annegato

One of my earliest memories of South Dakota is navigating our tiny apartment with a bowl of arur ki daal and chawal—yellow lentils and rice. This was my daily habit, the one meal I’d never turn away. My mother would hand me a bowl, and I would devour it while looking out the window, or while wandering around the rooms, making up silly words in my head. Occasionally, my mother would break the silence to teach me spellings and prepare me for school. Her spelling was spectacular, but her pronunciation was off. I would nod along half-listening, “m-i-l-k, milk, h-o-n-e-y, honey.” 

In the second grade, they had us fill out questionnaires to post on the walls of the hallways. Favorite food? I didn’t think twice before scribbling down “arur ki daal and chawal.“ Later, I asked my friends if they ate bhindi at home, and when they didn’t understand, I asked my mother for the right words to convey what I meant. “O-k-r-a,” I practiced, ready to go to school and proclaim that I loved okra, just like everyone else. But no one knew what okra was, either. I was embarrassed, but mostly, I was frustrated. Elaichi, cardamom, haldi, turmeric, bhindi, okra, it made no difference. Translating to English was useless when I couldn’t translate the tastes and experiences themselves. 

At home, I struggled similarly in the opposite direction, trying to explain the difference between stew and chowder, and the reasons why garam masala couldn’t replace ancho chili powder. Straddling seven oceans of taste, I saw flickers of potential and belonging in every ingredient and dish. My parents, however, held to their reservations: we rarely ate at Italian restaurants because my father hated the smell of cheese, and pepperoni made my mother’s nose curl. Still, I ate their food and stomached their dismissals, hoping one day they’d be willing to try on my perspective. My ingredients were measured in volumes and weights, and my mother’s in impressions and durations. “Pass the al-mends,” she would say. “All-munds,” I would reply. 

A-l-m-o-n-d-s, we thought to ourselves, silently. 

At college, I heard about other people’s parents. They counted down the days until they’d go fly-fishing together, or eagerly await driving back for Thanksgiving dinner. They’d talk about family recipes: this is my father’s trout, this is my mother’s challah. And then there was me, trying to convey multifaceted experiences with incomplete vocabularies. What could I say? Yellow lentils keep me up at night. They remind me of a taste I miss so much, and a mother I hardly miss at all. They remind my teeth and my tongue that they were not designed for dreams and fears, but for food, and food alone.

It was from my parents that I inherited the subtlest of translingual burdens—the fact that they spoke in English every day, but couldn’t feel in English for a single moment. I wasted years thinking they’d one day have a interest in the things I wanted to tell them. They were too busy stirring the sabji. 

So to whom then can I explain the ache of humility in my chest, when for two years of my illness, my mother gave up chawal and fasted constantly as a prayer for my health? And how can I tell my father that I want him to cook elephant and tiger-shaped rotis on the griddle again, just as he did before I began to disappoint? Where is the biography of my mother’s beloved (but covert) mithai and chocolate stashes, tucked away behind Christmas ornaments in the dresser drawers, as reminders that she, too, should be forgiven for her appetite and her absences? And what now can reply to the way I hungered for a place in conversation at the dinner table after school, glancing between their faces and a steel cup of haldi-milk like Balraj Sahni in 1955’s black-and-white Seema, singing “Teri ek boond ke pyaase hum” (I thirst for but a drop of your love)? 

For those that asked: my mother never taught me how to make sabji, how to remove the bone from a chicken, how to season a kadhai, how to slice a-l-m-o-n-d-s, how to fry a tadka, or how to maintain an emulsion. The only recipe book she ever gave me was a dictionary that lacked words like “fallibility” and “forgiveness.” 

But these days, her voicemails make me feel differently. 

My father often travels for work now, and I can tell from her voice that she is home alone tonight, that she’s thinking about other people and that there is no one there to hear her. I don’t return the calls. I too am silent in my apartment: just as isolated, and a little more than guilty. It feels like there’s no point in picking up—we are both trapped in our language. Maybe she is shredding lassoon right now, looking exasperated as she does it. I imagine her furrowed brow and the stiff movements of her bony shoulders as she draws against the grater. Does she remember the times that I pushed my plate away? Does she think of my thanklessness, even when I’m not around? She is probably making arur ki daal—something simple, delicious, and familiar. As I watch the phone vibrate, I mince my shallots and stir blitzed peppers into the beef broth. She would hate the smell of this. I can imagine her saying, “Iss mein kya khaas hai?”—What good is this? Or, if I’m lucky, it’ll be sardonic: “Accha, aur logh ki liye khana banatein, lekein hamare liye nahin.”—Oh, so you’ll make food for other people, but you never cook for us. Even that would be disingenuous, though... what she implies is that I’m wasting my time. 

