end? Will anything we care for matter then? I rarely put vermilion in the parting of my hair.

There is a dog outside our gates with a bulging, hanging growth under his tail. He sits down carefully, never placing his rear completely on the ground. I see him every day. I look at him, he looks at me. With him, I do not avert my eyes. He asks nothing from me, not even pity. I offer him nothing other than an acknowledgement that he lives as much as I do. We are both here. With him, I do not question my privileges. I should but somehow I do not.  Poverty in India is the breath of dust, swirls on the road, over flowing gutters and trash bins, cow dungs and human excrement on sidewalks, taps on the car windows, grubby hands, dark faces, cheap wares, entreaties made to Gods and to man both alike left unanswered. Avert your eyes, close them, pretend the bubble of cool air in your car is the monsoon winds, pretend the taps on your window are a figment of your imagination. Open your eyes after the car moves and look at the finger prints on your windows and look outside beyond them. Indignity upon indignity. Nothing worse than being a pest, a fly, a constant reminder to human conscience of poverty and suffering that mars the enjoyment of your own boons. The dog and I meet every day. Sometimes I whisper a word, sometimes he wags and sometimes we just look at each other, eye to eye.

The rains have dried up in Pune. Much like in elsewhere in the world, the earth is tired of coping with plastic and smoke and population and global warming and all the other crap that is melting the Arctic ice. I am hot already and ask around if the summers will be hotter. O no no, I am assured. Summer will be like this. A group of old women traveling in the back of a pick up truck, their heads covered with the ends of their saris look hot. A couple of dogs, black and white lie on the sidewalk, absolutely still. One twitches sporadically in his sleep. They look hot. The sidewalk is dry and dusty. The traffic moves in a reluctant slow motion. Pink Bouganvillias in a pot are faded into sepia tones. I step inside a coffee shop with my laptop under my arm. The air conditioner is running and I am grateful. I sit next to a group of young somethings. “You never fucking order me a drink.” a young woman says loudly to a man in her group. I stifle a gasp and turn to look at them. She looks very Indian, Indian in a way that is trying to be American. Her hair is cut short but not stylish, she wears a pair of black jeans and a tight white t-shirt, round petite, plump. The words are somehow incongruous coming out of her. The man laughs and promises to order her one next time. Around me everyone is eating; fries, sandwiches, pasta. I sigh and turn to look outside  through the cafe windows. I look at the world to find meaning. Nothing changes. Fucking meaning. I close my laptop and walk back out in the sun.

Our neighbor is holding a prayer meet. There are fresh flower garlands over their front door, inside their house, on windows- golden and yellow marigolds. Their doors have been open all day with the preparations. It is the God Krishna’s birthday in a few days and they are having an evening in celebration. She has invited us over and said, “Only women please. We do not have space for too many people so only women are invited to this.” I promised to drop by if I could.

I can hear the singer on a mike singing songs in praise of the God. He is loud and for a moment I have a surreal sensation of floating in space between worlds, between times. I am sitting at the computer in my house working on my writing projects. The girls are doing their homework and squabbling. The evening sun has set and the sky is grey and dull. I am tired suddenly. Of religion. That would be ok.Of faith? I hope not.

Prayer meets are held all over India all the time; from birth to death, life is punctuated by these events, by singing, by chanting, by prayers, by flowers, mantras, anointments, invocations. Dressed in white or dressed in finery depending on the occasion. I have sometimes enjoyed the devotion. I have sometimes swayed to the beauty of a voice. This evening though I am listless. I am listening to the music, to the flute, the drums, the voice and I am thinking I am stuck between worlds, stuck between spheres of myself, stuck between my own imaginations, stuck between the cultures I have inhabited, stuck between skepticism and a wish to believe.

I drop by and stand for a while at the back of the room. The host takes pictures on her iPhone of the deities, ostensibly to send to her sons who live abroad. It is still that sort of a “moment”. Saints, singing, drums, flutes, singers, incense sticks, lamps and an iPhone. Stuck.

It is now exactly two months since we have left behind American shores. Two months in India. Normally in years past, this would be a summer vacation to India and then time to return to Berkeley, to schools and jobs and mists. And every year, when we would see the Golden Gate Bridge from the airplane, as we taxied down to what almost seemed into the blue waters of the San Francisco Bay, I would feel a surge of joy and relief to be returning back home.

I loved my vacations back to India, to the little town I grew up in, to giggling warm afternoons with girlfriends from my childhood, to ice creams and milk shakes shared with them while we talked non-stop, about our lives as adults in a world we seemed to have trouble navigating. I loved the warm air, the walks by the beach, the quiet meditations in the ashram I grew up in. I hated the child I became  with my mother, about how I should or should not spend my time, I hated the close scrutiny from childhood teachers, mentors or adversaries. The look up and the look down at how I dressed, how I looked; that it was obvious that I worked out, that it was obvious that I was doing ok. “One can never go home again,” my husband often told me and for a while I disbelieved him.

A lot had changed in India, I had changed and that changed person just about fitted into those India vacations. I judged the very people who judged me while growing up and I was in turns pleased and bemused that I could now do that. I was proud of my choices, controversial in an Indian traditional set up, and I felt I had to stare down at my detractors. At those who believed that the ideal woman lived a life of self sacrifice.

