5

An American in India

What is my inheritance? To what am I an heir? To all that humanity has achieved during tens of thousands of years, to all that it has thought and felt and suffered and taken pleasure in, to its cries of triumph and its bitter agony of defeat, to that astonishing adventure of man which began so long ago and yet continues and beckons us. To all this and more in common with all men. But there is a special heritage for those of us of India, one more especially applicable.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, The Discovery of India

Before boarding the plane on my previous trip to India, when I was fifteen, I asked my father if they had Frosted Flakes there. “I don’t think so,” he replied. Then how could I be expected to stay for six weeks?

I was openly contemptuous of India during that family trip. Thumbs Up Cola didn’t taste at all like Coke, and the paper straw I sucked it through was too small to get a good gulp in. There was no shower in my grandmother’s home. Bathing was a primitive affair that consisted of putting water in a bucket and pouring it over yourself with a pitcher. The air conditioners made too much noise. The fans just blew the heat around. India was a land of filth, nuisance, and backwardness.

In Bombay, where my extended family is based, I spent my days inside my aunt’s apartment reading Ayn Rand novels and outlining my college application essays. My cousins offered to take me out at night but soon got tired of my attitude. “Remember, tell them not to put ice in your drink,” Bathool told me at a juice bar on Chowpatty Beach, doing her best to protect my American stomach from a case of the runs. “What the hell is wrong with this place that you can’t even have the ice?” I responded.

When we went touring in the north, through Agra and Jaipur, the only hour I didn’t complain was when we were at the Taj Mahal. My white friends at school had asked me to tell them what it was like; I paid attention so I could report back. The rest of the time, I cursed the searing heat; the sticky dirt; the stinking, heaving crush of brown bodies around me. I threw a tantrum when I discovered that we had been bumped from our original flight and would have to wait an extra two days before returning. “I just want to go home,” I whined like a five-year-old to my parents.

And now I was going back to India. Six years separated the journeys. I was embarrassed by my behavior on my previous trip, but most of all I was angry at America. After all, it was America that had seduced me into adopting its styles and its scorn, forced me to sacrifice my true heritage in a devil’s bargain for acceptance, and then laughed viciously when it slowly dawned on me that I would never be anything but a second-class citizen there. But I had become wise to the ways of the empire. Who says the master’s tools could not dismantle the master’s house? In the very universities and bookstores of the superpower, I had discovered its malicious trickster methods. My return was a reclaiming of my lost heritage, a reuniting with my people and my land, an inhabiting of the identity that had remained in my bones even when I had tried to scrub my dark skin white. I read about Gandhi’s rejection of the European mindset in favor of all things Indian and fantasized about wearing homespun and walking barefoot through rural India. I thought about Malcolm X meeting with his dark-skinned brothers in Africa and beginning his movement toward Pan-Africanism, and I wondered whether, after this sojourn to my motherland, I might not do the same.

The servants were awake when Kevin and I arrived in the middle of the night at my grandmother’s place in Colaba, a bustling neighborhood in South Bombay. They were huddled around the television, watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes dubbed in Hindi. They cried when they saw me, the two older ones taking turns kissing and hugging and reaching up to touch my face. “They took care of you when you were a baby, and now they are seeing you grown,” my grandmother explained. “That is why they are crying. They have been with our family for nearly fifty years. This one, Nassir bhai, he would take you on walks at night when you wouldn’t sleep. And that one, Amin bai, she would sit and feed you your food and be so patient when you refused to eat. They did the same for your father when he was a little boy.” My grandmother then put a garland of flowers around my neck and welcomed me home: “This is your city; this is your apartment. Sit, be comfortable.” My cousins came; my aunts arrived. More hugs, more tears, more cheek pinching and head patting. I was home.

After breakfast, Kevin and I were ready for India. “We want to go buy Indian clothes,” I told my family.

“But the best blue jeans you get in the States,” my cousin Saleem said. I didn’t quite understand what he was saying.

“Blue jeans,” he repeated, as if I hadn’t heard. “That’s what everybody wears here.”

“I want Indian clothes,” I repeated. “The kind my father used to wear only at night because he was too embarrassed to wear them out in America because it is a racist country.”

“You mean pajamas?” Saleem asked. I gave up on him and made the same request to my grandmother.

She also looked confused but gave instructions to Amin bai to take us shopping. Kevin and I climbed into the back of a hired car with her, and off we went. It was my first encounter with the Other World.

“Watch out! Watch out!” I said, alarm rising in my voice as the driver barely missed a bicyclist on the right. Then I realized that he had swerved to avoid the bus careening down the street on our left. There were three similar near misses before we reached the first traffic light, at which point there were about three more because none of the cars, trucks, bicyclists, pedestrians, or various animals followed the signal. Each time we nearly grazed another vehicle, I let out a little yelp. The driver calmly chewed his betel nuts and spat them out the window. “American?” he asked Amin bai.

