ilakumar-blog1

[ilakumar-blog1]

The Difference Between Cornbread and Caviar

As I grow up, the cruelty of the world stings me more. My salvation is elegant, a painful crescendo which vibrates, quietly the heart, creeping up the skin until it’s an indigestible anger on the tip of the tongue. Every candle I blow, each slice of frosted cake I taste, is a celebration of my resistance to the white wolves craving my dignity. Wolves so chill, comfy in their positions of power, so drunk off privilege they have no problem crushing any aspirations I might have, to be more than the girl to keep an eye on when in a park avenue department store.

If America’s entire racial progress is based on how fast I can become white, what does that mean for the young black boys with blunts on their lips the city sun in their eyes and guns on their hip. What does it mean for those who pledge to a flag that does not pledge to them, to kneel on the anthem only to be called sons of bitches, to find the strength to walk through mobs only to enter a classroom.  

Those who do not have to demand civil treatment, relishing in their place in the sun--are able to lodge their guilt deeper than the roots of the oldest trees, because from their sunroofs atop their castles they can see, that to not ever feel your face pushed into the dirt at the traffic light, is a privilege.  

My hair, my lips, my tan, my ass, torment me. But they connect me to the vast forests of pain and heartbreak, the cold wilderness of the outside--constantly testifying to humanity, the crashing waves of inspiring fear, the moody storms of christian love, crushing earthquakes of shamefully boyish shootings--desperate flexes of power, I am connected to the entire globe-- the exhausting rotations and revolutions of them and you, integration and acceptance.

White, is the default. They are not really white, rather we are just not white enough. Their mindless and pitiful drunk joyrides of ignorance and their grand cathedrals of comfort in just being better, feels so natural--like routinely tucking their heads under cone shaped hats, burning a cross, then going home to tuck their kids into bed.  

No feeling is unprecedented. The tantrums and tears over the black and blonde barbies at the galleria, the kind of dancing that’s colored warm and never misses a beat, the shock when you finally figure it out--you are not supposed to desire the world--understand your place, under the his whip. When you, at last, see the gap between people, only on the basis of their skins, to witness the accelerating illegalization of being not white. You heartbreak is not worse than anyone else’s, it connects you to all those who have lived and died.

This murderous mill of shifty encounters with the policeman, the taxi driver, the teachers, the waiters, the landlady, the banks, the insurance companies, the 24 hours of every day which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. This daily grind of being invisible, no hand holding the door for you--and one second later--thrown against a sharp white background, crip-walking over the most sacred white lilies.

I don’t want to be thirty years old, watch all my daughters and sons jump into the pool from the balcony. And I  have done nothing to save them from the disaster of the deep end. How can you save the children from the bland ignorance and condescension, the charm and cheerfulness, the pageant queens and squad cars of the American Dream?

For all who have stayed in their place, as the white man’s fixed star, the foundation of this country, the pillars holding up the White House--I hope to wake up one day and see out of my window, every star aflame and every pillar smashed. If the entire fucking universe were to be upheaved and the natural order were to be crushed in it’s windpipe, so would the breaths of white privilege, sweaty and oppressive, constantly breathing down my neck.

There is no drama like my drama--teenage eye-rolls, and my wretched teenage words, words of worry about her role in this country and this country’s role in her life.

[ilakumar-blog1]

A New Style of Immigrant Story

When my grandmother, my father’s mother, died in January of 2014, in Bihar, I was here in New York. My father was on the next plane to India. I remember the night, he walked down the stairs that evening, slower than usual. He told us that he was going to India because she was unwell. And he felt he should be there. And that night, I was ten years old, barefoot on the kitchen floor completely uninterested in commiserating with my father. A child’s first exposure to death is a tragically hopeless and confusing time. And in the case of my grandmother, she wasn’t dead yet. It was a matter of jet fuel which determined whether my father would be with his mother, his hand in hers, when she died. He knew this, and I did too.