Now, we are here in India for a year. Is this home? There is no clear answer but I feel myself slowly waking up. Writers I have read and admired, I find that they have been residing in my neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. Some teach courses in colleges I could have commuted to. What was it about my life in America that had put me to sleep? That had numbed me to the possibilities? And why do I find myself walking up here in India?

I enjoyed great freedoms in my American life, in many ways much more than life here but those freedoms to some extent were external ones- the ability to wear a bikini or a pair of shorts. One of the crucial freedoms I enjoy here is a sense of kinship that has developed more naturally than it did in my previous habitat. As a mother in India, there is space to be that person who struggles to express herself, because other mothers like me who are also artists and writers reach out and offer support. Why did I not find this in America? Was it my own sense of alienation and difference that kept me away or was it a broader social set up?

Many or most of my friends in America worked full time jobs and after their children were born, worked doubly hard to handle their homes, care for their children and be successful at their carriers. Unlike in India, where families especially grandparents step in to care for grandchildren willingly, wanting to spend their time with your children; in America, my friends and I had to ask for help and often pay for expensive help. Here in India, reliable help is more readily available and affordable even if grandparents live far away or are not present. The joint family structure is certainly breaking down as our abilities to adjust with differences has a lower threshold,even here in India, yet there is a certain willingness to try which was less commonly found in my American life.

Two months into our life here, I often find myself speaking about home. Sometimes I mean the home here in Pune, sometimes I mean the home back in Berkeley. What do I mean by that word? Maybe I mean the physical structure of where we live, maybe I mean my children and husband, maybe I mean memories built together. Home, home, home. I love the sound of the word. I still do not know what it means- really.

On the way to Mumbai yesterday, it rained. My middle daughter cried fora long time because we could not see monkeys in Lonavala. During our last trip, a few weeks ago, we had stopped and fed the monkeys in this little hill town, little paper cups of steamed corn spiced with red chili powder. On a side, way below- railways tracks crisscrossing in and out of a tunnel, on another side water falls and cliffs. On that day, the skies were covered with mists and the monkeys lined the highway, babies hanging off their mother’s backs and bellies.

The girls have grown up in America. They stop to admire goats, cows, sheep grazing on patches of grass; camels, dogs and cats searching for shade on hot days. Monkeys are a whole special breed. Rarer and therefore more precious. Recently, I heard of monkeys outside their classrooms and they are absolutely thrilled by their presence in their school. So why should my daughter cry because she did not see monkeys in Lonavala?

She slept the entire way to Mumbai after that let down. Later she said, “This drive was not as fun as last time.” She wanted everything to be exactly the same. This trip had to replicate the last one because that was so much fun. And I have been thinking about myself and how somewhere I am reaching for that myself. “That time” in life when I was young and full of hope- am I constantly trying to replicate “that time” and struggling with the sceneries that are no longer the same, the fact that the monkeys are now not sitting on the highways? Is this why we are here in India and if that is so there is no doubt in my mind that it can only lead to being disappointed? “That time” when I was young, when I worked as a news director in a twenty four hour news channel, that time before bad marriages, before disillusionments, before child-birth tore the body in irreparable ways, that time before I found I was not enough on my own in foreign lands, that time before I let a man convince me that I was nothing. Between that time and now, a river has flown, mountains have formed, craters, ridges, gorges, hills- the landscape has changed and shifted. So have I.

I take a deep breath and settle into my chair as I write this. The family has settled in. I feel like the surveyor of a new land waiting for a discovery.

We spotted her outside the car windows. Her face was painted like that of a clown but the lines around her eyes and mouth were so jagged that it made her look lopsided and a little absurd in an innocent way. She looked no more than seven or eight years old. Seeing us looking at her she began to turn cartwheels. Her feet rose up amidst the cars and then she appeared upright and smiling, making eye contact with us. A couple of cartwheels later, she stood outside the window twisting her arms around her in a form of such supple gymnastics that we all stared at her and simultaneously reached for our bags to find something to give. I  pulled out a hundred rupee, did a quick dollar conversion in my head and wanted to give it. Everyone in the car stopped me and I put it away. My brother opened the window and gave her a smaller rupee note. Then suddenly our car was surrounded. Many children with their faces colored in those garish hues, round blackened eyes, bright red lips, hair in bright ribbons; smiles painted on. They started to beat on the windows. Rhythmic hits on the glass, palms beating relentlessly with the strength they had displayed in their aerobatics. Suddenly their faces formidable apparitions from a psychedelic dream. Hands, faces, colors, forces, threats of violence and danger. Children become monsters.  The car began to move. I expected them to give chase but they melted away in the smoke and dust of the moving cars.