“Mmm,” she grunted, and wagged her head side to side—Hindi for yes.

I decided my best strategy was to try to ignore the road and concentrate on Amin bai. She had taken care of me when I was a baby; the least I could do was find out what was happening in her life. “How are you?” I asked.

It took a moment for her to register my question, both because it tested the limits of her English and because Indian servants are generally not asked about their lives. Amin bai seemed delighted to catch me up and launched into a stream of colorful Hindi. I didn’t understand a word, but I didn’t want that to stop me from making a connection with my past, my people. I nodded vigorously whenever I thought it was appropriate. Amin bai must have taken it as a good sign because she kept on talking. At one point, she pointed to her mouth and smiled widely. I smiled back and nodded, overjoyed at the thought that our connection had overcome the language barrier. Amin bai paused, and her face changed from pure happiness to slight confusion. I didn’t want to lose the energy, so I smiled even wider and nodded even faster. Amin bai shrugged, popped her fingers in her mouth, removed her teeth, and placed them in my hand. “Brand-new,” she said, the only English she had spoken all morning, and smiled gummily.

It was Indian travel that convinced me that going native would be harder than I had thought. The eight-hour bus ride from Chandigarh to Kangra started off fine. We were amused to be sharing the vehicle with chickens in cages and a couple of small goats. The bus conductor kept on rolling and smoking funny-smelling cigarettes, and occasionally walking up the aisle to hand one to the driver. Kevin found a sadhu, a Hindu holy man who gives up all his possessions to wander and worship, in the back of the bus and did his best to have a conversation with him. The sadhu seemed delighted with his new pupil and began lecturing in a stream of mostly Hindi inflected with small amounts of English. I decided to play a little game with myself: how many minutes before one of them says a complete sentence the other understands?

We drank water. Lots of it. Gallons and gallons. It was the one piece of advice everybody gave us wherever we went. Unfortunately, they had failed to remind us of an equally important consideration: finding a bathroom. An hour into the journey, I felt myself needing to go. I surveyed the situation. The bus hadn’t actually come to a complete stop yet. People seemed to get on and off while it was still moving. Was there any way to communicate my issue to the driver or conductor? I had no idea what the words were. What about sign language? Hmmm, a dangerous idea. What was I going to do, wave at the conductor and point to my groin? Maybe that was the worst type of insult you could give somebody in India. Maybe the conductor would have to kill me to preserve his honor. I decided against it.

And now the slight pressure in my bladder felt like a river roaring behind a dam. We were an hour and a half into an eight-hour journey. What had started off as a fun roller coaster ride was starting to take on dark overtones. Our bus driver insisted on passing every vehicle on our side of the road, which usually put him on a collision course with a Tata truck coming from the other direction. The two drivers would furiously honk their horns and then swerve away at the last second. The bus driver would calmly take another puff of his hashish, then prepare to do it again. This was beginning to wear on me. My ass was starting to hurt, because the seat was basically a strip of imitation leather over cheap metal. I tried to find a position that minimized the pressure on my bladder, but it hurt my back too much to stay in it. I decided I needed to involve Kevin. I interrupted his pantomime conversation with the sadhu and said, “Listen, the next time the pothead driver slows this bus down, I’m going to jump off and find a place to pee. Can you make sure the bus doesn’t leave without me?”

Kevin was skeptical, but I was clear with him that Plan B would displease all creatures on the bus except possibly the goats. We are living in a world of bad choices, I told him, and I needed his help to make the best of those bad choices work. Fifteen minutes later, I saw a few people pick up their bags, grab their children, and crouch by the door, waiting to jump off when the bus hit its slowest point. I crouched with them, absolutely gleeful at the thought of the relief ahead. We jumped together. I pulled my zipper down as I ran to a concrete wall where I saw several other men peeing. There were small pools of urine everywhere, with pieces of feces lying around. It could have been heaven. I started my stream, turned to my right, and saw my bus doing its best to avoid a herd of cows as it merged back into traffic. Kevin was frantically running up and down the aisle, trying to get both the driver’s attention and the conductor’s, pointing to me and then to my bags, doing his best to indicate that I was still hoping to be a passenger. I saw a row of faces sitting on the bus looking at me, with slightly amused expressions.

It took an almost spiritual willpower to stop myself in midstream, chase the bus down, and zip up at the same time. Thank God for that herd of cows, or I would never have caught up to the bus. When I climbed back on, the conductor didn’t even look up to acknowledge me. He just kept calmly rolling another joint.

Kevin was furious. “Don’t ever do that again,” he said. “They think I’m crazy here. This guy is never going to talk to me now.” He pointed to the sadhu. It was true; the sadhu appeared to be meditating.

