FAQ: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about a Hindu-Jewish Wedding But Probably Shouldn’t Have Asked

Actual Questions from REAL People

Q: (knowing glance) How do both of your parents FEEL about this?
A: Speaking as someone who will be a 30-year old Indian-American bride, I would have to say my parents are happy – nay, GLEEFUL – that I decided to finally buck up and commit to a lifetime of making the proverbial chapatis for a man. In my fiancé, they’ve found the closest they are going to come to having an Indian son-in-law: a smart, polite, soon-to-be-doctor who has been raised with a truly comparable education in dealing with guilt and passive aggression.

About my Jewish-American fiancé, I can’t imagine his parents are any less pleased to see us tying the knot. To be honest, they may be even more thrilled than mine because their Magic the Gathering-playing, RPG-loving, lab-t-shirt/tapered Levis/white sneaker-wearing son is marrying someone who is personable and loves real-life interactions more than anything online. Also, though I myself have been raised with an excellent education in guilt and passive aggression, I have never experienced the reality of a Jewish mother-in-law in my own family, so the power balance is already firmly in favor of his parents, right?

*WINK WINK*

I take it from the tone of the question that you were hoping for an answer filled with stereotypes and ethnic drama so here you are. This is the best I can give you. Here’s a tip: NEVER ask this question in real life. It’s presumptuous. It’s rude. And honestly, it’s really none of your business unless you are a) my best friend, or b) a sibling of mine, in which case you would already know how my parents feel. I definitely wouldn’t ask YOU this if you were getting married so do not ask me (this will prove to be a good rule).

Q: OMG! I am so excited about your wedding! I know we haven’t talked in YEARS but can I come? I’ve never been to a Hindu-Jewish wedding!
A: In these recession-verging days of higher-than-ever food and gas prices and intense competition for jobs and affordable housing, why the hell do you think my family is going to FOOT THE BILL for you and your partner to round out the Weddings Attended section of your CV with the elusive Hindu-Jewish nuptials? No, you may not come, and it’s rude to ask for an invitation to any event. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?

Q: I go to yoga every morning and we open with chants in Sanskrit. It’s such a beautiful language. Will I be able to use my chants during the Hindu ceremony?
A: Oh wow. Okay. Short answer: no. Long answer: A Hindu wedding ceremony is not an interactive event. Google it if you’d like more information. Contrary to your Judeo-Christian expectations, there are no hymnals, prayer books, or parts where the audience is invited to participate. Even if there were (which there are NOT), the commonly used parts would not be unveiled to a room full of crunchy hippies on florescent rubber mats in a YOGA CLASS. Do you hear first Corinthians recited in your spinning class? No, you most certainly do not. Get it?

Q: I just saw Monsoon Wedding and LOVED it! Will you be eating marigolds to symbolize your undying commitment to one another?
A: No. If you were paying attention to the movie, you would have seen one slightly-over-the-top-media-fantasy-but-pretty-accurate version of an upper middle class Hindu wedding. Hint: it was the PRIMARY love story in the movie and they didn’t eat marigolds at any point. The other love story, while beautiful, ended with the equivalent of an elopement, and eating marigolds was clearly meaningful to the couple but not at all symbolic of either of their cultural or religious communities. Because you obviously missed it: the housekeeper, Alice, was Christian (she wore a cross). There are approximately 100 million Christians in India, and I’m pretty sure they don’t eat marigolds as part of their wedding ceremonies either.

In answer to your follow-up question: yes, I have tried marigolds. They taste sort of like a blade of grass but a bit spicier. Why have I tried them? Well, why do you chew on grass?

Q: I know Indian weddings are really lavish. How much are your parents spending on this wedding?
A: I definitely would not ask you this so do not ask me. It’s none of your business.

Q: Well, now I’m just afraid of insulting you. What is an appropriate question for me to ask?
A: Think about questions you comfortably have asked your other (probably Christian or Jewish) friends about their weddings and go with that. I’ll be happy to tell you about my wedding attire (THREE beautiful outfits), what the wedding party is wearing, food, music, cake/sweets, and the décor. I’ll even bore you with stories about finding a photographer and getting invitations printed if you’d like.