The girls have started school. They hug and then they run off, sometimes they come back for a second hug. One of the teachers told me,”We prefer if the parents don’t linger.”So Tom and I don’t or try not to. It is hard. In Berkeley, at the same school for 5 years, we lingered and not just we, many parents. Many congregated on the sidewalk, some in the coffee shop near by. At the international school here, most kids take the bus. Those who come with their parents, walk into the school alone and do not seem the worse off for it. “Helicopter parents.” My husband once told me. “We are hovering around our children all the time trying to facilitate their lives by making sure they have enough friends, are in the classes with teachers we like and cross every obstacle on their behalf if we can.” I didn’t know other ways to be their parent. Those who were on the other side of the spectrum, busy with their own carriers, hands off about what their children ate or what their children did after school seemed callous and uncaring to me. There must be a balance; I hope to find it here.

Day four at the school. I am standing at a distance and watching the  children. I do not want to be accused of “lingering.” I realize that my children are almost hard to pick out in a crowd. They are brown among brown. Do they revel in this freedom of anonymity? Does their skin sing in harmony with the brownness of the earth and of their friends? My oldest was four when she had painted her first picture of herself- brown skinned and dark haired in a classroom of what she called “peach skinned and golden hair”girls. At their school in Berkeley, our girls were poster girls for the diversity the school wished to project about itself. And yet, the girls were asked to remove their bangles. Every girl in India, young or old wears one on her wrist. I tried to explain this to their teachers but they were not impressed. “But what about understanding diversity?” I would often ask.

Does sameness in color grant one a greater sense of belonging? I think it does. Divergent colors and backgrounds are not impediments for friendships or love but similar skin colors can be a facilitator in relationships. “An African-American thinks or realizes something about his or her color every thirty seconds.” I once heard this in a workshop in San Francisco. It is true that in America, I was often self conscious or proud of my difference, depending where I was that day. Never indifferent, never oblivious. I watch the girls play and hope they will revel in the sameness they share with this country and a culture. Whether it will help them make friendships, I do not know. For now, I hope they can forget for a while the color of their skin.

Below is an article I had  written about their schooling in Berkeley a year ago-

Navigating school

Four years ago, my daughters started their schooling in a French school in Berkeley. Now, not only was I not just an “alien” (the official term used by UCSIS for immigrants) but also I was now a Francophone alias Indian alias non American alias non French-American alien. The first few days dropping and picking the children from school were spent in the normal haze of children whimpering and crying. Ishani, the oldest drew pictures of herself brown skinned and black haired in a room full of what she still calls “peach “skinned and blonde haired. When we were called for a parent teacher meeting for Asheema who was then not even three, I joked with my to be husband, “What will they tell us that she cannot draw within the lines?” We listened in disbelief as her teacher who had just come from France sat with the dean of students explaining how she was concerned about Asheema not running in a line, of the certain tilt to her head and yes, the inability to draw within the lines. We left the meeting shaking our heads in a tizzy of fear and worry about their futures. What I had never imagined had happened! Our three year old not being able to run in a straight line or draw within lines were indicators of a serious problem.

Dropping the girls to school every morning I am caught in a more personal problem, the dilemma of not fitting in myself. The women around me whether French or American, difficult to discern from simply skin color or nose shape are all impeccably dressed. Their faces do not reveal any of the trials and tribulations of being a parent who is dropping a child to school at 8 am in the morning. Hairs and nails gleam, their perfect clothes drape their shapes in good taste. Some days I try to look like them but end up more like a mannequin at uncertain store front. You must have passed them by, these stores. They sort of have the right clothes but somehow something is wrong, it could be the accessories are clueless or the mannequin’s hair looks like an old man’s wig. In winter I am glad I can cover myself in a gigantic coat and sometimes I am still wearing my pyjamas under this coat at drop off. I am ashamed. But I am a woman of intellect I tell myself; I have numerous degrees in English and French literature. I will find women like me. I don’t find them not because they were not there but because they could not understand me. In the early days, I was so glad to finally be able to speak in French again that I spoke freely and often. “Can you speak more slowly?” A kindly mother with a French accent asked me in halting English. I tried English which I have spoken since my birth, I tried French which I spoke since I was twelve but my English and my French were too Indian for the lack of any other way to describe it. I looked longingly at moms in groups conversing in either of these languages. I never joined them.

There were some Indians in the school, not many at that time. One of the women, a professor at UC Berkeley spoke Bengali. I was thrilled- a compatriot. Other than language, we had nothing in common. She oozed self-confidence, her accent more exotic than mine. As a full time faculty at the university, she also had no time. No time, don’t fit- it was one or the other for me. Meanwhile my older daughter continued to draw pictures of herself, brown and black almost a blotch or a blob in a peach skinned and golden universe and her younger sister continued to be a source of concern to her teacher. “You should get her ears checked. Maybe she has a problem with her balance.,” her teacher said. It amazes me now to recall how quietly I would acquiesce at everything. I got her ears checked. She was just fine, my pediatrician assured me. My daughters and I continued to float in bubbles of uncertainty. I was constantly plagued by my shame and inability to fit in and when I saw that reflected in my children’s struggles I took it is my own failure.

We have now been in the French school for almost four years. The older daughter still meets the school psychologist. She is a developing artist. Her self- portraits in brown and black shine with color. I recently crossed what I considered my final American frontier and met a therapist. And my younger daughter? She is a budding gymnast on the school play-ground. Her last report card describes her as a “joy to watch on the monkey bars!”