I was forlorn. My back was killing me, my ass felt raw, and my bladder was still about to explode. I sat down again, trying to ignore the mocking smiles of my fellow passengers. “Why don’t you just focus on your fucking goats,” I wanted to tell them.

A very sad thought crossed my mind. I had done all kinds of reading on the nature of exile before coming to India. I had fancied myself in the class of people who were condemned to live in a land that was not their own, like Edward Said, the Palestinian in New York City. I had spent hours musing about the concept of “home.” I was especially drawn to Robert Frost’s celebrated line: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” Now I had something to contribute to that literature: if you cannot tell a bus driver that he has to stop the bus so you can take a leak, the land you are in is not your home.

I had deeper discomforts with India. To begin with, the very idea of servants. Three of them waited on my grandmother. They slept on thin mats in the living room and kitchen; ran to her when she rang the bell in her bedroom; swept the floors; cleaned the bathrooms; did the laundry and the dishes; cooked and served and took away the food. “Mama [our grandmother] lives very simply,” Saleem told me when he came over for lunch one day.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “She has three servants. Who the hell needs three servants?”

“You have no idea how the rich in this country live. They have three servants for every room, every function of the household. They have servants just to show off their status. And they treat their servants like nonhumans. These three aren’t just servants,” he said, gesturing toward Amin bai, Nassir bhai, and Gulshan. “They are almost a part of the family. Mama has saved their lives.”

I just shook my head. All I saw was three people waiting on one person, and I couldn’t get used to it. Every morning after prayers, the servants would set the table and bring us mugs of hot masala tea and plates full of fried eggs and chewy toast. After breakfast, Kevin and I would stack our plates and mugs and try to bring them to the kitchen. “No, no, no,” said Gulshan, the youngest and most educated of the servants, who could read and speak English. “Cleaning is for us to do. You relax, be comfortable.”

The servants never used the same bathrooms we did. They did not drink tea from the same mugs. After we finished our meals, I walked by the kitchen and saw the three of them sitting on the floor eating theirs. I couldn’t help but think of Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too, Sing America,” in which he imagines a day when the house slave is no longer banished to the kitchen to eat, but sits at the table with everyone else. It made me sick to watch such blatant inequality.

When Kevin and I went to the home that Mama owned in Nargol, a small village in Gujarat, two additional people suddenly materialized to take us. “They will cook and clean for you in Nargol,” she told me.

When we got to the train station, they handed Kevin and me our first-class tickets and gestured that they would meet us at the end of the journey. Then the two old women picked up our bags and waddled off to the third-class compartment. I felt like a slave driver watching them go, but I was helpless to stop them.

When we arrived in Nargol, the two servants became a whirlwind of activity, one making the beds and sweeping the floors, the other beginning a feast in the kitchen. That night, I woke up to use the bathroom and discovered I had to go through the servants’ quarters to get there. I crept along on tiptoe as quietly as I could, doing my best not to disturb them, but my foot hit something solid, and I tripped. I heard screaming and felt hands grabbing my leg. Somebody turned on the light, and then we were all laughing. The servants had been sleeping on the floor, and I had tripped over them. I wagged my head back and forth, the universal Indian gesture of relationship, did my business, and returned to my room. But before I fell asleep, I realized something: There was a bed in the other room, and it was empty. Neither of the servants was sleeping in it. They had chosen to sleep on the floor, next to the empty bed. They could not conceive of it as their lot in life to sleep in a bed. Gulshan’s line whenever Kevin and I picked up our plates from the table flashed into my head: “Cleaning is for us to do.”

Every interaction in India was a lesson in the class structure. While munching on masala veggie burgers at the Café Royale near the Regal Cinema in Bombay, I asked Saleem where a college student like him got his spending money. “My parents give it to me,” he answered.

“Would you ever do this?” I asked, motioning to the young men dressed in crisp white shirts who were ferrying food back and forth to tables.

Saleem almost choked on his sandwich. “Don’t be crazy, boss,” he said. “Nobody I know waits tables. Very few people I know in college even have jobs. They all get pocket money from their parents. These people are a different class.” He waved his hand in the direction of the waiters and took another bite of his food.

I couldn’t help but think that everybody I knew in America waited tables or had some other kind of job in their high school and college years. But class worked differently in India. Labor lacked dignity. I thought of an older cousin of mine, Aftab, who had left India for America several years earlier. In India, he was the partying type, constantly shooting pool and riding his motorcycle up and down Bombay’s Marine Drive. He was never very interested in education. When he arrived in America, he got a job as an exterminator and worked overtime for almost two years. Then he and a partner bought a convenience store. A year later, he bought his partner out and started looking into another business opportunity, gas stations. He now owns four in West Palm Beach, Florida. In India, none of this would have happened for him because he would never have taken the manual labor job to begin with. Aftab hires recent immigrants and offers the best workers a cut of the business, which gives them the opportunity to climb the ladder the way he did.

