“Why do you still write about India?” a friend was asking. It was 2015, and we were sitting on the shaded outdoor patio of a hipster Vietnamese restaurant in tropically hot Austin, Texas. Svelte white waitresses in generic Asian garb swirled around us. One had tiny slashes of black makeup at the edges of her eyes.
My friend, a white American from the Midwest, had asked a simple question. I had immigrated to the United States from India in 2001, for college, and had lived here, off and on, ever since. In many crucial ways—my vintage T-shirts, my fondness for indie rock, my social ease with Americans of all backgrounds—I could pass as assimilated. Why, then, she asked, did the novels that I wrote, set in the New Delhi of my childhood, bear no trace of my outer life?
She had asked the question innocently, and yet, on that humid day, I found myself filling with rage. I muddled through an answer—something about being drawn to unprocessed, formative memories—but what I wanted, more than anything, in that moment, was for America, and my American interlocutor with her America-centric concerns, to vanish.
It is only now, years later, that I can acknowledge that something else was going on that day: that I was feeling defensive about my own confused and tormented relationship to place, my powerlessness about my circumstances. Didn’t I, too, feel that there was something inauthentic about writing across a chasm of time and space?
Indeed, why, in my writing, did I have to pretend to be there, in India? And did people there want to hear about what I was writing about them from here?
Was I writing about there because I couldn’t accept my life here?
From the start, my immigration to the U.S. was infused with denial. I wasn’t even, properly speaking, an immigrant. When I arrived, after all, I was already a citizen.
This was a quirk of personal history. My father had emigrated from India to the U.S. in 1968—soon after the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Immigration Act—for a master’s degree. In 1973, my mother joined him, and for thirteen years they lived together in Chicago, Illinois; Nashua, New Hampshire; and Stamford, Connecticut. In 1986, when I was two and my younger brother was just six months old, they repatriated to India, with us in tow. My brother and I were, in a sense, “anchor babies,” though, in another way, we were the reverse: our arrival in my parents’ marriage quickened their realization that they didn’t want their kids to grow up in the States. We tore our parents’ anchors from America even as we gained birthright citizenship.
From then on, my brother and I grew up in upper-middle-class Delhi, surrounded by relatives. We attended a local school—not an American or British educational outpost—and our parents never seriously considered returning to the U.S., even though, at the time, material conditions in India were, in many ways, a generation behind the place they’d left. From a world of abundant brands and wondrous gadgets, we had come to a city with days striped by power outages. There were two national channels on TV and only a handful of brands of sluggish cars. Bureaucratic delays were rampant. Yet my mother, especially, felt she had made the right decision, choosing her culture over America’s capitalist escalator to nowhere. (My father, aggravated by the inefficient business culture of nineteen-eighties India, was more ambivalent.)
All the same, my brother and I remained connected to America. There was our American citizenship—India, thanks to a post-colonial suspicion of divided loyalties, does not allow dual citizenship—but also the matter of our parents. Their years in the U.S. had changed them. Unlike many of their peers, they were dead set against a culture of casual graft. Courting terminal uncoolness, they routinely scolded fellow-Indians for their habit of throwing trash and wrappers in the street. Religious rituals were rarely observed in our home. My parents spoke English confidently and had an easy traffic with the West and Westerners. My father, an engineer, still consulted for companies that he had worked with previously in the U.S. and Europe. During my childhood, he often travelled abroad, bringing back toys and springing open his hard-shell American Tourister suitcase the minute he arrived.
But, if the West was just another aspect of our lives rather than a glittering Valhalla of possibility, this changed when I entered my final years of high school. My mother, realizing that my American citizenship was an advantage, suggested that I take the SAT and apply to American colleges. I had always pictured myself attending an Indian engineering school—the dream of most academically inclined students in India. But my citizenship, synonymous with quality and power, sat there like a taunt and a temptation. And, frankly, it was much easier to gain admission to a prestigious American university than to India’s hypercompetitive technological institutes, which required years of after-school preparation for their entrance exams. When I was admitted to Stanford, in 2001, with financial aid, there was no question of turning it down.
Coming back to America fifteen years after I had left it was more of a beginning than a return. I possessed no memories of my earlier time here, and, like many new immigrants, I struggled to take care of myself after a life cosseted by family. All the same, I had a familiarity with American culture that my parents had handed down to me. I also held strong to my Indian roots. My parents, for example, had never developed American accents. Nor did I.
I had started writing poetry as a high-school student in Delhi, and now, in creative-writing classes, I attempted stories set in my home town. Writing about India from the command center of Silicon Valley was, at least initially, an expression of cultural confidence. I knew who I was and where I was from. Unlike some of my Asian American peers, who had been raised within a white superstructure, I did not write about white people by default. At the same time, as I mentally summoned India in my dorm room, with the golden hues of California outside my window, I was filled with doubt. How much did I really know about the place where I had grown up? My childhood had been cloistered, and I’d glimpsed just a sliver of the Indian experience; around me lay a great area of darkness to be explored. If I wanted to be a real Indian writer—like Arundhati Roy or R. K. Narayan—I would have to immerse myself in the Indian reality, become one with my nation.
And so, by a strange act of mental jujitsu—declaring myself an “Indian writer” in the West—I forced upon myself a second, figurative passport: a passport to India, where I planned now to return after completing my studies in economics and English, dedicating myself to painting an accurate picture of the country that India was becoming, my writing unshadowed by the corrupting eyes of the West.
But there was already an irony within this declaration, because it was America—through its permissive creative-writing classes, which my engineer friends slogging away in India would have considered a joke—that had allowed me to declare myself a writer, away also from the judgment of my bourgeois Punjabi milieu, in which literary life was looked down upon as an effete, unremunerative curiosity. And, examining myself through Indian eyes, I judged myself. I was ashamed of what I wanted to do. It didn’t seem serious. It didn’t seem right for an academically gifted Indian boy whom everyone expected to study computer science and to work at Microsoft or Goldman Sachs.