Mapping Home

I came across Dean Slaughter’s blog post on the New York Times website today. Click here to see it She is the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and is spending the year in Shanghai. She writes eloquently about her shock at seeing a world map drawn not with a West-centric view, but with Shanghai at the centre of the map. The West she says, from Shanghai, is “the exotic far east”.

I felt a similar shock the first time I saw a map of India drawn by someone other than the Surveyor General of India. It was probably in an OUP encyclopedia or something (damn Brits), and Kashmir was cut up with red “Disputed Territory” lines. Maps I saw later, outside of India, didn’t even give me that much: only the Valley and Jammu were coloured Indian; the rest of it was clearly marked as Pakistani. Some parts were even Chinese. Growing up, PoK had always been included in our school textbooks as Indian Territory. All Kashmir was ours, the crown of the Indian landmass, disputed territory lines be damned. A girl I once met in Princeton told me she was born in Azad Kashmir. I looked at her blankly, thinking, kisne azad kiya (who freed you)? It took me a minute to realize she was Pakistani; I had only ever heard of it being called Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir.

One of the most unexpected things about living abroad is the fact that the mundane takes on a life of its own. Yes, I grapple with larger issues, like, how big is my country really? But sometimes, it’s the small stuff that gets you. Talking of the weather in SA, I have to remember to flip the summers to winters. Talking of the weather in the US, I have to remember 30 degrees is winter, not summer. One of the reasons I’m terrified of driving is that my brain is all out of whack from the continual switching between right-hand-drive and left-hand-drive countries. I cannot remember which way light switches are supposed to go anymore: is up on or off?

Things you never think twice about are suddenly imbued with all kinds of meaning. Having grown up in the racial and religious majority in India, it took me almost two years of living in America to get comfortable with calling myself brown. Now, after years of making brown jokes, I’m afraid to bring up my skin colour up in a conversation, for fear of offending someone who has lived through blatant racism in the recent past.

I know I have mused upon the strides that SA is making in the matter of integrating various sectors of its diversity, but for the most part skin-colour-stereotypes are still true here. I walked into a small café yesterday to get a sandwich, and the lady there shook her head. We don’t have halaal meat, she said regretfully. The irony that I am pickier than even that (being vegetarian) would have probably been lost upon her. I can’t fault her for looking out for my interests: most people of South-Asian descent walking into her establishment belong to the predominantly Muslim Cape Malay or Colored communities. And besides, even I culturally pigeonhole people occasionally. My rental agency’s assistant looks brown, and I find myself looking for her name to confirm whether she is Indian or not. And then her phone rings in the annoying tones of some dratted Shah Rukh Khan song, and my hunch is confirmed. Brown as they come.

I don’t want to make it sound as though SA is unique in its problems with race. Any country with racial diversity will grapple with these issues. America certainly does. Even Princeton, for all its liberal lefty-ness, has oodles of problems with racial integration (how come you don’t know him—he’s in Naacho!). I know I kid about moving back to India just for the food (dosas at every corner shop = bliss), but one of the easiest things about living at home is that I can be the “tall girl” or the “girl in a red kameez”. I don’t have to be the “Indian girl” every time.