Laughing with my Desi Sisters

Bangles by the dozen in Southall, London, England.  My partner and I spent an afternoon laughing and eating chaat with Anjana and Mina in this "Little India" in the spring of 2009.  That evening, I shook hands with Annie Lennox as she signed a CD for me at the Oxford Street HMV, but hanging out with these dear women ranked as high as meeting the superstar.  Memories of that day came back as I wrote the post below about women I met last week. 

“I don’t know.  Shit!” I replied, as I drove a car full of passengers to a local hotel that I should have been able to find easily.  Laughter greeted me.  I laughed, too, and my passenger, a Tamil woman I’d just met at an interdisciplinary conference about India, chuckled: “You sounded so Indian right there,” she said, repeating my words and my emphases. 

We were returning from dinner downtown: four women and a baby who had met on the first day of a three-day conference.  Over dinner at a Thai restaurant, I had had the unusual pleasure of not being the only desi, the only Indian at the table.  In fact, there were three of us, all academics.  The fourth woman with us, a white lesbian from California, is the mother of the baby.  So I wasn’t the only lesbian either.  It was a liberating experience, one that I sunk into the way my I slide into favorite old pajamas that I had forgotten about but which feel just right. 

Our conversation was loud and wide ranging, joined by occasional squeals from the baby.  We talked about gay people we know in India, about the papers we had heard that day, about the books we read growing up (by Enid Blyton, of course), about whether the only one at the table without a smart phone ought to get one.  We laughed as we took photos of each other and planned reunions—in California or at the Niagara Falls—reunions that we all know might never happen.  “Conference promises,” I think someone called these recently.

By the end of the night, my vowels had changed in shape and my consonants were more sharply enunciated.  I was saying “caan’t” and “baathroom,” though I was mostly still too shy to throw Hindi words into my sentences as the other two Indian women did.   I speak Hindi so rarely that until I am with my mother or back in India, I feel like it will come out all wrong. 

That absence of Hindi is one of the losses I have grown used to, almost to the point of not noticing it—until an evening like the one I just had, when its presence reminds me of what is missing the rest of the time, and the part of me that is missing, too.  The woman who was tickled at my pronunciation of “Shit!” is a linguistic anthropologist and had been teaching me how to say certain “n” sounds in different Indian languages, including Sindhi, my mother tongue.  I almost got them right, too. 

The other Indian scholar and I ended up going to a late showing of the new Hindi movie Kahaaniat the local Art Theatre.  We laughed at the subtitles, grabbed each other’s arms at the scary parts, and talked about the ending of the film when I drove her to the house in Urbana where she was staying.  But neither of us had to translate the film for the other, and both of us were curious where in India the star, Vidya Balan is from.  (She is Keralite and grew up in Chembur, Bombay, I found out on IMDB later http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821480/). 

              

All this happened last Friday.  Since then, I have missed my new friends and the ease with which we shared our meals and told our stories.  Yesterday, I received an invitation to a cha, a tea being given for a group of queer desis up in Chicago later this month.  I could connect with old friends there and laugh some more and hear my accent change again.  April is a demanding month at work, and the drive up there is tiring, but I am considering it seriously.  Now that I remember the familiar, comforting feeling of being among my desi sisters, I don’t want to forget it again anytime soon.