The Quintessential American - I

"Do you feel like a quintessential American?" I asked A.

"These days I do, at the nadir", he said.

"Hmm...that's not quite what I am getting at", I said.

To which I said, "almost everything is a point of comparison for you, between India and America. When we see a brilliant movie or TV show, with flawless direction and lines of dialogue that never miss their mark, you ask me if I can imagine an Indian movie or show with the same attributes. When we see an intelligently designed product you ask if I can imagine it coming out of India. When we see people trying out adventurous things like bungee jumping or diving off a cliff you once again ask if an Indian can be imagined in such a situation. Even when you wolf down habaneros by the dozen you question the ability of Indians to stand heat in their food to the extent that Americans can. This one is really strange because Indians are famous for eating hot food! So tell me what it is that sets America apart in your mind? What trait, what characteristic? And how American do you feel? You've been here longer than I have!"

"It's hard to explain. I see it through sports. Football, baseball...how it's played, how it works as an instant ice-breaker when you are around people who follow the same team or even when they follow other teams, people bond over sports, something active, something energetic. I don't see Indians radiating energy. Every time I go to India I see people sitting around discussing politics or Hindi cinema. I was always stunned on my trips back to India when I heard people get into serious discussions about how many people Amitabh Bachchan single-handedly fought or how many storeys he jumped and survived! It's as though Indian cinema is more real to them than reality. And every movie buff talks about heroes! How are these actors heroes? What have they done that's so heroic? Do you ever see Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford being called a hero? I don't think this way, Americans cannot possibly think this way."

We have been through similar discussions on several occasions during our twenty-one years of marriage. His view of India doesn't necessarily mesh well with mine, even though I can't deny the fact that actors and actresses, for some mysterious reason, reach an exalted status and that politics does get discussed with directionless passion, just for the sake of discussion.

We both think of the time in the nineties when we were visiting India and we were talking to some of A's young cousins, little kids, who said they couldn't do well in school and that it wasn't worth doing anything with their lives because Laloo was in charge. I haven't heard little American kids say that their grades don't matter because Bush or Obama are in charge.

But none of this gets us closer to the question: what makes one American?

There's the sports immersion that appealed to A because he came to the US at the age of eight. A world viewed through the lens of American sports is certainly uniquely American. He still carries around an entire century of baseball stats in his head and remembers his Little League or high school football days with fond nostalgia.

It was different for me. I grew up with stories of America. My parents always referred to it as my country. I never imagined an Indian future for myself. In Indian crowds, in uniquely Indian dirt and poverty, amidst the rudeness of bank tellers or in the face of bureaucratic red tape I used to hear about how smooth the process would have been in the US. I also heard that Americans were friendly and lively and always wished and greeted strangers or offered help if someone's car was broken down at the side of the road. To me it sounded like heaven on earth and my heart was set on America.

I thought I could learn about America from Archie comics! (I wasn't too far off in this estimation). I devoured these. I never missed a single episode of Star Trek or Diff'rent Strokes or I Love Lucy; these were the only shows that made it to India during the years when I was watching them. I needed to absorb the diction, the culture, the sights and sounds through the pages of comic books and novels and through the black and white television images.  Sidney Sheldon, Ayn Rand, Tootsie and my parents' fond recollections of a carefree time here all helped construct a particular image of America in my mind.

I started spelling things the American way, dropping the unnecessary "u" from words like color or labor and spelling words like organize and mesmerize with a "z" (pronounced zee).

Earlier on my dad had acquired an encyclopedic series of books for us called "Learning by Doing". These books had been authored in America and were basic science books that taught science through illustrations and experimentation. I devoured those books. I especially loved the illustrations, the most poignant ones showing a father or a son or a father and daughter standing in the fenced in yard of a typical American suburban home as the father pointed up at the night sky to planets and constellations. It was an image that got etched in my mind.

Since my dad had obtained a doctorate in the Sciences in this country and since I thought of him as a scientist who made sure my first few words were, "DNA is the building block of life", in my ideal sense of America, dads were scientists and they held their kids' hands through observing and through doing things together, helping them think for themselves.

When I was older and it was time to start thinking about my westward journey I read some of the literature the embassy put out. These books and pamphlets said Americans were friendly, talkative, engaging, that they respected personal space and breaching this 3' distance between yourself and others was frowned upon in informal social settings. I absorbed these facts as well.

I thought I saw some of this in action when I went to the American Embassy in New Delhi to get my first US Passport. An American girl behind the passport counter was demonstrating something to her colleague by breaking into an impromptu dance. I was entranced. Never in my life had my own personal interactions been so buoyant, so energetic.

