EPILOGUE

Midnight

“What are Papa and I doing here?”

These words, instant-messaged by my mother from the outskirts of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep ocean cables and came to me in the village where I was living, in the country that she left. I had departed Bombay for a time to live in a tiny hamlet called Verla in the former Portuguese colony of Goa. Jungle surrounded the small studio that I had rented; the air had that thick, humid Indian quality that my mother has pined for since the day she took off from Bombay. My sister, Rukmini, who lived in California at the time, had recently announced that she was considering a work opportunity in India; now it seemed that India, my mother’s India, the place from which she had only reluctantly gone, was enticing both of her children. India was the talk of the world and was where the magazines declared the future to be, leaping from history and making itself new.

If the whole world was descending on India, then what was she doing in America?

It is a milestone in any nation’s life when to leave becomes a choice, not a necessity. India was now passing that marker, and how blessed to live in a land you needn’t quit to become your fullest possible self. But for those already gone, who left when leaving could still feel necessary, the turning that I had witnessed in India brought new feelings of displacement—the loss not so much of place as of time, the inevitable wondering about what might have been had they remained.

My mother sometimes wondered aloud about going back home. Now that it was possible to make a living there, now that it stood at the edge of things, she seemed to feel more acutely the losses she had borne: of family connections, community, the confidence of being among her own tribe. One can only speculate as to how things would have turned out had the ocean of change come to India a generation earlier. But because it came between my parents’ generation and mine, the premise of our family history was gradually pulled out from beneath us. We were American citizens now, my family, and proudly so. But we had to accept that we were Americans because of a choice prompted by truths that history had undone.

For many in my parents’ generation, it was too late to change their minds. A new India could only be marveled at from afar and on occasional visits: there were now mortgages taken, friendships made, careers built in other places. And they, too, had changed. India, however new, was still more corrupt, more bureaucratic, more interfering than they were accustomed to. So they lived with a nebulous sense of place, unable to claim one country or another as fully their own. But we, their children, our lives still forming, had greater possibilities to reimagine our belonging. Thousands of India’s stepchildren felt its change of spirit as I had, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.

India was confounding at first. But it was plain to those who returned that we lived in new times, that Indianness was no longer something better to deny. We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our parents had, but in reverse. Some of us studied Hindi; others learned yoga. Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long Vipassana meditations. Many who shunned Indian clothes in their youth began wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars. There was, of course, a sad reality in this: we had waited for our heritage to become cool to the world before we were willing to drape its colors and textures on our own backs.

We learned how to make friends in India, and that it requires befriending families. We learned to love: men found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men. We forged dual-use accents: we spoke in foreign accents by default, but when it came to arguing with accountants or ordering takeout kebabs we went singsong Indian. We gravitated to work specially suited to us, becoming part of a new worldwide fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them. We built boutiques that fuse Indian fabrics with Western cuts, founded companies that trained Indians to work in Western companies, became dealmakers in investment firms that spoke equally to Wall Street and Dalal Street, mixed albums that combined throbbing tabla with Western melodies.

Our parents’ generation still participated in India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange, attended émigré conferences. But many were too implicated in India to return: to reverse their journey threatened somehow to invalidate the years spent away. Our generation, bearing less of the past’s baggage, was freer to embrace the India now coming. I had grown up defining myself by the soil under my feet, not by the blood in my veins. The soil I shared with everyone else; the blood made me unbearably different. Before I loved India, I loathed it. But the more India called to me, the more that feeling began to seem like a relic from a buried past.

And India now called not only to us, its far-scattered seeds. Its sharpest call was to its own, to those who had remained and may once have felt outsmarted by those who left. It summoned them now to seize hold of their destinies. And so they were becoming the unlikely, long-lost cousins of my parents in America: restless, ambitious, with dreams vivid only to themselves. In leaving India, my parents had beaten the odds in a bad system. What had changed since they left was a systemic lifting of the odds for those who stayed. From languorous villages to pulsating cities, Indians were making difficult new choices, rising to the occasion of history, coming into their own in a thousand ways. And it was addictive, this improbable rush of hope, these many answers of the call.

I will never be able to relay the fullness of what it was to live in India in that dawn. The world turns slowly; nations, heroes, visions of regeneration come and go. To history we are ever chained, and the new is seldom as new as it seems. But there are moments, sprinkled stingily among the centuries, when fate breaks, when souls open, when the shoreline of the past falls irretrievably into the distance. Nehru spoke eloquently in that midnight in 1947 of the instant when “the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” But it took two more generations to bring utterance not just to that collective soul but also to the millions of souls within, one by one by one.