My confusion about the separation between the servant class and the upper middle class revealed a quintessentially American point of view. Status is much more fluid in America, at least within the wide range of the population that can loosely be characterized as middle-class. I wait tables at a restaurant, and after my shift is over, I go out to a lounge and someone waits on me. Even if I get a graduate degree and earn a six-figure salary, I don’t treat waiters like a permanently lower class. After all, I was one and know what it feels like. And who knows when someone serving me in this restaurant will get their own graduate degree and be my boss. Better to be friendly.

My “American-ness” was starting to stare me in the face in India: not the America of big-screen televisions and Hummers, but the America that, despite its constant failings, managed to inculcate in its citizens a set of humanizing values—the dignity of labor, the fundamental equality of human beings, mobility based on drive and talent, the opportunity to create and contribute.

Someone once told me that the most penetrating exploration of the relationship between identity and nation is found in the writing of James Baldwin. I had brought several books of his essays with me to India, eager to discover in his writing a map for myself. In college, I had looked to black writers for fire. I had identified with their anger and alienation and had carefully crafted an oppositional identity based on their example. Baldwin had walked the same path and had become so consumed by his anger that he left America for Europe to escape the indignity of segregated coffee shops and the brutality of Harlem police officers. But he found that Europe was a stranger to him. When he was mistakenly identified as a thief in Paris and taken to a French jail, he had a morbid wish to be going through the ordeal in the cells of Harlem, where at least he knew how to interpret the facial expressions of the cops. When he met North Africans in the streets of Paris, he realized that they were not his brothers any more than white Parisians were. They did not share his experience of alienation, his anger, or his ache for acceptance. Their mothers had sung them different songs. It was Americans of all walks of life, black intellectuals and white country boys, that Baldwin understood. He followed the logic of this observation and realized that as murderous as America had been to his ancestors, it was the only place that he could call home. Baldwin, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Langston Hughes, made of that surprising fact an opportunity: He started to view himself as a citizen with a stake in the success of America. “I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores,” he wrote. And he started to realize that the experience of blacks in America had provided them with “a special attitude”—an attitude that had given rise to America’s only indigenous expressions, blues and jazz, and some of its most significant heroes, ranging from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman. Black people had been prevented from integrating into American society and had somehow still managed to have a profound impact on the American imagination.

The idea of America was worth fighting for. An experience with an extreme form of an oppositional identity convinced Baldwin of this. He was invited to the home of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. The Nation, Baldwin observed, was not like other angry black organizations in Harlem. White cops didn’t rough people up at Nation rallies. They stood in formation at a safe distance, faces set stoically ahead while Nation preachers spoke about the blue-eyed devil, too scared of the intensity and discipline on display to attempt their typical brutality. Elijah Muhammad’s ideology was most certainly warped, but Baldwin was impressed by the allegiance it had attracted. Moreover, he was disgusted that white people refused to see the reason for this. After centuries of slavery and subjugation, white Americans were still unable to imagine the anger that seethed within black people. It existed in Baldwin also. He accepted Elijah Muhammad’s dinner invitation to determine whether their anger was the same.

The dinner was a regal affair. Nation members, dark and intense, filled the room, the women separated from the men. There was an overwhelming power in Elijah Muhammad’s presence. It was time to stop being brainwashed and come to his true self, he told Baldwin. A series of slow, penetrating commands ensued, each followed by a chorus of “Yes, that’s right” from the Nation members who surrounded them. Then came the condemnations—of white people, of Christians, of intermarriage, of restaurants where alcohol was served and blacks mingled with whites—all accompanied by the same “Yes, that’s right” chorus. Any interaction with the enemy was a denial of the true black self. And then Elijah Muhammad laid out a vision built on this ideology: finding the land to create a black society with a $20 billion economy. In other words, total separation.

The Nation was fast becoming a mass movement with a deeply devoted core of true believers. If Elijah Muhammad made a serious attempt at this goal, tens of thousands might well jump off the cliff with him.

Baldwin understood that this was Elijah Muhammad’s response to the racism he had experienced, but his plan was a disaster waiting to happen—not only because it would be impossible to separate people who were so intimately connected economically but also because the plan violated a spiritual principle: namely, human beings were meant to be diverse, and they were meant to live together. America’s sin was not just the gross inequality with which the black race had been treated but also its creation of barriers between people. Still, Baldwin felt that there was a chance that America could be redeemed and become a place where people from everywhere collectively created a home. Near the end of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote, “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

In college, I had understood identity as a box to lock myself in and a bat to bludgeon America with. I was seduced by the notion that we belonged to a tribe based on the identity of our birth, that our loyalty rested exclusively with the tribe, and that one day my tribe of dark-skinned third world people would rise over our white oppressors. I may well have been a candidate for Elijah Muhammad’s separate society. But here was James Baldwin, whose ancestors had been enslaved and who knew more about the brutality of white racism than I could ever imagine, saying that love between people of different identities was not only possible but necessary, and that we had to insist on it. Here was a black man who had been chased out of restaurants because he had the temerity to ask for a cup of coffee from the front counter, rejecting separatism in favor of the hope of pluralism, a society where people from different backgrounds worked together, protected one another, sought to achieve something more meaningful for all. Here was a man who viewed identity as a bridge to the possibility of pluralism.