Was this what it meant to be American?

There came a time when I didn't have to wonder anymore. I held my father's hand for the very last time as he led me here and indicated more confidence in my ability to make it here than I could muster up for myself.  But no inner thoughts were daunting enough for me to decide against this move.  I was here, out of the air-brushed world of my imagination and breathing the air, feeling it on my skin. I landed here in the fiery brilliance of fall. I saw colors I had never seen before and endless highways. I saw more cars than people and then I started meeting the people.

There was Mr Christian Dunyoh, at the employment office, who rolled his eyes and shook his head in despair when he learned that I could neither type nor drive and that all I possessed was a legless BA Honors in Economics. He found me a job nevertheless and will remain memorable for his chagrin at my lack of life skills and an optimism that remained unaffected by it.

The next stop was the workplace where my boss was only a year older than I was. I was all set to call him sir or Mr Sierra but the former wasn't done and the latter, he said, was his dad. He was simply Dan and I was to call him that. He told me that first names were to be used all the way up the chain of command. Informality in addressing people was my first lesson.

The second workplace lesson was that there was no concept of putting in some time or deserving before desiring. There was no break from desire, here in the new world, relentless desire drove this engine.

My boss was new in his role when he hired me and he was campaigning for his next promotion from day one of his current job. He took me in his confidence and often pulled me aside to help him plot his next moves because even at twenty-one, like all Asians, I was perceived to be in possession of some ancient wisdom and insight. Or perhaps it was just my ability to spell correctly. Whenever I asked him what made him think he could be promoted just a couple months into this job, he told me that this was the way things worked, that all it took was enhancing ones visibility to upper management, to not miss a single opportunity to be in their faces and to even pretend one was Italian when one really was Puerto Rican.

This was a novel idea for me. I came from a place and a time where almost everyone I knew worked in the public sector and there were no fast tracks to the pinnacle. One had to put in the time, earn seniority and take a step up when the time came. I grew up hearing how honest people were inevitably on the slow track. The ones who hopped, skipped or jumped ahead used political connections and the Hindi word, pairvi, was often heard in this context. I suppose it meant using inside connections to get ahead. So this world where one thought one could simply reach out and pluck a promotion out of thin air, was new to me. This was 1988 of course, and this country still had jobs and things like career tracks.

What stood out from my initial American experiences was evidence of an unquenchable, infinite thirst riding the perfect wave of hope. Even if one's microcosm showed tinges of despair, the macro picture erased it all with finesse. On a larger, grander scale an American was always soaring above the earth and looking down at a glittering blue, luminous perfection.

In those early years a quick adoption of this attitude was indispensable for me. See, I, have never felt lucky and I have never felt as though I could attract wealth or success. But coming here did bestow upon me a sense that with tenacity and determination I could possibly turn things in my favor, just a little bit.  Just that hint of a feeling, often just something that whispers in your ear and brushes against your fingers that says it is all possible here more than anywhere else in the world, is a quintessential American feeling for me.

The Company Men

I didn't see the entire movie, just tuned in at the part of The Company Men where Ben Affleck's character was calling himself a loser at 37. It was easy enough to piece together the facts after half the movie was over. They couldn't pay their mortgage, their son gave up his Xbox, the wife worked double shifts and the American dream hadn't crashed and burned but was close to it.

The movie became one of great interest to me after I filled in the blanks. They could have been telling my story since I bear the scars of two layoffs.

The first time I became an unbearable cost at a progressively impoverished corporation I left them my jar of pennies and a note saying it was a donation to help stall their imminent financial demise.

The second time around I wasn't quite as cocky. I was older and nervous. At that time plan B hadn't yet made an appearance. The fog was dense. There was no occupation or income to state on any forms, there was a massive student loan that would once again start burgeoning out of control by feeding on capitalized interest while the payments got deferred. All degrees of freedom were gone, obliterated. I was alone, losing oxygen.

There were those moments of self-loathing that can only come to a firm believer in choices and consequences. Was my past littered with bad choices and bad decisions? Had I willingly drained my career of all its lifeblood, was I incompetent and ill-equipped for life.

And then there were the moments lit by the sickening light of the thing called hope that said none of this was my fault, that there was no longer any stigma attached to the loss of one's job, that we were all together in this sinking, stinking ship.

Neither realization allowed for the tearing of a check from that meaningless checkbook, tied to a bank account that was in the red and getting redder by the minute because of the fees banks liked to charge accounts that didn't have sufficient funds on deposit, and to write a check to the mortgage company.