I’ll also be happy to give you my best answers to thoughtful, respectful questions about a Hindu wedding ceremony. However, I am not a particularly religious person so there are things I may not be able to answer. This is not a sign that I am culturally confused or a self-hater. In the same way that the majority of you could not answer exhaustive questions about the nuances of a Catholic, Christian or Jewish ceremony even if you are having one, I also am unable to accurately speak to the more intricate details of a Hindu ceremony. I would encourage you to look online for resources to answer your questions.

Bottom line: it’s insulting for you to presume things about my culture and religion based on what you’ve seen in movies, television, or in your exercise classes. Also, if you’ve had one Indian-American friend with a particular experience, please don’t assume that mine is the same. I will always treat you as an individual with a unique familial, cultural and religious background, and I expect the same from you. Thank you.

There Are No Words...

...to describe how heinous I find this image.

To Rachna, With Love

This week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week and in past years, I have done nothing to note the occasion. This year will be the first of many, hopefully, when I will mark this important week with the gravitas and attention it deserves. This year, I want to thank one of my favorite people in the world for a gift she unknowingly gave me many years ago.

When I was 19, my little sister, Rachna, saved my life.

At the time, I was going on my fourth day without food. My appetite was completely gone, and without the gnawing hunger that had been at my side for the past eight months as I whittled away 30 pounds and three jean sizes from my curvy, Indian 5’1” frame, I felt uncomfortably alone. Inside my mind, I heard only an uneasy silence, not unlike the quiet that follows turning off a quietly humming computer in standby mode. The stillness was almost unbearable.

I initially sought refuge in the busy campus grill, a central meeting location where I had often made dinners out of the free saltines (I would eat no more than five packs, totaling 100 calories) and water (enough consumed so my pee was regularly clear). That night, however, I couldn’t stand being in the warm, cheerful room. The buzzing hum of laughter and loud voices, punctuated with falling silverware and clinking plates felt piercingly loud. The smell of food was nauseating. A group of girlfriends waved and called me over to where they were eating bagel sandwiches and sharing pizza, and I waved back and pointed weakly toward the library. I left in a hurry, my head lowered as I hustled out the door, breathing shallow and fast as my anxiety rose.

The third floor of the library provided a much better sanctuary, and I could feel my heart rate slowing as I made my way to my favorite desk. I had stopped going to the dining hall for dinner, and I came here every night at six, studying with one five-minute break every hour until midnight. I had grown to love the floor’s quiet mustiness and faintly palpable scent of student panic. The perimeter was ringed with small but clean rectangular windows, revealing the library's front walk from the north side, and the peaceful residential streets beyond busy U.S. Highway 6 to the south. Under the gentle glow of 50-watt desk lamps, couples privately exchanged kisses between organic chemistry problems sets completed at adjoining desks, and friends recounted the previous night's debauchery in furious whispers.

It was also the perfect spot for hiding out. Night after night, I sat at my chosen desk of exile, diligently completing chemistry problems, reading chapters in my sociology book, and staring at the endless stream of cars and trucks on Highway 6.

Tonight, though, I couldn’t focus on anything except for the stillness in my head and in my body. Why wasn’t I hungry? I was majoring in biology with fuzzy plans to attend medical school at some distant point in the future, and I understood my hunger and the battle I had waged against it as a fight against my own survival instincts. I held myself to a rigid daily diet of no more than 1000 calories, and ran two miles a day religiously. I cut fat out of my life almost completely, eating one wheat bagel with jelly per day at my most restrictive, a paltry 300 calories to sustain me.

I watched my muscles grow long and lean after hours of running, and lamented constantly that my D-sized breasts (a source of pride for my Indian aunties) wouldn’t cooperate and slim down with the rest of my body. A floor mate named Jamison gasped in surprise when he saw me returning from a run wearing a sports bra and shorts. “I had no idea you were SO skinny,” he said, his tone shocked. “Your boobs make you look much bigger than you are.” I only took away “bigger than you are” from his comment, and began to seriously contemplate breast reduction to take away the only part of me that refused to yield to my will.