Richard Rodriguez once wrote that Thomas Jefferson, that democrat, was a slaveholder. And Thomas Jefferson, that slaveholder, was a democrat. America embodied that same trauma of contradictions. In college, I had viewed it as my responsibility to expose America’s shadow side. But too much emphasis in that direction risked seeing only shadow in the American story and, worse, believing that there was nothing but darkness in its future. That’s a cop-out, Baldwin was saying. I realized that it was precisely because of America’s glaring imperfections that I should seek to participate in its progress, carve a place in its promise, and play a role in its possibility. And at its heart and at its best, America was about pluralism.

In a strange way, Baldwin’s writing on America helped me understand my relationship with India. I relieved India of the burden of being my haven, and I relieved myself of the responsibility of being the reincarnation of Gandhi. My heritage as an Indian in America gave me a special relationship with the country of my citizenship. Why couldn’t my citizenship in America provide me with a unique way of relating to the land of my heritage?

My eyes started to adjust. The street scenes that had seemed like nothing but madness two weeks earlier had come into a little more focus. It was not simply random chaos happening on Colaba Causeway, the road that runs between my grandmother’s flat and the famous Taj Hotel. It was a thousand carnivals spinning simultaneously and sometimes crashing into one another. There was the carnival of business: ear cleaners, pan wallas, single-cigarette dealers, street barbers, sidewalk book merchants. There was the carnival of food: little boys in rags carrying cha and tiffins from office building to office building, sweet meats stacked in display windows, college students lined up outside makeshift dosa stands, kohli women carrying baskets of fish on their heads and bellowing, “Machi! Machi!” There was the carnival of fashion: young men on motorcycles wearing flared jeans and loose-fitting cotton shirts, young women experimenting with bright styles that mixed India and America, stores advertising bridal outfits and others displaying matching jewelry. There were carnivals of furtive lovers, sidewalk families, street animals, and child beggars. And despite the desperation of so much of life in Bombay, most people seemed happy. They drank tea in cafés, played cards on the sidewalks, bartered playfully in markets, got high on holidays, danced to Hindi music, and dreamed of becoming film stars.

I had picked up enough of the language to have a workable patois of Hindi, English, and hand waving—enough to get me where I was going most of the time. Kevin and I had convinced the servants to teach us how to make chapattis (flat, unleavened breads), which meant they no longer saw us only as lords. It was a far cry from being equals, but it felt much more comfortable to our American minds. We were having a great time with Saleem and Zohra, my two cousins who were only slightly younger than we were. The faculty at their college had conveniently gone on strike during the stretch that Kevin and I were in Bombay, so the two of them and their friends became our social group.

We read for hours every day. We went through stacks of Indian literature: nonfiction by Naipaul, novels by Rushdie, speeches by Vivekananda, poems by Tagore, a history of India by Nehru, various biographies of Gandhi, and, because of our audience with His Holiness, everything we could get our hands on about Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhism. We split our time between the carnivals of India outside and the idea of India inside. And the more I immersed myself in Indian civilization, the more I recognized the faint outlines of myself in its vast mirror.

I found myself rejecting Naipaul’s cold, exacting pessimism of India—that it was a million mutinies and an area of darkness. Somehow, amid its poverty and filth, India danced. Naipaul seemed incapable of seeing that joy as anything but an opiate. Perhaps he had no rhythm.

I was drawn to the hopefulness expressed by other Indian writers, to their visions of what India could be, what it was meant to be. I loved their ability to weave the worlds of ancient religious texts and village life and the Mughal Empire into a garment of possibility. Here was Rushdie’s protagonist in Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, hosting conferences of the children born at the moment of India’s liberation—Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs; the sons of beggars and the daughters of successful businessmen—each of them holding forth on what her country’s identity should be. The evil work of the antagonist of the novel, Shiva, was to destroy the dialogue.

Indeed, the common theme that ran through these hopeful visions was India as a civilization whose diverse communities were in deep dialogue with one another. The emperor Ashoka, who, more than two thousand years ago, managed both to spread Buddhism and to encourage interfaith discussions, said, “Other sects should be duly honored in every way on all occasions.” The sixteenth-century Muslim emperor Akbar invited leaders and scholars from all of India’s various religions to debate one another in his court, scenes of which are depicted in paintings that have come to be considered characteristic of Indian art. For centuries, persecuted religious communities—Parsees, Tibetan Buddhists, Jews, and Baha’is—have found India’s doors open to them. The great poet and contemporary of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote that the “idea of India” itself militates “against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others.”

