Chicken Tikka in England

I was agonizing over the mediocre Mexican mango I ate yesterday while watching the online Indian mango wars gain momentum. It's summer time and the only thing that comes before eating a mango is fighting about which mango is the best. I don't even love mango as much as my family does for instance. My dad sources mangoes, people perform favors in mango. Crates and boxes travel far and wide before they reach our house to then be safely tucked away under the bed covered in newspapers. They must be appropriately ripened under the bed, making the whole room smell of mangoes. Then he goes under and retrieves the choicest ones for post-dinner debauchery. A few always given to our domestic helps. After all, the joy of eating is communal. It is thoroughly communal and don't let anyone else convince you otherwise. There is more joy in watching someone eat your offering than there is in eating that same delicious mango. So mangoes are fed and eaten - haapus and kesar, the rest is all not fit for consumption only. The gujju mango snobbery entails that dasari, langda, tota must all be cooked with. The season of murabba and chhundo, aam papad and an ever flowing stock of aam panna in the fridge. If I romanticize anything about these summer rituals that I grew up with, I'd be pandering to the implicit Columbusian phoren Amreekan audiences. Other fellow mango-eaters in any part of India will surely have their own rituals. But I sat here agonizing, stuck in the times of a disease that at times doesn't feel real. As usual, home feels extra far. Home feels as far as the breadth of the pacific but then you buy a Mexican mango and eat it as a silent assertion of everything objectively better that lies on the other side of the pacific. I am equally grateful for the avocados on this side of it. I live local these days, trying to be less affected by any thievery of chickpea recipes. Stealing is the amreekan way of life and nothing can be done about it. But playing to the amreekan gallery or making a case for anything Indian is beneath, above and beyond me. Learning one recipe, one flavor, one dress won't establish anything, what I think of as tasteful is somewhere between the ingredients.
But the mango agony stems from elsewhere. A few months ago I encountered the second generation Indian creature in my own home. The version of the second gen creature that shoots its mouth off, amreekan confidence and cheetos power the mouthing off. She, of Punjabi immigrant parents, strove to convince our common white friend that (her exact words), "you have to go to the UK to eat the best Punjabi food". They moved on to rave about chicken tikka, a dish that does not exist. The zombie love child of some colonial encounter. I bit my words at the time, trying to take high moral ground. My face is still learning to react to such bounded idiocy. Surely it is idiocy but then last night I was thinking, if that does it for her, good for her. Who am I to prove her wrong and show her the spectrum of good Indian food? There's nothing like that, my mother makes excellent food and the aunty next door makes different excellent food too. I don't really have a point except that I am trying to rise above the desire to hate on and correct anyone who has anything to say about India. It's just a sort of reorientation where your legitimacy or even any satisfaction doesn't come from helping phoreners discover the true authentic Indian stuff. That in itself would be terribly problematic. But I like this Sarnath Banerjee article, his stance comforts me. He writes about and for his own (whoever that might be). I too am hoping to overcome the desire to shed light or set the record straight. A certain bounded, limited cosmopolitics is good, its comforting. There is no need to strive for universal cultural translation. The mexican mangoes still do suck but they are excellent for mango salsa. Onward to making mango salsa.

Family is Fraught

A still from Circus of Books with the mom and the son (picture credit: Rachel Mason) 