For every waking minute of that time, I was hungry.

I obsessed about food, and obsessed about how to keep my friends and family from learning about what I was doing. I stocked my bedroom with snacks and fun-size candy bars that I offered generously to anyone who came to visit, never touching any myself. Later, though the candies and snacks began to gather dust as I retreated further and further into isolation, I continued to replenish them regularly. Their presence reassured me that I was okay, that I loved food, that I was totally normal.

To further prove my normalcy, I let myself have one dessert every week at a Monday night staff meeting of RAs where our hall director, Holly, would bake us cupcakes and cookies, or buy us sticky sweet cinnamon rolls from the local Hy-Vee. Eating sweets publicly seemed to be a good way to ward off any questions about my dieting habits, and to my surprise, I began to look forward to Monday nights with an anticipation that scared me. I had to fight against a surge of uncontrollable anger the night Holly gave us only Chupa Chups lollipops, and an apology for not having time to get us something better as she had been away for the weekend. The other RAs laughed at Holly and thanked her for the lollipops, while I seethed quietly in a corner, sucking furiously on a strawberry cream candy. My hunger was eating away inside me, raging so strongly that I thought it strange that no one could hear its deafening roar.

And now, all of a sudden, it was gone.

I was scared. I could somehow sense the stillness in my mind and body wasn’t right. I felt like I had crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed, which was a marked contrast to how I had felt four days earlier. The first day I realized I wasn’t hungry I had felt victorious and excited; I watched two students eating a bag of popcorn late at night and marveled at my lack of envy or desire. I was invincible, pure and empty and austere.

Over the next three days, though, the emptiness began to feel less virtuous and more like a deep yawning hole that I couldn’t figure out how to fill. Since I had no appetite, the ritual of meticulously rationing, then taking tiny bites of my paltry meals until I just quelled my hunger was no longer necessary. I tried to run longer but found that my legs clomped heavily on the pavement, and my muscles burned after half a mile. Even worse, after struggling through miles that I had once run with ease, I no longer felt light and airy, but instead just more tired and emptier than ever.

Looking back now, I think this may be the tipping point between those who recover from anorexia and those who spiral into its depths. Even as I struggled to remind myself that it wasn’t right that I hadn’t eaten in days and that my appetite was gone, a significant part of me was still impressed with myself. I don’t think this is unlike the struggle a recovering alcoholic goes through when deciding whether or not to have another drink: on the one hand, you KNOW it isn’t right, but on the other, life is so much better when you’re buzzed.

Denying my constant hunger had been my buzz. Now in its absence, I instinctively realized that the silent emptiness I was feeling could be my new buzz, the same way an alcoholic knows to switch to mixed drinks when beer stops working. As I sat there, a wave of calm washed over me. I could do this. I could do this.

I opened my chemistry book with a new sense of purpose, and tried to ignore the nagging feeling that I was sauntering past a point of no return.

And that is when my sister saved me. After working a few problems, I felt restless and wandered toward the stairs aimlessly. I walked down one flight, then another, then another until I was in the basement of the library, where a lone phone sat nestled under the stairs. It was my favorite spot to call my family at night, and I rapidly dialed the calling card company, punched in the 16-digit code I had long since memorized and finally entered my parents’ phone number.

My 13-year old sister picked up the phone. “Hi!’ she said excitedly when she realized it was me.

“Hi!” I responded happily. “How are you?”

She got quiet. “Oh, I’m okay,” she said, her excitement fading. “I guess.”

“What’s going on? Is something wrong?” At thirteen, my sister was the same person she is now: a strong, opinionated extrovert with the courage of her convictions, and yet conversely, a painful awareness of any harsh words or criticism by others. I had worried for her when she entered middle school, remembering my own insecurities and the constant feeling that I was an overdressed Indian girl at a party where everyone was blond-haired and casually cool. To my surprise and delight, she seemed unshaken by the shift from elementary school to middle school, and chattered happily about new friends, the teachers on her team, her violin, and her continued involvement on a Jump Rope for Heart demonstration team of jump ropers her from elementary school.