The dream of India is the dream of pluralism, the idea of different communities retaining their uniqueness while relating in a way that recognizes they share universal values. It is a dream I recognized from the writings of James Baldwin. It is the American dream also. And just as America has sinned against its dream with slavery and racism, India has violated its promise with religious nationalism.

It was a sin my family knew well. In January 1993, the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena organized groups of saffron-clad thugs to terrorize the Muslim population of Bombay. My cousin Saleem saw one of these groups armed with machetes pull down the pants of a little boy. Saleem turned and ran as fast as he could, but he still heard the scream. His parents had told him about these murders. Chanting Hindu nationalist slogans, the Shiv Sena marauders surrounded young boys and pulled their pants down. If they were circumcised, it meant they were Muslim, which meant they were dead.

For Saleem’s parents, my aunt and uncle, this was the final straw. They locked themselves in their apartments, taking their nameplates, which marked them as Muslims, off their mailboxes so that the roaming mobs would not know who lived there. They lived that way for several weeks, not going to work or school, afraid for their lives, afraid of their city.

In 1998, the year I returned to India, the BJP, a Hindu nationalist political party, was elected into national office. They had whipped up a frenzy of support from certain Hindu groups by stating that, centuries earlier, a Muslim emperor had destroyed a Hindu temple, which they claimed was the birthplace of a Hindu god, and had built a mosque over the rubble. The second in command of the BJP had led a campaign to destroy the mosque, a move that many Hindus in India saw as both patriotic and faithful, the very definition of religious nationalism.

I remember one of my aunts expressing dismay and concern over the election: “This is bad for Muslims; it is bad for Hindus; it is bad for India.” I don’t think even she knew how bad. Under the BJP, India exploded a nuclear bomb, the “Hindu bomb” it was called. Pakistan followed with its own nuclear test. Tensions between the two nations, which had fought three wars in the past half century, rose dramatically. That made life more difficult for Muslims in India. Although India has just about as many Muslims, 130 million, as Pakistan, the Hindu nationalist rhetoric coming from the government constantly questioned their loyalty to the nation.

The BJP’s allies started weaving Hindu nationalism into the fabric of Indian life. They changed textbooks to teach the Hindu nationalist line. Muslims found it harder to get certain jobs. Police forces, some very much in the control of Hindu nationalist elements, became more brazen in their brutality toward Muslims. A few years later, in 2002, Hindu nationalist groups in Gujarat, a state run by a strong BJP ally, went on a murder spree that took the lives of about two thousand Muslims. In some places, the police force stood by and watched. In others, it actively aided and abetted the murder. Almost no one has been prosecuted. The governor of the state, Narendra Modi, won his reelection campaign later that year.

Gandhi, a devout Hindu, had long maintained that Hindu-Muslim unity was just as important to him as a free India. His murderer was a member of a Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS. In the fury and sadness that followed the assassination of the father of the nation, the articulator of its dream of freedom and pluralism, the Hindu nationalists went underground. But they returned with a vengeance in the 1990s, and it was not just Muslims that they were targeting, but the very idea of India itself.

One of the proudest moments in India’s recent history was its granting refuge to the Dalai Lama when he was forced to flee Chinese occupation of his native Tibet. Buddhism was founded in India but had nearly disappeared over the centuries. The Dalai Lama brought it back. He set up his government in exile in Dharamsala, a small city in the foothills of the Himalayas which attracted an eclectic mix of old Tibetan monks and young Western seekers. It was here that Kevin and I traveled for our audience with His Holiness.

What do you say to the Dalai Lama when you are with him? It is a question worthy of a Zen koan. We met with His Holiness in the visiting room of his small palace. He presented us with the traditional Tibetan white scarves and said he had heard of us from Brother Wayne. We spent a moment drinking in his presence with our eyes.

His Holiness was in a playful mood. He reached out and put his index finger on the chain that Kevin was wearing around his neck, a string of beads with a small bowl on the end, given to him by a Native American couple at the United Religions Initiative conference. “Emptiness,” the Dalai Lama said. “I like it.” And then he giggled.

“I spent many years studying the concept of emptiness in Buddhism,” Kevin explained. “Ultimately, it brought me back to a similar notion in Judaism—the idea of ayin, which means that God was once the entirety of creation, and the universe as we know it was brought about when God contracted Himself. That contraction caused a shattering of light across the world, and we human beings are carriers of that light.”

The Dalai Lama listened intently and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “this is a very spiritual concept. You are a Jew?”