By the time my father had packed his shaving kit, clothes and notebook, I should have been asleep. I was brushing the curls, which I get from my dad, out of my hair. From my bedroom window I saw him climb into the taxi. Needing somewhere else to focus my energies, I then, baked a cake. I labored over it, for like three hours. Carefully, I piped small pink flowers placing one of those pearly sprinkles in the middles. This cake served as my nagging problem through the night. It was this perfectly vanilla cake, a simple or impossible task, to which my mind insanely clinged to avoid its real trouble. As I tried to move it from the counter to the plate, it crumbled in my hands like clay that’s been under pressure for too long. I began to cry, between the sorrow and guilt the jack-in-the-box inside my skull finally escaped my control and flooded the entire house with tears.

I could not bear to imagine my father, alone in that dark plane. You see, his sisters who were already in India, knew their mother had died. To save their brother from the most uncomfortable and saddest plane ride of his life, they didn’t tell him. It was a cousin, on FaceBook, offering condolences right before he was boarding the plane that really screwed the whole operation. Sixteen hours of torture and despair all suppressed in an illusion of composure for the flight attendants and the man sitting next to him. He might have been flying above the world, his heavy heart must have been the only thing tethering him to the world.

When my grandmother died I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to her. I am realizing, now, if her husband, my grandfather, was to die today, I would still be writing the same sentence. I haven’t learned from my mistakes, I have made no effort to know my grandfather. Nevermind that, my mother, who stayed with us--didn’t tell me or my brother what happened. The idea was that when my father returned, we would all talk. That night, I lay down to sleep. My mother didn’t tell me my grandmother had died, so was it even true? Had it even happened? Maybe she really was alive, breathing the same air as me. My grieving heart did not care for logic.

And my dad and I didn’t talk. When he finally came back home his head was shaved. Curls gone. He brought gifts- toys for my brother, dresses and jewelry, silver coins, a gold statue of a young girl reading a book from his mother’s bedroom. I remember the night he came back, he was jetlagged and I just couldn’t sleep. He came into my bed and I lay in his arms, trying to sync my breathing to his. We lay there, for hours in the dark, neither one of us falling asleep. He spoke once, he asked me if I had any questions, about anything. Of course I did. But I would never ask them.

My father and I didn’t spend evenings in a treehouse talking about boys, he was never my lacrosse coach or whatever most dads are for their daughters. The mornings we share together are silent. I wake up disturbingly early, but he wakes up earlier. The heat is on, the house is warm. Breakfast and tea is waiting for me to finish my mascara. He waits for me. And we leave our warm grey house to stand outside. Just us in the cold. He likes to listen to writer’s almanac and drink his coffee. I don’t like it, but this day, I did. Robert Hayden’s poem, a tired one, my father had read to me so many times, played.

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

My bus hasn’t come yet. We stand in silence as it nears 7am and more and more cars drive by. “It always reminds me of my mother,” he says. “Did I thank her enough?” The bus came. There was a kiss on the forehead and that was it.

I found my answers almost a year later, in London on Christmas day. That sounds misleadingly glamourous. There was a party, everyone was outside in the lavish backyard smoking cigars. I was in an awfully crappy mood. It was the smoke, that really was the cause for my drama. My father does not smoke, as in cigarettes, as in regularly. But the occasional cigar is an attractive idea. It’s a stylish thing-- an accessory, a fetish object, something to help pass the time, a communication tool. It’s selfish, if he only knew it bothered me. But anyway, this night is only relevant because as my father was distracted, outside, doing what he does so perfectly--he left a book inside, on the kitchen counters. It was the mock-up of his forthcoming book of essays, including “Pyre” about his mother’s death.

All I desired was a simple medical diagnosis--but that is not what was given to me. I didn’t want to feel sad, there was no need to, we barely knew each other. And then, I read. It was my grandmother's life, suddenly revealed to me-- her wonderful charitable life, and then what happens to my father after her life.