She was quiet. “Well,” she began slowly. “I guess I’ve been feeling fat lately. I think my thighs are too big. No one else has thighs like mine.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat and I felt dizzy. I leaned against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the carpeted floor with the phone grasped tightly in both hands.

“Why do you feel fat?” I asked, my voice calm and pleasant, belying none of the anxiety that I felt. “Did someone say something to you?”

“No,” she admitted. “I’ve just been noticing that when I sit down next to my friends, my legs are bigger than theirs. They are just skinnier than me.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “Do you ever feel fat?”

Did I ever feel fat? Did. I. Ever. Feel. Fat. A wave of nervous heat rose under my armpits and to the back of my neck. I could feel a bead of sweat slowly forming and then rolling down the middle of my back. Did she know about me?

My mind was racing as I tried to remember the days last summer when I had last been at home. I had been eating more then, I remembered with relief. I was working two jobs, which added up to over 60 hours a week. Every morning I got up early and ran for two miles, grabbing an apple for my breakfast and my small lunch as I ran out the door to my first job of the day. I was away for much of the day, and when I got home at night, I ate dinner with my family. My smaller portions had drawn attention from my parents, but my lying insistence that I had taken and eaten plenty of food during the day seemed reasonable. And truthfully, I had gained weight my freshman year from late night eating and lack of exercise, and my attention to my diet and exercise appeared to everyone to be a healthy move. I had lost 25 pounds that summer, but I didn’t look unhealthy to anyone, just more muscular and leaner. Even at my lowest weight of 117 pounds, I still didn’t look unhealthy, though the last time I had been that weight had been sixth grade.

I felt relief as I realized that she couldn’t have noticed. It was replaced suddenly by horror as a picture of my sister in six years’ time flashed through my mind. I imagined her huddled on the floor like me, days gone by without a bite to eat, and friends she hadn’t seen in weeks out of fear and embarrassment. I imagined my beautiful Indian sister seriously considering breast reduction as I done in the past month, and from that empty hole inside, a searing rage began to boil and rise. Of course you don’t look like some Germanic blond-haired, waif of a white girl! I wanted to scream. We have a totally different body type than them. You have beautiful, muscular thighs without an ounce of fat on them! And who cares if you did have fat on them? What does that even say about you?

Rage continued to pulsate through me as I remembered how in high school I would cheerfully order a cheeseburger and French fries for dinner, while three of my girlfriends would chirp out in turn, “Salad, please. Honey mustard dressing on the side.” In those days, I had thought nothing of it, and had happily wolfed down my cheeseburger and shared my fries with my friends, each of them nibbling daintily on a single French fry, lamenting how they were going to get fat if they had more than one. And though I had realized I was bigger than them, I also realized that I wasn’t a white girl, but a curvy Indian one, brown and muscular, where they were pale and lean. Years of dance and gymnastics and competitive swimming had rendered my body sturdy and strong, and my appetite was at times insatiable as I ran from activity to activity.

My sister was turning out just like me, I realized. She was busy and strong and athletic and I felt a loss for what I had become. I thought of my beautiful, opinionated sister succumbing to this empty, solitary life I had created, and something in me snapped.

“You are not fat at all,” I said gently. “I used to feel fat when I was younger because there aren’t a lot of girls who look like us at school. We’re just built curvy and strong, you know? I mean, we have boobs before they do, right?”

She laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “Some of my friends don’t even have ANY boobs at all.”

I laughed with her. “I know. And you know what else? Lots of them won’t get their periods until they are 17 or 18. Isn’t that crazy? Of course they’re not going to have boobs until later. They’re still like little girls inside! It took me a long time to realize that they were small because they were like I was in sixth grade, before I got my period. I sometimes used to think I was fat, which is just untrue.”

I could almost see her nodding on the other end of the phone. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I guess that’s true.”