That idea first came to me in the dusty lanes of Umred. It came in meeting Ravindra and in hearing in his voice not just ambition, not just hope, but also a sublime kind of freedom: a freedom from the definitions of the past, of his tribe, of rank; a freedom to make himself new. And I wondered how he judged the freedom that he had found in relation to the freedom that Gandhi and Nehru had won in 1947. For the world, and for many well-born Indians, those men were paramount heroes: they had given India voice; they had ushered an improbable country—vast, fractured, argumentative—into being. But farther away from the leading cities, that independence seemed to matter less. In places such as Umred, the British had been a faint presence; the Indians, once they took over, improved little. The landlords, the humiliations, the smallness of life—it all lived on. What was coming to India now was a sense of awakening, much as it had in 1947. But this time it felt less theoretical; this time it felt like another kind of independence—an independence of the soul, not just of the nation.

“If these kinds of things are happening and continue to happen in the future, India will become a real independent country,” Ravindra said when I put the idea to him one day.

“Today, we are independent, no problem,” he went on. “We do not have anybody’s kingdom over us. But still we are not that much free; we are not living a completely free life today. We need financial freedom, which we do not have now. So when young people come ahead, the new generation will come ahead, and they will start to live in the way we’re talking about, India will really become independent, and we will really become a superpower. We will not depend on anybody else. We will live the life of our own dreams.”

To live the life of one’s own dreams: this, then, was a second independence for Ravindra, the coming of a new midnight. That first midnight had expelled an empire, had resolved the political question of whether Indians could govern themselves, had shown the world, in the person of Gandhi, a specially Indian way of melting oppression. And yet so much of the Indian stasis—so much of what challenged the life that Ravindra sought—was not of British provenance and would not just leave when the colonizers sailed away. The family relations of guilt, the never-questioned rituals, the intricate taxonomy of castes and sub-subcastes, the rural cruelty, the poverty—these facts would require their own thousand Gandhis: a diffuse army of activists and entrepreneurs and philosophers and farmers, toiling across the land, cutting these other fetters, stretching the Indian idea of the possible, making it more than lyrical to speak of a life of one’s dreams.

That first midnight had anchored Indians in place. They had lived for so long with smaller allegiances—to the tribe, the caste, the faith. Gandhi, returned from South Africa, and Nehru, returned from Britain, saw a wholeness in India that many Indians did not see for themselves, and through the force of their actions they made that wholeness a reality. This second midnight was, by contrast, about the dissolution of place, about returning to another kind of fragmentation. It was a revolution of quiet refusals to know one’s place—geographic place, place in time, place in the tribe. It celebrated the lightness of being without roots, the possibility of reinvention, the dignity of anonymity. It brought a kind of independence that 1947 had not brought: that of not depending on others for the discovery of what you might become.

It could be argued that these ideas were alien intrusions, colonial in their own way. But the reality was that this vision of the self had hovered in India in the decades leading to independence, though it had never quite been realized. In their various ways, Gandhi, the first Hindu nationalists, Swami Vivekananda, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and others all spoke of a link between a society strong on the outside and a society of strong and whole selves, free not only from their British masters but also from the many bindings within.

“Not the English; it is we who are responsible for all our degradation,” Vivekananda had said. “Our aristocratic ancestors went on treading the common masses of our country underfoot till they became helpless, till under this torment the poor, poor people nearly forgot that they were human beings. They have been compelled to be merely hewers of wood and drawers of water for centuries, so that they are made to believe that they are born as slaves.”

And Tagore, in 1911, extolled what we think to be the modern idea of individuality: “It is only when he comes to feel the glory of his individuality that man tries to reach greatness even though it means suffering. And it is only when they reach greatness that union among men becomes a reality. Union in poverty, union in subjection, union in compulsion—all these are no more than patched-up unions.” The individuality of which he wrote inevitably brought separateness and fragmentation, he conceded. But these were to be embraced: “There are no distinctions amongst sleeping men; but as soon as they wake up the identity of each shows itself in various ways. All development means the unfolding of diversity in unity. There is no diversity in the seed. In the bud all the petals are closely fused into one; it is only when they are differentiated from each other that the bud unfolds into a flower. The flower reaches fulfillment only when each of the petals fulfils itself in a different direction in a distinctive way.”

It was this vision, long deferred, that had now found a place in India. And it was the modern vision of the human condition: not only of Ravindra’s India but of all those who believed in the making of themselves, who were willing to bear the lonely suffering to which Tagore referred in order to gain the glory of selfhood and the possibility of greatness.