They said money can't buy happiness. In that state of impoverishment one hoped that the originator of that saying had faced a firing squad in some dictatorial regime for having uttered those inane words.

Happiness. What is happiness if it isn't being in a state that provides infinite degrees of freedom? And degrees of freedom are always bought or sold to the highest bidder.

The sun still came up when it did, time continued its brazenly audacious task of aging you out of any potential open positions meant for unscarred young things who had just tacked up a framed degree somewhere in their 500 sq ft studio apartment above a Manhattan bodega.

So there was a lot of sitting around, walking, flailing, falling and squinting for direction through the thick fog. But fogs are just that, fogs; wispy, temporary, a veil, not a wall. If one staggers through it, collects a few burrs, stumbles over some logs and steps in some ditches eventually a bramble free path does emerge.

I find myself on just such a strange path now. The game has changed and the rules get made along the way. The lesson one learns is to shake any residual belief in permanence, to distance oneself from historical lessons and from the idea that the past has any bearing on the present.

The brilliant nerds around us get rich and richer by designing and programming gaming scenarios where one battles lurking danger, vanquishes, conquers or surmounts and proceeds to the next level.

No game addict quits after level one and no life addict should either. It is all one massive exam; solve a problem move on, solve another move on and continue doing it until your body gives out and the soul stands poised for flight into nothingness or into something incomprehensible or unimaginable.

I am in my sinecure hammock for the moment, taking occasional dips in a time soup; Dali's clock, melted to a point where dawn is unrecognizable from dusk.

I reminisce and recollect my days of enslavement to the clock, the neuroses and the panic it induced, running to catch buses, trains or cabs, screaming at the long procession of red tail lights, praying I won't be sharing an elevator with a boss who would raise his left hand and train his eyes on the wristwatch there to make a silent point about punctuality. I think about the skipped lunches the forecasts, re-forecasts, the reconciliation of actuals to forecasts, the late nights spent at the office and I marvel at the involvement I had shown, the way I had internalized and assimilated every nuance of the business, only to be summoned to an HR office one Friday to be told that costs had to be cut and that my position was being eliminated.

How can one allow oneself to live and breathe a job that gets "eliminated" without a second of thought by the masters one so selflessly served?

These recollections inspire awe and wonder and reinforce the lesson that your interests are of no interest to anyone but you, that you need to solve your singular problem and move on to the next sans emotion and sans attachment, believing that each step you take is a non sequitur; it doesn't follow a logical, linear progression.

One only need review my dad's career and life to verify this: Hawaii isn't predicted for the fatherless son of an Indian freedom fighter, an in depth, doctoral level study of the Pacific Caulerpa does not predict a life in snowy Canada or in an agricultural university on the outskirts of a small town in Bihar. None of this predicts a lifetime in Delhi, some pioneering work in the area of vocational education in India or a life of quiet retirement in Canada where managing every nuance, every measurement and every reading of one's blood pressure or sugar or creatinine is as much of a full time job as the founding and running of an institute of vocational education in Bhopal. Those years have receded so far back in our memories, they offered no hints, no clues in 1996 about what 2013 would have in store for him.

The dense fog only ever allows immediate action on that which stares us in the face, the rest lies in wait, asleep, awaiting our tread.

There's no room

She sat there, listless, yawning, waiting for her daughter's violin class to end.  Her eyes were unfocused and there were bags under her eyes.  She seemed incapable of taking another step.  She could have curled up and taken a nap right there on the carpet of the waiting room.

I commented on her tiredness, told her she looked ready for bed.  I was waiting for her daughter's class to end as well because my own class started next.  On Tuesdays I do have an elevated level of stress because I need to time things perfectly: leave work at a certain hour, catch a certain bus, pray for flowing traffic etc.  But I wouldn't dream of giving up my violin classes because of this.  In fact if my class was two hours long instead of 30 minutes, even if it started at 8 PM and ended at 10 PM,  I would still love it.  I would prefer it longer.  It's the only time of the day when I am doing something good, something that enriches my life, something that is so far removed from what I do to earn a living.

Our conversation went on.  We started talking about Route 206 and how clogged it got during rush hour because of all the construction and the long stretches of one-lane traffic.  I experience Route 206 on Friday nights or Saturday mornings when I go for my Hindustani classical vocal lessons.  I told her my reasons for traveling on this route on certain days.  That's when she told me how impressed she was with my efforts at taking classes, my desire to learn new things.  She said it wasn't possible for her to absorb anything new at all at this point in life.  She said there was no room.  She said she was crazed enough at work and all she wanted was to relax with a glass of wine after work and not do another thing that involved getting off the couch.  Just bringing her daughter to violin and soccer and basketball was an immense strain.