“Well, do you think I’m fat?” I asked her. The last time she had seen me was the end of summer, when I looked as I had in high school.

“NO!” she said. “You’re not fat at all.”

“Well, then, you’re not fat either, right? I mean, you look like me. We have the same body type. We’re sisters. We’re just different from them, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” she said, more sure this time. “We are just different.”

“But it is hard sometimes,” I admitted. “I used to feel that way, too. You can’t let it get to you, though, okay? We’re just different. If you want to talk about it, you can always call me. It is hard sometimes to remember.”

As we talked, I could feel the hole inside me getting filled slowly. Lest you think my life changed in that one day, let me assure you, it did not. My struggle to overcome this nasty disease took three years, the support of my family and friends, compassionate counseling, and consistent reminding to control my life from the outside and not from within. Even with all of that, I relapsed more than a few times.

But in that moment, ten years ago, my beautiful little sister saved my life by reminding me she was still paying attention to me. From the moment she was born, she has held my heart in her hands. I had carried her from room to room when I was six and she was a newborn, holding her swaddled in blankets, so excited to have a real-life doll of my own. As she grew into a strong little person, I colored with her, and dressed Barbies with her, and taught her the five basic ballet positions when she started dance lessons at my dance school. My brother and I read her chapters of books every night and tucked her in, positioning extra pillows on the sides of her bed to protect her from falling out.

I felt like I had spent a lifetime protecting my sister, and I would have done anything to prevent her from becoming me, trapped in a lonely cycle of calorie counting and running from an emptiness inside. Even if I had to fake it at first (and I did), I would do nothing that would lead her to believe that our beautiful, curvy Indian bodies were anything less than perfect. I vowed to spend a lifetime protecting her from any suggestion that she was anything less than beautiful.

To my surprise, as I began to understand my disease more and more, she became an unending source of motivation as she effortlessly took control of the environment around her, without imploding inside as I had done. She grew into a confident Indian-American woman, who hooked pride rings I had given her to her backpack in response to a homophobic comment of a classmate, despite the fact that we lived in a violently homophobic suburb. She spoke out when her friends were catty, and told me nonchalantly that she didn’t like mean girls. She proudly wore a beautiful Indian lehenga to her junior prom when all the white girls wore pastel-colored, strapless ball gowns. In a world where women are still taught to hold it all in, she continues to be my inspiration as she giggles uncontrollably when she’s happy, sobs violently when she’s sad, yells when she’s angry, and seeks out help when she needs it.

On this week that marks our struggle to take control of our lives, I want to thank my little sister Rachna for that moment ten years ago when she unknowingly reminded me that I needed to do it, if not for me, than for her.

And for all the years since then, for showing me how.

The Smell of Your Heritage

I am twelve when I notice the smell for the first time. Our plane has just landed in India and a soothing female voice welcomes us to Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi where the local time is 1:38 am. Before the plane even rolls to a stop, Indian men are in the aisles pulling at the overhead bins and yelling at their wives to look alert in Hindi as they toss down duty-free bags filled with Johnny Walker and Chivas Regal, tattered carry-ons, and their children’s cartoon-decorated backpacks. All around me, mothers are loudly admonishing their children to put their shoes back on after the ten-hour flight from Singapore, yanking at messy ponytails with combs and brushes, and trying ineffectively to calm the screams of their babies, roused from sleep by either the change in cabin pressure as we landed, or by the rising din of chaos echoing through the wide body of the 747. My family and I sit quietly watching the scene; my mother hugs my six-year old sister close, and my father places one hand on my brother’s shoulder and the other on mine. Our parents’ touch conveys one clear message: we are not going to fight with these pagal people. Let them wrestle each other out of their seats like animals. We will wait (like civilized people) for this tamasha to settle down.

