Checking in

I am at Chicago's O'Hare airport, waiting to check in for a flight that leaves more than five hours from now. We are flying to Abu Dhabi, where we will change planes and arrive in Bombay about 25 hours from now, 31 hours from when we left home.

Traveling used to be glamorous. When I was a teenager living in Kuwait, I loved going to the airport and listening to the two-toned, smooth-sounding bell that preceded announcements usually spoken by a woman with a deep and competent voice. I used to watch the board that listed flights, the white letters and numbers on black flaps clicking quickly as they changed, indicating another plane had landed or taken off. Amman. Cairo. London. Frankfurt. Colombo. Delhi. I liked guessing who was heading where. And I was familiar with the airline logos.

I used to dress up to travel in those days, even wearing heels when I flew. Now I aim for comfort. Birkenstocks and capris and a comfortable shirt. Socks for when the air-conditioning is cranked high. My journeys are longer now, not the quick hop from Kuwait to Bombay or the slightly longer one from Kuwait to London.

Still, I am astonished that soon I will be in my parents' flat in Bombay. Just over 31 hours to get from door-to-door, from one world to another still seems like the blink of an eye.

The End of an Era

One of the books my students and I discussed together; I took this picture because I liked the bookseller's reason for recommending Mrs. Dalloway: "Woolf elegantly demonstrates that sometimes life is bigger on the inside."

“It is the end of an era,” my student said a week ago.  We were at my neighborhood coffee shop with other students from my women’s literature class, sitting around one of the coveted, large tables usually occupied by people with laptops.  My students had wanted the class to gather somewhere off campus, and one suggested that coffee shop.  That Wednesday, after their final exam, was when most of them were available. So we sat there, eating biscotti or a sandwich, sipping on tea or a latte, talking about books and movies and super heroes (one of them was explaining The Avengers to the rest of us).  This group of women had been chatting like this before, during, and after class twice a week, and over the course of the semester, they had become a community.  A temporary community, by definition. 

I have thought about that a lot the past couple of weeks, as I said goodbye to my classes and transitioned into the summer.  Every semester, I endeavor to create a community in each classroom, one where students feel that they belong.  Each community develops its own quirks, its own inside jokes.  And even as I create it, I know it will be dissolved and then never exist again.

This semester, I especially enjoyed my students, thinking of them between class meetings and looking forward to our next conversation.  So I was sad as the semester drew to a close, even though it meant the start of summer. 

Yes, summer is nice: I slow down, I read widely, I reacquaint myself with my art supplies and with the fiction I write in the break from teaching, and I get my hands dirty in the garden, planting tomatoes and annuals and tending to the perennials.  But summer also involves letting go, saying goodbye to students with whom I have spent a lot of time and for whom I feel affection. 

The endings feel more final at community colleges.  Students don’t meet again in dorms, and many of them transfer to other colleges.  So the connections they make in the classroom are not easy to continue afterwards.  Despite that, connections are indeed made.  Perhaps the connections were especially strong this spring.  Certainly the end-of-semester rituals seemed more important, both to me and to the students.  In a composition class, some students suggested we ought to have food on the last day and joked about a turkey roast.  We settled for Oreos, and chips, and Hawaiian punch—which they drank out of Styrofoam bowls because no one had thought of cups.  Some students from my Humanities class, where we study South Asia, decided to meet me at a nearby South Indian restaurant.  Over a leisurely two-hour lunch, we sampled four different kinds of dosas and tried mutton biryani, too.  Then they ordered kulfi; they were full, but they couldn’t pass up a chance to try an Indian dessert. 

At the coffee shop last week, getting ready to leave, my student sighed as she said, “It’s the end of an era.”  I chuckled inwardly at her grand description of the disbanding of our small group.   But I also recognized the aptness of her words.  It was indeed the end of our era, an era I enjoyed and will think of fondly, as I did while planting tomatoes yesterday evening.

Creeping Phlox and Monsoon Umbrellas

Each spring, the creeping phlox curls around the rock at the base of the mailbox.  Lavender-colored, star-shaped flowers and delicate leaves brighten up the pale grey stone that has lain bare all winter.  The flowers draping around the rock comfort and please me—and, surprisingly, they remind me being a child opening up an umbrella at the start of the monsoon season in India. 