“Yes,” Kevin said. He finally felt comfortable embracing that identity. He still practiced Buddhist meditation and read widely in other religions, but it was clear that his roots were in Judaism. Somehow, the things Brother Wayne had told us—that studying other religions should first and foremost have the effect of strengthening our understanding of our own—had sunk in for Kevin. More and more, I saw Kevin with his nose in a book about Judaism. He would constantly tell me about Jewish spirituality and social justice theology, comparing Jewish concepts to ideas in other religions. He always ended with a diatribe against the Hebrew school he had gone to when he was younger: “Why didn’t my rabbi teach us this stuff? All he ever talked about was rituals and Jewish chosenness, never Jewish social justice.”

The Dalai Lama seemed happy. “Judaism is a very good religion,” he said. “I have many Jewish friends. We have interfaith dialogue. I learn a lot from them. Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.” I have never seen Kevin look happier. The Dalai Lama reached over and touched the beads around his neck again and then rubbed his head and laughed.

Then he turned to me. I started getting a little nervous. I knew what was coming. The Dalai Lama was about to ask me about my religion. He had just commended Kevin for deepening his Jewish identity. Somehow I didn’t think he was going to be impressed with my story of trying to be a Buddhist. Yet try as I might, I just could not get the hang of it. I had a little secret that I hadn’t even told Kevin: I was a total failure at Buddhist meditation. Our version of it was to sit cross-legged and quietly focus on nothingness. By the time I got my legs in order and my back straight and I took my first full breath, a thought would enter my mind. I would try to shove it out. But halfway through my next breath, another thought would penetrate. I spent the whole time I was meditating shoving thoughts out of my head and being mad at myself for being a bad Buddhist. Those thoughts were my greatest enemy. My Western materialist upbringing was preventing me from entering the original mind.

Lately, though, I had gotten tired of shoving thoughts out of my head, and I had allowed one to linger long enough to get a sense of what it was. I could not have been more shocked at the discovery: “Ya Ali, Ya Muhammad”—the prayer that my mother had taught me when I was a child, the prayer that was meant to help me fall asleep and keep me safe through the night. The realization startled me. It had been such a long time since I had said that prayer intentionally, but here it was floating in my head, still woven into my being. I decided to let it stay, even if it didn’t abide by the rules we had made up and called Buddhist meditation. I knew my intention was pure, even if I wasn’t skilled at creating and focusing on nothingness.

But after hearing the Dalai Lama and Kevin talk about Judaism and Buddhism, I started forming a different theory about my Buddhist meditation. Maybe, as Kevin’s study of Buddhist concepts had helped him understand Jewish concepts, my novice foray into Buddhist meditation had inadvertently returned me to Muslim prayer. The Ismailis are a spiritualist Muslim community with an emphasis on meditation, and one of our techniques is to focus the mind on a particular Muslim prayer word or phrase. Perhaps Buddhist meditation had brought the Muslim spirituality from deep within me to the surface. Perhaps this was God’s gentle way of telling me something.

When the Dalai Lama opened his mouth, it wasn’t to ask a question; it was to make a statement. “You are a Muslim,” he said. Brother Wayne must have told him. Or maybe the Dalai Lama’s brother, with whom we were staying in Dharamsala. Or, really, who knows how the Dalai Lama found out. I imagine Dalai Lamas know some things that the rest of us don’t.

“You are a Muslim,” the Dalai Lama repeated.

“Yes,” I said, then swallowed. The Dalai Lama giggled. “Islam is a very good religion. Buddhists and Muslims lived in peace in Tibet for many centuries. First, there were only Tibetan Buddhists. Now there are Tibetan Muslims, too. You should visit them.”

Kevin and I spent a few minutes talking about the Interfaith Youth Corps, how it hoped to bring young people from different religions together to serve others.

“This is very important,” the Dalai Lama said, suddenly growing serious. “Religions must dialogue, but even more, they must come together to serve others. Service is the most important. And common values, finding common values between different religions. And as you study the other religions, you must learn more about your own and believe more in your own. This Interfaith Youth Corps is a very good project.”

And then he turned slightly to face Kevin and me together. “Jew,” he said, and pointed at Kevin. “Muslim,” he said, and pointed at me. “Buddhists,” he said, and pointed at himself and his secretary. “This is interfaith. Now we have to serve others. But we”—the Dalai Lama pointed to his secretary and himself—“are not young. Can we still join?”

He sent us away laughing and floating and believing.

______

In The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz writes that many young people view religion as an old man saying no. Growing up, my “old man” was a woman—my grandmother, with whom I was now staying in Bombay. She would come to the States every few years and live with my family, occupying the living room from midmorning to early evening watching Hindi films. I avoided her as much as possible. “Are you saying your Du’a?” she would ask if she caught me before I managed to reach the back staircase. If she woke up earlier than usual and saw me at the breakfast table before I left for school, she would say, “Are you giving your dasond?” referring to the tithe that Ismailis give. She was disappointed that I had no close Ismaili friends when I was a teenager. “You will marry an Ismaili, right?” my grandmother would ask, catching my arm, as I was sneaking out. I am embarrassed to say it now, but I dreaded her visits and did my best to avoid her.