I think the metadiscursive move of queer theory is to start producing a counter/comparative standpoint from where we first start to see the world as not uniform. Gradually, the project of queerness, after having produced enough "not this but another way" reference points, allows for the questioning of that which was held to be normative in the first place. The switch flips on and a queer subject is the one who questions, who is ever so cautious and perhaps to a great extent always unsure. That fundamental loneliness of queerness if to feel unsure, to feel alone and to be able to not fully participate in ritual or scripted enactments of anything. To be queer is to remember one's constantly exceptional, excessive self, often with the realization that one has to live a little less to live sanely.
"Is this love?"
She answers, "It could be, who is to tell what the way to love is? And afterall, love is what love does. Is there a love outside of or opposed to its practice?"
We just saw 'Circus of Books', a Netflix documentary about a sort of underground adult media store in Los Angeles, run by two very straight people. They sort of fall into it because they need to earn a living. One a former journalist and the other, a less successful inventor and media technician. They run this store and they raise three kids. One of the kids makes this documentary as the store is shutting down because after the Internet, their only clientele is ageing (and dying) gay men for whom consuming pleasure and their sense of identity came from participating in the gay video cultures (VHS tapes, pornos, men who made a name for inventing genres of gay porn, people who survived the Reagan administration's morality crusades and the AIDS epidemic). Halfway through the film, the focus shifts to the coming out story of one of the couple's three kids. If the eye is well trained to the presentation and performative gestures of gay bodies, it is not hard to see from the start how this now fully grown, out-of-the-closet man is so gay. But the reveal happens in the later half. It centers more on the mother who was raised as a conservative Jewish girl, she reconciled her business and her (very pleasant) social interaction with her gay employees, customers and business partners as business - as the means to earn money and thus drew a mental line around family and business. Family is straight, family is normal. Business is simply what is needed to nourish the family. But then her son comes out and her first reaction is disappointment. Her less religious husband had less trouble accepting it.
As she says later in the film, "I wish I could take those words back but we all know that is impossible and I talk a lot so I have to remember all that I say." Her moral crisis and her inability to accept her son's full identity while staying true to her own theological cosmology is very raw and real. But what follows both surprised me, it almost seemed unreal and it made me sob a lot. She started doing soul searching, looking for readings, people who have tried to bridge religious tenets with homosexuality. She eventually joins a support group of parents and families that support lesbian and gay children/people. The film reaches an emotional crescendo when she and her husband lead a group parade at the LA pride, representing PFLAG (the organization). It's not the kind of moral arc where an overtly homophobic and antagonized parent has a change of heart. She had already never disowned her son which is the more common story we hear and see on screen. But her whole sequence is supported by an audio track of her speaking and her son speaking too.
He says (or she), "Parents are always supposed to be the ones leading the change and children are expected to just you know, go about their lives..." (heavily paraphrased but something like that)
That is the exact moment when I started to sob because I had already started substituting my own parents into the picture. The long and short of this could be that I wish my parents were capable of such emotional journeys. The truth is that my parents and their seemingly flat emotional arcs are at least symptomatic if not fully the product of the "Indian society" we grew in. In short, growing up, Indian parents' inability to emotionally express or be vulnerable was already a joking point, especially dads.
I like cinema because it allows for this third space between what is (at-large, normal) and what could be (or already is in very small proportions). Like when someone shows you a real example of a good school and it makes you want to believe that good schools exist, surely not where I grew up but they surely do somewhere. It's half desire realized and projected. And I told my partner who was also watching the film, "I wish my mom had such self reflexivity." The times I've brought up queer things with her, just things that are not to be discussed between parents and kids - sex, drugs, wayward desires...she literally blanks me out. She shifts the conversation to herself. She immediately says, "when have I stopped you from speaking your mind and you say what you want anyway"
I know that discomfort. I know she wants to get out of the specifics. It makes me at least momentarily desire the mom who might go join therapy or a support group or be the starter of a conversation around my general waywardness and how perhaps there are other ways of being in the world.
But my partner said something so astute, he said,"we like to pretend that it is us (Indian families) who are infused with love, warmth and care, we maintain our relationships...but we are so transactional, it is full of transactions" To the reader of this post, my purpose is not to be instructive, I am in the half desire space, I am merely exploring things that could be (better or worse). His words struck a chord with me because when my parents visited America, they were amazed to see that most people (in Orange County, San Fran and New York) were not obese, they saw a lot of happy caring families. They cultivated a hesitant appreciation for what they expected would be a wreckage. Afterall, for years we have had NRIs, cinema and newspapers tell us that Americans are facing a moral crisis, families are breaking up and divorce rates are peaking. To find that there are other people who happen to live in other ways and it does not lead to the end of the world is very destabilizing. From my limited perspective, the desi life principle of log kya kahenge (what will people say?) also works in reverse. It also implicates us as a social public into a kind of log/people that feel that constant need to live as if we are living better than others.
Cinema is not evidence in the strict social science way, it is also not anecdotal. The knowledge status of cinematic texts or their instructive value is up for debate. For some of you reading this, there are now countless serials that play on the stereotypes of Asian and Black and Hispanic family cultures in the US but also of SoBo family cultures and Delhi family cultures and Tambram families in India. As they become an easy way to entertain and relate to markets, it is harder to figure out what is organic and what is not (life imitating art?). But this is a documentary and some of my positive reception might have to do with the fact that I have been listening to podcasts on US constitutionalism. Without belaboring it, legal histories especially of landmark cases and autobiographies and documentaries about historic progressive events are very heartening. They just instil a deep appreciation of a land, its people, possibilities for empathy. And cinema is definitely a great vehicle at being able to produce that effect even with one single story, definitely more than my research papers :) I highly recommend 'Circus of Books' and also Pose (both produced by Ryan Murphy). Thanks to Anubha for the recommendation to watch! 

In the waiting room

It's a feeling that I verbalized when I was in an emotionally abusive relationship in 2019. The feeling that someone is constantly keeping you sitting outside in the living room, or in the waiting room of their mind. And what they think, what they feel is inside their private chamber. I thought if I knocked hard enough and often enough they would finally open up. I saw it as their fear of vulnerability. Only later did I realize they also drew power from holding back, from knowing and being reassured that I would constantly permanently sit in the waiting room outside. I hated that feeling and I am currently struggling to find how I overcame it. How I got over trying to guess and access someone's intentions, moods, feelings. It's exhausting. I've been told to write an email and say whatever I want to. And that dialog may not do good right now. I am vulnerable too you know. I can't emotionally labor for two people. I just hope I am not yet again sitting in the waiting room of someone's head. This time I know to protect myself better. Only time will tell.