But even my family’s little oasis of tranquility couldn’t prepare me for the smell that accompanies the first rush of hot, humid Indian air as it tears furiously through the open plane door. It is a smell that my body recoils at immediately after it hits my nose, making me wish this now gated plane would turn around and return to America, an automatic response that I will feel years later each time we land in India, all started at this one moment. This is the smell of my parents’ country, of my country, as they are prone to reminding me? If only I were being raised in India, their sentences often begin plaintively, I would be less mouthy, more ladylike and demure, less boisterous, more Indian. India is my country, too, they say with pride. How lucky I am to have two countries instead of just one like my classmates and friends!

But this other country smells awful and my throat clenches out of fear (why does it smell like this? It never smelled like this before when we visited) and my heart begins to race as I continue to breathe in my first olfactory memory of India. My other country smells like garlic and masala and decaying fruit, fuel oil and diesel exhaust, sandlewood agarbati and the poop and pee and sweat and body odor of too many people. At eleven, I am newly aware of my body’s recently uncontrollable odors and I dip my chin to surreptitiously sniff my armpits, breathing in a potent mix of my own travel-heavy body odor mixed with Teen Spirit Baby Powder Fresh deodorant, the artificially sweet and chemical smell of baby powder doing little to hide my own pungent smell. From this moment on I will always hate the smell of baby powder scented deodorants, a violent hatred that will surface only in drug store deodorant aisles where I am the crazy Indian girl rooting through deodorant packages to find ones that do not remind me of my dirty, eleven-year old, travel-smelly self.

We are a family that has been taught to control our various smells by my mother. Ours is the only Indian family I know whose house does not smell permanently like garlic and onion or fried masala or simmering curry. My mother is meticulous about cleanliness in her kitchen and in her home, and the smells of her delicious cooking are scrubbed away immediately after eating every night, leftover food tightly sealed away in Tupperware containers, trash and its offending potential smells whisked out to the garage every night. We are the only family I know, Indian or otherwise, where takeout food is not allowed to reside in its original packaging if it needs to be stored for later. My mother always transfers the leftover Kung Pao Chicken and uneaten slices of pizza into appropriately-sized Tupperware before stacking it neatly into the fridge, eliminating “the smell,” as she says, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the thought of Chinese five-spice powder or mozzarella cheese odors emanating unchecked into the confines of her sterile fridge if allowed to remain in flimsy cardboard and paper containers.

So at this moment, I am finding it hard to believe that my mother is from this smelly country. When I look over at her, her nose isn’t wrinkled in disgust and she is helping my sister with her shoes, seemingly oblivious to the odor that has now overtaken the plane. I, however, am unable to escape. In the baggage claim area, some other dad’s armpit looms above my nose, waiting to grab the first of many suitcases his family has dragged from the States. I am important and American, scream his bulging rows of suitcases, but his masala and garlic-scented body odor mark him forever an Indian. In the airport bathroom, which I’ve learned from the other times I’ve been here will be the last time I see a Western-style, “sit down” toilet, the room itself is immaculately clean but the smell is too close to what actually happens in here. The windows are open to air out the room and the combined impact of the air from outside and the reeking stench of human waste makes my palms sweat: I am trapped here for the next two or three months. I sit on the toilet and try to make my insides as empty as possible, and I take stock of my life: I can’t call my best friends Shauna and Elizabeth and Jenny the way I do every other night. I will miss the New Kids on the Block Christmas Special because they don’t show that here. The next plane for Europe doesn’t leave until tomorrow night and there is no way I’d be allowed to get on it: I am stuck.

By the time we leave the airport secure area, scanning the rows of brown people looking for familiar faces four years later, I have learned to alternate breathing through my nose with breathing softly through a slightly open mouth. As we walk toward my uncle and an elder cousin, who look leaner and older than I remember, a new surge of panic starts. My mother and father, in a show of respect to my elder uncle, will be touching his feet in a show of deference and respect. I have never had to do this before now, but I have a feeling that at the age of eleven, I am too old to plead American ignorance and must instead touch his feet in a show of respect. The real problem is that I’ve never done it before and like a debutante who hasn’t practiced her courtesies enough not to fall on her big day, I am sure I will make a mess of this gesture. I know I am supposed to touch my uncle’s feet with both hands (or is it one?) and then place them together in a namaste. I think I might actually have to say something that means, “I’m touching your feet,” which seems silly and redundant, but is complicated by the fact that the words aren’t in Hindi, but in Bhujpuri, which is the local dialect that my extended family speaks to one another. But I can’t remember the words in either language.