In India, the monsoons also bring the start of the school year in June.  Back when I was in elementary school, every year, my parents bought me new rubber sandals required for my uniform. Some years—to my delight—I also needed a new umbrella and a new raincoat.  Unlike the sandals, these did not have to match the school uniform.  I remember one umbrella, pale blue like a faded bird’s egg, with a brown print of leaves and flowers around its edge.  It had a brown plastic handle, and it was full sized, not the small, kids’ size I had had before.  When I would open the blue umbrella, I would create a temporary haven from the rain. 

Not that the rain bothered me.  I loved the monsoons: the relief from the heat of summer, the inviting puddles in the brilliant green grass, the smell of the wet earth, and the blanket of grey sky, a charming change from the incessant sunlight.  I also loved the start of school; I would inhale the new notebooks, savor the sharp edges of the eraser that had not yet been used, and delight in the novelty of overhead lights in classrooms on especially dark days.  The monsoons also brought the potential for drama: heavy downpours, potential flooding, and the need to huddle under umbrellas. 

To find relief from my predictable young life, I imagined those umbrellas were temporary shelters, mobile homes I carried with me.   I would pretend that I had to remain within the borders of the umbrella, my footsteps not straying outside.  And sometimes, I would set up the umbrella on the back verandah and pretend I was a vendor squatting on a sidewalk selling paan, a betel leaf chew.  Even then, I think I knew that the life of a street vendor was difficult, not glamorous.  But I couldn’t resist creating that temporary shelter, that little home in the circle of the umbrella. 

Now, seeing the phlox curl around the stone by the mailbox, I recall the circle of that temporary childhood home.

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.

Grateful--no foolin’!

The flower garden behind the house as it looked this evening.  Everything is nearly a month early, and the implications of that worry me, but I relish the beauty, too.

This evening, I returned home after grading papers on the patio of a café in downtown Champaign.  We had record breaking warm temperatures (which worry me), so it was lovely outside, with birds hopping around me and the sun shining on my back.  Somehow, spending all Sunday afternoon on grading wasn’t so bad.  And my students were doing better on their papers; it’s reassuring to know their writing skills are improving.  Their comments on their classmates’ rough drafts were often helpful and kind, never mean-spirited or even indifferent.  They make me hopeful. 

As I left the café and walked to my car, I passed three striking sculptures along the street.  A few minutes later, stopped at a red light near a huge bed of daffodils and red tulips at the edge of Westside Park, I felt a delicious sense of wellbeing, a result of working hard and of soaking in the sunshine.  

As I drove home, I passed two young women walking; earlier they had been working at the table next to mine.  They were smiling and talking, and one had her arm around the other.  They reminded me of the couple my partner and I had seen at Meadowbrook Park yesterday, two young men, walking hand in hand around the prairie.  How much things have changed in two decades, and how grateful I am, I thought to myself. 

I felt grateful this morning, too, for one of my safe spaces, the Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church I attend.  I wore a new t-shirt today, one that reads, “Amasong: Champaign-Urbana’s Premier Lesbian Feminist Chorus” across the front.  As I drove to church, I thought how fortunate I was that I didn’t have to think about walking into the service in that shirt.  There was no contradiction between the words on my t-shirt and my silver UU chalice pendant, a birthday present from my partner, Marilyn.  At church, she and I sang the hymns as we always do, arm-in-arm, sharing a single hymnal. 

This afternoon, driving home, I passed Jarling’s, our favorite custard shop, and grinned at the familiar lines that extended out the door.  Driving past Hessel Park, I noticed adults walking on the winding path and could hear children playing.

Perhaps it was the golden late afternoon light that was shining on everything, or knowing that Marilyn had brought home pansies for me to pot for our front stoop, but I felt a glow of gratitude.  I know the world is hard and can be mean, but there are places and moments of beauty and joy.  Today, I felt in the presence of beauty and joy, and for that I am grateful.