I told her I would get crazed if all I was doing was my work, that moving numbers around in spreadsheets would cause early brain death for me if that was all I did with my time.  I mentioned I would be bored out of my mind if I wasn't finding ways to learn new things.  I said that it was difficult for me to find inspiration in number crunching.  She said her work inspired her everyday.  That there were new challenges everyday.  Each work day was different for her, there were new problems to solve, new opportunities to explore creativity, to get absorbed in her work, creativity was rewarded, employers cared.

Hmm...so where before I was feeling mildly superior for having interests outside of work and the energy to explore them after a fourteen hour long day, now she had swiftly turned the tables and backed me into a corner, forcing me to the recurrent exploration of the "where did I go wrong" theme.  How did all my choices lead me to a place where all I do is move numbers around? Why am I so singularly incapable of finding something exciting to do to keep body and soul together in fine functioning order, without craving newness? I click open all my files, review everything I have on my plate a million times, trying to find something new, something exciting, a different way of doing something, some way to find enchantment and contentment in what I do and I continue to draw blanks.

If a hammer is all that is "officially sanctioned" to perform all necessary tasks in my role then all my problems do take on the morphology of a nail.  I am not allowed to stray.  I am not allowed to emerge from my straitjacket.  So I stay put.  I smile and take pleasure from the wide-eyed looks of wonder that I get when people say things like, "Wow how do you do it? I couldn't."

Student Loan

It was an automated response
It confirmed receipt of payment
And showed me a new balance
Not much different from the old.

The response stated quite clearly
Its "no reply" nature. It promised
A swift bounce back, a notification
That an attempt to communicate
With the sender would result in
Undeliverable bits and bytes.

Longitudinal research on my life
Will show an undiminished loan,
Borrowed fifteen years ago and
Still as fresh and as youthful as
The day it was born. It is in fact
A burgeoning beauty,
With no concept of age or death
Or diminished stature.

It feeds, it grows and it feeds
Some more. It has reached
Immortality. I am certain it
Will outlive me.

So I fired up a response
To the no-reply address. This
Wrath needs to be bounced
Off the walls of my padded cell.
I am straitjacketed and shackled
But I can still scream "usury",
And have it fall back on my
Crumbling self.

Poetry

I have been hanging out with poets and people who want you to believe that what they are writing is poetry, for many years.

Identifying that which deserved the tag of poetry back when studying language and literature was a requirement, in ones school years, was not so challenging.

I didn't much care for what it entailed. I never liked learning all those lines by rote and then being asked to recite it in class. None of our teachers delved any deeper into the subject. Studying English was generally fun because textbooks came with stories, but poetry was like a bump in the road, something for which one did the bare minimum required in order to get by.

I am certain many of you would say that it wasn't so in your schools and that your teachers made the study of poetry meaningful for you. That is entirely possible but it wasn't the case for me.

We studied a lot of poetry in school. We were asked to read it, learn it by rote, recite it and perhaps answer a few questions about it on exams. Nothing more, no painstaking exploration of ideas. But despite its resemblance to an onerous chore, identifying what set poetry apart was never a problem.

One noted rhyme, rhythm, meter and an exploration of thoughts an ideas within those bounds, as though these explorations were endlessly possible, in infinite combinations within these bounds, as though these limits, these external constraints didn't even exist or impede. In the final product one sensed that which differentiated prose from poetry.

Beyond those student years, life ensured a rigorous and methodical schooling for me in the prosaic and mundane non-arts. I fell headlong into soulless pursuits. Poetry was a distant memory. But it has managed to become a part of my history in recent times.

I came in close contact with writers, many of whom told me they couldn't express themselves in prose and preferred poetry as a means of expression. Many of the folks I met were close in age, so they were probably schooled in the same manner, in the same era as me. So I marveled at their love for poetry and their distaste for prose.

I started reading what they were writing. Later on I graduated to asking them why they called what they were writing poetry, their works were nothing like the thing that neatly slid into the exalted slot reserved for poetry in my brain. These so called poems came without form, without structure, without a spine. They resembled words slithering around on a page or a screen in rather messy configurations where a few lines were longer than others, nothing rhymed and no ideas other than yearning, loneliness, lust and longing were ever explored. They appeared to be journal entries that were being aired out with line breaks and mushy language.