And yet, hearing her static-laced voice, it occurs to me that we have more in common. We take to the knife and the pressure-cooker for the same reason: a penance of sorts, to satiate others in lieu of speaking to them, since everything we say always comes out wrong. Perhaps that’s the destiny of these vegetables, tonight: redemption. Or, perhaps I’ll scrap the whole effort instead, and then hunt for chocolates in the backs of dresser drawers. Perhaps I won’t eat from sunrise to sundown, and then wish for a bowl of her daal. 

I see the same people mobilizing, and the same people standing still. Let’s get it straight.

I understand that for some, social media is exclusively a tool for drawing attention, and it can be hard to imagine why people would “push in your face” ethical issues, especially on Facebook. Two years ago I even told myself I would stop talking about those things, and that I would certainly stop bringing those discussions online. I hated the flack I would get for bringing these things up.

At the moment, we seem to live in a golden age secured by the patriots we read about in elementary school textbooks, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan and the writers of Zero Dark Thirty (that second one was a joke) (that third one was, too). It’s especially clear that we think marshaling against racist sentiments is now unnecessary.

How does this play out? When it comes to racism against blacks, if you’re black, you’re first asked to not over-react, then you are compared with a black person who has gone on record saying that racism is not a problem. If you’re not black, you’re asked why you care at all. Above all, you are asked to have dignity—to stop protesting racism, to be decent and silent. I’m reminded of my father: a man who has seen much racism in the work place, but firmly believes that he should be submissive to it, because everyone likes a hard worker who is passive and obedient and doesn’t “make a big deal” out of anything, even if it is big. “Dignity,” they call that.

So why bother speaking up? To preach to the choir? To get likes and up votes? To get attention? To feel like your life matters? To have an interesting new cause, which will shortly be followed by advocating for the rights of third-world non-GMO lightly-bruised avocados?  

The reason why you or I or anyone should speak up is because putting a face to a statement adds a measurable influence on every person within a network. In this, who you are and the stance you take has tremendous power (I’m looking at you, people who feel like your help won’t matter or isn’t wanted). Every time I see someone write in support of black students at Mizzou, that is one more person—a person I know—who is expressing a belief. Every time that happens, more people realize how widespread that sentiment is.

Most importantly, more people who disagree with that sentiment are brought closer and closer and closer to it.

There is an impact to this. Right now we are experiencing hate crimes against African Americans that never really declined, only lost visibility. Now, they are somewhat more visible and certainly on the rise. If ever there was a time when we would be asked to act, by anyone—especially civil rights activists from decades ago—it would be now. In their time, they must have been dismissed; “slavery is over; it’s all good now.” In our time, they’d be told “segregation is over, it’s all good now.” Told to forget the rampant structural oppression and violence that continues. But we can’t. This is the real world. This is actually happening today.

Please understand that I have no reason to lie to you when I say that most of America is not like the cute, insular, affluent mostly-white suburbs where I would often crash house parties throughout my teenage years. In America, in any America where black-people exist today, very dangerous realities are being faced. Really, you should be concerned by all the inequalities your friends of color face, be that racial slurs or job application bias. But if nothing else, violence hits home quite quickly and quite seriously.

So, to be clear: 

I’m blowing up your Facebook feed and your real-life ears because it is a very real chance that one of my friends who is black will see significant harm one of these days, if they haven’t already. I’m saying something because someone important to me, someone I go to school with, could be abused, and (though I pray not) possibly even assaulted or killed for the color of their skin, today. This is not exaggeration or oversensitivity, this is statistics and lived experience.

For this reason, I am obligated to offer at least a statement when a group of people are marginalized. This goes beyond race and the discriminations I personally experience: as a man, I seriously implore my male friends to stop remaining silent when women are asking for support of their rights and political agendas. As a heterosexual, I seriously implore my heterosexual friends to stop letting homophobic comments or statements slide by without challenge (whenever possible and safe to do so). The list goes on.

As far as race goes, we are at a turning point. A social election is playing out right now, and it will take place whether you vote one way, the other way, or whether you don’t vote at all. And that’s the part it seems like people aren’t understanding: there is no TRUE abstention. Every choice, including silence, has an impact.

If you speak up, it will have an impact.

If you don’t speak up, whether it be because you feel silly, you feel it’s already been said, you feel it won’t help, you feel embarrassed, you feel it doesn’t matter, you feel it’s “not your issue,” you fear judgment from friends/family, you fear you’ll be thought of as making a “big deal” out of nothing, you fear you’ll be labeled as a SJW—

so far as you can reasonably and safely speak up, and yet choose not to, it will have an impact. If that sounds like a lot of pressure, that’s because it is.