I can feel the stench of body odor and Baby Powder Fresh Teen Spirit rising from my armpits as my anxiety mounts. This isn’t something that I need to do in the States, I remind myself, where a polite “how do you do” and a firm handshake executed together show the world I’ve got manners. Here, I’ve got to touch someone’s feet to do it. I slow down my pace and notice my brother has done the same. I look at him and can’t tell if he’s as horrified by this immediate prospect of feet touching as I am. I look down at my own feet and then across at my uncle’s. His are wrinkled and brown and calloused in their Indian sandals and for some reason, I think immediately of Joey McIntyre, my favorite New Kid. Joey Mac wouldn’t have to touch anyone’s feet. Joey Mac wouldn’t have to pretend that touching other people’s smelly feet is the way people greet each other in America. Joey Mac could just shake my uncle’s hand heartily and give him a hug and that would be enough.

I watch my cousin move toward my parents and in a graceful move, swoop his right hand down to touch just above one of my dad’s feet and then the other, before sweeping his hand up to touch the top of his forehead and then down to the waiting left one in a namaste. He does the same to my mother, and the move is so practiced and effortless that I stop paying attention to its intricacies, unintentionally simultaneously abandoning my futile effort to learn it in these two minutes. It’s actually sort of beautiful when he does it. Indian and beautiful. He smiles at me and my siblings and I smile back and watch my mom and dad pay their respects to my uncle. Their moves are not nearly as smooth as my cousin’s, and my mother seems to be lingering on the floor with her head bent over my uncle’s feet for so long it is making me uncomfortable. I want her to get up, and when she finally does, she looks at my brother and me with a meaningful look in her eye. I stare back at her blankly (a skill I have recently picked up) and she smiles and pushes me forward. “Do pranam,” she orders.

Pranam, so that’s what it’s called, is my only thought as I messily try to remember what my cousin did. My right hand waves over my uncle’s feet hovering in between them since I have no idea which one I am supposed to fake touch first. I linger there for longer than I think I’m supposed to, waving my right hand stupidly between his feet and then sweep my hand up to touch my forehead before remembering that I am supposed to dip my head in deference as I touch my head. With my right hand touching my forehead, I drop my chin and then drop the hand, raising my left hand up to meet the right in a shoddy namaste. I repeat the gesture with my cousin and feel sweat on my palms as I clasp them together a second time in the namaste. My brother’s attempts look no better than mine must have but my uncle and my cousin are smiling. My cousin cries out in delight, “Oh my, they are Indian!” in Hindi and it feels like he is making fun of us, me and my brother and our crappy American pranams. Leaving the airport, all I can think is that it will be a long time before we return home.

*

That visit was the first time I remember being so uncomfortable in India, and that discomfort would last into my late twenties. All of the pictures of visits prior to this third one at the age of eleven showed a smaller version of me running around with children in my parents’ villages, climbing trees with abandon, me in my bright red and white striped dress surrounded by village boys in their various shades of brown, green, and khaki that looked dirty in the photographs. I didn’t remember having to do pranam before I was eleven or feeling odd if I did. I didn’t remember the monsoon, even though I had visited and lived through three of them. I had a vague memory of being afflicted with malaria when I was six but nothing of the specifics other than the feeling of being hot and cold at the same time, and the memory of getting in trouble with my aunt when she found me standing outside in the rain trying to cool myself down from the malaria fever. My mother told me later that my fever held at 104 degrees for two or three days but I remembered nothing about how long my body burned and ached, remembering only how good Limca, the Indian version of Sprite tasted while I was sick. My little sister was less than a year old and suffered from a more severe version of my malaria, and my mother’s voice would choke up as she described my sister’s near death state during that hot, rainy, mosquito-filled summer.