I wasn't criticizing, I was just puzzled. Perhaps this indeed was poetry and ideas like consonance in recitation and adherence to meter belonged in the dark ages. Perhaps poems were supposed to be like yawns or tears or other impromptu ejaculations, delivered in the moment of their creation.

But with so much wondering and seeking going on I was bound to run into a poet who has kept up quiet but sustained efforts at telling the world that poetry wasn't a yawn or a tear. Rather it almost always needed to be a wondrous alchemy of words, observation, metaphor and structure and that sacrificing linguistic excellence and elegance was never an option.

I now sought poetry where a larger thought, a larger idea could be explored even through the casual observation of the most mundane. Poetry could now be found in ink drying on paper, in waiting lines, in waiting rooms, in hospitals, in cafeterias, on buses, on ferries, in the spaces between things. I didn't need to accept longing, yearning, loneliness or, at the other end of the spectrum, the verbatim description of recent events as poetry. It was liberating.

I tried writing some of my own poetry. The streets of New York City glitter at night, have you noticed? In the day time Lincoln stares up at us out of pennies embedded in the sidewalks, homeless people push their lives around in shopping carts, no one looks at anyone in an elevator, there's a certain air of desperation in interviewees and an air of extreme discomfort in interviewers, there are people who draw smiley faces or baby's feet on misted up bus windows when they are stuck inside a bus with steamed up windows on a wintry night, all these things make for poetry in the truest sense because there is that which the eyes see and that which can be attributed to what one sees.

The key to poetry lies in this attribution, this is the realm where the concrete and the sublime come together seamlessly.

There are those who write about world events and natural disasters. They want to tell us about the people who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy and they reproduce news reports in rhyme. This is not poetry. You cannot describe an earthquake and the resultant loss of life, limb and home and call it poetry. In these instances the poetry lives in the aftermath, in between that instant when one was whole and contemplating one's things to do list for the next day and the instant when one's home was reduced to rubble, rendering all such lists extinct.

And when poetry is all of these things, when it explores all that's interstitial, that's when it becomes irresistible food for ones soul.

Did I Leave Footprints?

There was a credenza
In a corner of the room.

I paid it no mind

Perhaps it served
Some obscure purpose.
I had rested
A coffee mug on it once.

We gave it away last spring
Dragged it to the curb
On recycling day
And left it there.

There's a square depression
In the shag of the carpet
Where the credenza once was.

The original hue
of the carpet was
a much brighter beige, it seems.

I walked out the double doors
Of the Port Authority Bus Terminal
This morning and squinted up at
The New York Times Building.

Did this still feel like it once had?
Like home?

I walked east, then south
Balancing a purse, a tote and
a steaming cup of coffee.

I noted the woman dressed in
The all familiar black who had gold
colored shoes on with red laces.

I was indeed here even if my gait
was wobbly. estranged.

I even recognized
The bagel and coffee vendor,
He was at the same spot
on my old beat.

He did not remember me.

Back at home much later
I see the lighter colored
rectangular track where
the credenza once was.

These footprints were permanent.

Earler in the day,
The guy at our meeting,
The disembodied
Speaker phone voice,
Whose face I've never seen
Swore he had met me
And had known my name
For "hundreds of years"
He insisted, "who hadn't?"

Makes me wonder
If there was a marked,
permanently etched,
Indentation
Where I once was.

Sunset

This was prompted by someone's picture of a sunset.
***


As the eastern seaboard ascends into darkness in golden hues of slanted light,
I squeeze the sand between my toes and let the water cover me up to my knees before it recedes again, taking with it the sand I was trying so hard to hold. I feel the gentle brush of the breeze add another layer of gold to my hair and skin.

A lover would taint the moment. Words would be as unwelcome as the misplaced applause between two movements of a concerto. As the sun glows brighter each second and as the expectation of darkness starts building up to a crescendo, I feel a disintegration of all that was me. In that one moment I am nothing. I am insubstantial and I perceive no boundaries, no endpoints to my nerves, my skin, my limbs.

There are clouds now that offer pink and purple streaks across the orange orb of brilliance and darkness is at hand.

There is a frisson of fear now, darkness is the impending denouement. I lift up my camera. I want to capture the divine in its final moments and share it with virtual friends who would be awakening to brightening skies on the other side of our planet. I intend an image that defines the pleasure, the sensuousness of an ephemeral moment of sensual absence and divine presence.

I expect a copyrighted image that tells of the keenness of my eye and boasts of my aesthetic. I am all perverse humanity now as the growing darkness devours the divine and I start the long walk to the boardwalk and the blinking neon palm trees, scrolling through my camera roll for that one image that would set my social networks ablaze with appreciation.