My view of her changed dramatically on this trip to India. She spent most of her days sitting on a simple sofa bed in the living room, clad in white, tasbih in hand, beads flowing through her fingers, whispering the name of God—“Allah, Allah, Allah”—over and over. She would cry during prayer, the name of the Prophet causing an overflow of love from deep in her heart. I told her all about the Dalai Lama, my voice filled with admiration. I am sure she wished that I spoke as excitedly about the Aga Khan, but she never said as much. Instead, she asked me to read stories about His Holiness to her and observed, “All great religious leaders are alike.”

She loved Kevin. Every morning, when Kevin and I were reading in our room, she would bellow for him from across the apartment: “Kevaauuun!” He would get out of his chair, pad across the living room, and put his head in Mama’s lap, and she would stroke it and whisper Arabic prayers over him, asking God to keep him safe and on the straight path. When we first arrived, she saw Kevin’s books on Judaism and asked, “You are a Jew?” Kevin nodded. “Masha’Allah,” my grandmother said, meaning “Thanks be to God.” Then she turned to me and said, “He is Ahl al-Kitab.” Muslims use this term, meaning “a person of the book,” to refer to their Abrahamic cousins, Jews and Christians.

Earlier in her life, it seemed as though my grandmother could speak to me about nothing but Islam, but now she rarely brought it up at all. Yet, through her interest in Buddhism, her constant Zikr (the Muslim term for remembrance of God through prayer), and her love for Kevin, I was getting a sense of what it meant to be a Muslim.

The most important lesson came in the most unexpected way. I woke up one morning to find a new woman in the apartment. She looked a little scared and disheveled, and she was wearing a torn white nightgown several sizes too big for her, probably one of my grandmother’s older outfits. She didn’t appear to be a new servant or a family friend.

“Who is she?” I asked my grandmother.

“I don’t know her real name. The leader of the prayer house brought her here. She is getting abused at home by her father and uncle. We will take care of her until we can find somewhere safe to send her. We will call her Anisa.”

I turned to look at Anisa, who was sitting on the floor with a plate of dal and rice in front of her. She returned my gaze, a little more confident than before. She looked as if she was easing into her new surroundings.

I turned back to my grandmother and said, “Mama, what if these crazy men, this father and uncle, come looking for her? Do you think it’s safe to keep this woman here? I mean, Kevin and I are here now, but when we’re gone, who will protect you and the servants if they come around?”

My grandmother looked at me a bit suspiciously, as if to say that she had little hope for protection from us. “We will check the door before we answer it. And God is with us,” she said.

I couldn’t restrain myself. “Mama, this is crazy. You can’t just take strange women into your home and keep them here for weeks or months. This isn’t the Underground Railroad, you know. You’re old now. This is dangerous.”

“Crazy, huh?” she responded. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“I have been doing this for forty-five years. That’s more than twice as long as you’ve been on earth. This may be the fiftieth, sixtieth, hundredth person who has come here and been safe.” She got up and walked slowly over to the cabinet and took down a box. “Come here,” she told me. She lifted the lid, and I looked inside and saw a mess of Polaroids. “I took pictures of them.” She reached into the box and picked up a picture. “This one was so pretty. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother died in a car accident. She was afraid that he would sell her into prostitution for money to drink. Some friends told her about me—Ashraf Ma-ji, they would call me—and she saved up some money, a rupee here and there from small sewing jobs, until she had enough for the train from Ahmedabad. It was the middle of the monsoon season. She was dripping wet when she came to the door. Barely seventeen. So scared, so beautiful. She didn’t talk for two weeks. But slowly, slowly she came around. We sent her to school to improve her sewing, and we found her a good husband. She lives in Hyderabad now. She has had two children and started a very successful sewing business.”

My grandmother started going through the other Polaroids. There was a poor woman with three young sons from the south of India who had heard about my grandmother and come for help. A woman from Calcutta who could neither hear nor speak and whose parents had abandoned her. Several girls whose fathers were sexually and physically abusive. My grandmother helped them find jobs or husbands, sent them back to school, or helped them locate family members in other parts of India. She had made little notes on the back of each Polaroid: name, birthday, current address. The more stories she told about the people she had saved, the more I realized how little I knew about my grandmother.

“Why do you do this?” I finally blurted out.

She looked a little shocked that I would ask, as if to say that the answer was self-evident. But just in case it wasn’t clear to me, she said simply, “I am a Muslim. This is what Muslims do.”