I have not yet learned how to properly, live and talk and write about my very peculiar relationship, my limited understanding of where I come from. The drift began at the age of 6, when I became aware of my thick hair and big lips. It was not so much being aware of the large lips, but knowing what they meant--it was a symbol of difference in power, I felt like a clown. What is more, is I had a feeling, not being white, meant I was inferior to the rest of their world and the rest of my life would just be so exhausting.  

I can cannot help that those inaccurate portraits of Indians on TV make me sick, I cannot help the bitterness I feel whenever I stumble upon the inescapable stereotypes these shows have burned in our brains. I need you to understand, the images of the Indian in America have impacted my early life in such an influential and very dangerous way. At least, I now know why I have made no progress in accepting my public identity, and why one should not serve, or give into national taste. What has ruined me, is the most subtle form of oppression-- how one thinks about itself.

The story of an immigrant child in this country could be written a million times better and sadder and more eloquently. But that’s not the point and I don’t care. My fight for a seat at the table was based on how fast I could look or become like the table. Yet, I remain trapped and despised within this republic--and my situation is unique because I have not been kept in bondage for three hundred years. I have only been held together by my future, unwilling to accept my past. I have drowned in my past. As it was deemed unfashionable, so I hoped it cracked and crumbled under the pressures of drought.

No one is in the position to tell me that my only problem, Indian people on TV, is not a valid complaint. It’s a recipe for murder, really. I know mostly only white people, they have no intention to exploit me, and I love them for that. But their own glorification, their place in the sun and on the screen--has forced me to endure a great deal of pain and festor some anger and jealousy. These shows had told me I had a very specific place, socially. My dignity was just a character to the very ill people creating the illusions on of the screen. Of course, the sick illusions do not stay on the screen. The accents, of course, follow one around. The goal, is to separate yourself from that. And perhaps I have made a mistake, because in my separation of “Indian in America” I look back, as a stranger to “Indian.”

My mother is Muslim, my dad is Hindu. They got married when their two countries, India and Pakistan were fighting a war. Ila is a Hindu name; it is the opposite of my mother's last name, Ali (a Muslim name) Ila Ali. It forms a palindrome. It mirrors my mother’s, yet keeps its difference.

My father had written about the marriage between a Muslim and Hindu, and got himself on a hit-list. Far-right India was not happy about his news. But still he went to meet the man who put him on the hit-list, for lunch.

And what is worse, is it was the death of my grandmother that had brought me back to where I had started. No one told me she died. It was a text I saw on my mother’s phone, from a cousin, offering condolences. Really, it was my father’s essay, “Pyre” that I only saw because of the liking Franzen took towards it, gave me the scraps of information of her death. What is interesting, is his own drifting from what used to be his world.

“I left India nearly three decades ago, and would see my mother only for a few days each year during my visits to Patna. Over the past ten or fifteen years, her health had been declining. She suffered from arthritis and the medicines she took for it had side effects, and sometimes my phone rang with news that she’d fallen asleep in the bathroom or had a seizure on the morning after she had fasted during a festival. I knew that one day the news would be worse and I would be asked to come to Patna. I was fifty years old and had never before attended a funeral. I didn’t know what was more surprising, that some of the rituals were new to me, or that they were exactly as I had imagined. That my mother’s corpse had been dressed as a bride was new and disconcerting, and I’d have preferred a plainer look; on the other hand, the body placed on the bamboo bier, its canopy covered with an orange sheet of cotton, was a familiar daily sight on the streets of my childhood. In my notebook that night I noted that my contribution to the funeral had been limited to lighting my mother’s funeral pyre. In more ways than one, the rituals of death had reminded me that I was an outsider.”

In my school, we have been learning about India. Do you remember, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the chilled monkey brain for dessert? That desire to exploit other worlds using film, again, is not only in TV but documentaries too. The supposedly “accurate” or perfectly innocent or good and straight parallels that are supposedly drawn in documentaries-- they are a false and biased  look into the lives of others. Lives, that colonial powers have no place in, yet they do. I blame film, which is the most was the influential weapon old colonial power has, for my drift with India. That is my confession of to desire to be in that burning house seated at the broken table.