This was the bargain that bound my family’s story in America to the stories of so many Indians I had encountered. I grew up in homes with few traces of our ancestors, except for some jewelry and silverware and shawls and such. There were no crests, no artifacts, no heirloom furniture, no pictures on the wall of anyone older than my grandparents, no maps of our homeland, no uniforms of wars in which our forebears had fought, no reminders of their triumphs and defeats—no living embodiment of being more than what we were there and then. We lived in houses purchased on the open market, not inherited from ancestors. We were taught values mixed in my parents’ head, drawn from the many cultural wells around us. And this placelessness had become, over the course of my lifetime, the way of the world; in India it had upended the old certainties.

Ravindra put it well. “Instead of you should know your place,” he told me, “you have to imagine your place. That’s what I believe.”

In the ninth grade, when he still lived in Bhiwapur, Ravindra was lying outdoors one night when he stared up and noticed for the first time a plane slicing through the sky. What extraordinary freedom it was: he imagined the passengers, miles above the ground, unfastened to their native places, going in their different ways, with projects to complete and people to meet. How different their lives were from his. Ravindra knew that if he walked the wrong way for five minutes, he might have gone too far, might have entered a mohalla not his own, might have invited a shouted lesson about his place. When you fly, the earth can seem so small, but in Bhiwapur, on the ground, it could seem unconquerably vast. Ravindra remembered thinking to himself, “Some day will be there when I will be in this kind of flight.”

It took about as many years as he had lived at that time for the vision to take flesh. But in the end it had. His flight to Hong Kong, where he would manage the Indian roller-skating team, was the first of his life. A man of gadgets now, he made sure to document this historic occasion. He recorded long stretches of video from their departure from India to their stopover in Singapore to their arrival in Hong Kong. He had given me the clips on my last visit to Umred. Some months later I watched them, in the hope of seeing how Ravindra had first confronted the outside world.

I suppose that I expected him to be his usual social self, telling stories, inspiring, motivating. But in the clips he was utterly silent as the others talked and joked. After takeoff, he filmed nothing of the plane’s interior life, nothing of the colleagues beside him. He kept the camera trained to the window and, through it, to the passing green farmland from which he had once looked up in aspiration. He panned back and forth from the wing to the loose weave of clouds to the ground below. He had come a long way. He would be in the air only for some hours, but life for him now contained all the motive possibility of the airplane. His view of the world, whether airborne or not, was now the view of the flying man, not of the place-bound village boy.

At the end of my third visit to Umred, a short time after he had returned from Hong Kong, I had asked Ravindra if we could visit Bhiwapur and the house in which he grew up. We had spoken of making the hour’s journey before, when his parents still lived there, but we had never gone. Now they had moved to Umred to live with him, and the house was occupied by some of their relatives. He agreed to take me.

We passed through a warren of lanes too narrow for the small hatchback car and reached the house, which was as Ravindra had described it: a house for landless laborers, with no land for tilling, an outdoor latrine, a small well in front. We entered the first room, and I was invited to sit on a charpoy. Images of Hindu gods were everywhere. The calendar on the wall was two years out of date. But there was a new phone in the house. Ravindra picked it up curiously and asked his cousin if it worked. The cousin, though no more than six, already knew enough about the world, about the requirement that people like them pay in advance for calls, to say, “There’s no money on it.”

Badminton rackets, sweaters, and a lone jacket hung near the front door, above an abandoned tape deck whose metallic surface had browned over the years. The wooden ceiling beams were inscribed with the birth and death dates of ancestors. The sitting area led into a dark, narrow corridor, which led in turn into a cramped kitchen. The room was lit by two bulbs, hanging on thin wires from the ceiling. A collection of pans stood in one corner, next to a small wood-fire stove. There was an ornate Hindu shrine in his mother’s cooking space, which had perhaps soothed her hours.

The house fascinated me. I found my mind seeking to put Ravindra back in this setting, to ask how he had risen from this. I peppered him with questions about the house and the past. And for the first time, he grew impatient. With a jocular air on the surface and irritation simmering underneath, he pressed to leave. There was nothing to see here, he said many times; it was only a village house. I had traced the arc of his life, but in reverse: he began in a mohalla in Bhiwapur, and had fought to reach Umred, then Nagpur, then Bombay, and, through it, the outer world. I was born in that outer world and had come to Bombay, then Nagpur, then Umred, and, finally, Bhiwapur. Now, standing in his old house, asking my questions, I was challenging the premise of Ravindra’s life: that destiny is in the mind, that the past can be escaped, that you must imagine, not know, your place.

As a boy, he never imagined that he would leave Bhiwapur. My parents never imagined that they would leave India. I never imagined that I would leave America to return to what had become another India. But history bends and swerves and sometimes swivels fully around. Visions of new terrain and new beginnings possessed us in our different ways. We imagined and reimagined our places. And so I sensed when returning to India that I was not undoing my parents’ journey, but in some way fulfilling it. Like them, I was chasing the frontier of the future. Which just happened, in my case, to be the frontier of my own past.