It is with those memories in the front of her mind that we are here now in the middle of my sixth grade year. Winter in India is seasonable and dry and mild, devoid of mosquitoes and in my mother’s mind, of the possibility of repeating the events of five years ago. I have left school three weeks before winter break and will return two weeks after school begins again. My teachers have given me pages of assignments, math problems marked in my pre-algebra book, and English books to read, as well as their open awe at this seven-week journey that my family is taking. “What a wonderful experience!” they gush, clasping their hands together in joy before handing me mimeographed workbook pages and spelling lists. “You will learn so much from this! You’ll have to tell us all about it when you come back!”

Armed with books and assignments and the expectation that I will learn so much, I spend the next seven weeks learning for the first time how very un-Indian I am. I try to share my Sony Walkman with a poor girl my age in the village and she stares at me agape as I fit the headphones onto her ears, crying out in surprise as the music fills her ears. After, I am told to hide the Walkman since now every child in the village will know it’s here and if it gets stolen, I’ll have no one to blame but myself. During the day, my two girl cousins take me out to the sugar cane fields near our village home and their steps are light and sure on the raised earth barriers that separate the fields. I feel myself slipping on the soil, and my feet feel like they becoming dirtier than my cousins as my rubber flip flops become painfully heavy with mud. When we stop at the village’s small temple on our way back from the fields, I remove my shoes to enter and my cousin gently pulls me aside to wash my dirty feet at the hand pump near the entrance. She washes her feet first, sticking one than the other under the stream of water to rinse the dust away, but mine are caked in mud, and the water does nothing to remove the clay-like crust. My cousin bends down and laughs as she removes the earth and grass and manure from my feet, admonishing me for getting so dirty.

I am uncomfortable in the small temple, even though it is a peaceful, quiet room where sunlight filters through the filigree of delicate marble covering the otherwise open windows, bouncing lazily on the worn and washed marble floors. My cousins expertly light the agarbati and swirl the smoking, sandlewood-scented incense in graceful arcs in front of the small marble statues of Krishna and Radha, before accepting the tikka, red powder that the priest dabs on their foreheads as he hands them a bit of sacred sweet. My experience in temple is limited; there is not one in Denver where we live, and my offering feels jerky and clumsy, a replica of the pranam gaffe at the airport. But here, as at the airport, my cousins and the priest all laugh and cry out, “She is so Indian!” Linking their arms with mine, my cousins pull me toward their home, and in my head, my own American voice reminds me, “No, you’re not. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.”

*

That lesson remained with me for the next fifteen years, constantly in the back of my mind whenever I dressed in Indian clothes for a wedding, or went to a puja at the newly built temple near my parents’ house in Colorado, or had to answer a question about Hinduism for anyone who wasn’t Indian. When asked where I was from, I smoothly answered, “My parents are from India, but I was born here,” knowing neither why I made the distinction nor if one even existed in their minds or mine.

And so it’s strange that I find myself back drawn back to India at the age of 27. For the first time, I am traveling alone, without the protective cocoon of either my immediate family or my extended family in North India. I will be working in Mumbai designing a sexual health education program for low-income teenagers who live in one of the city’s extensive slum communities. The experience is a requirement to attain my master’s in public health, but I am the one who has picked the NGO in India in which to work. Most of my other classmates are slaving away at state and county public health departments or under-funded Boston area non-profits, hoping to complete the requirement with minimum intrusion into their daily lives.

With my decision to live in India for the summer, I have opted for the opposite route: a total upheaval of my normal life. The decision was still nascent in February when I was fresh on the heels of a breakup, having been painfully and unexpectedly dumped by an otherwise unassuming and sweet boy who cried and professed his need to be alone, and his desire for us to remain best friends. He began dating another girl three weeks later and for the first time, I thought to myself the behavior was typical of a selfish white boy who wanted some boring white girl instead of complicated, brown me. My friend Shivani listened patiently to my rants and brushed back my hair while I raged and cried. “I just need to date an Indian guy, for once,” I wailed. “It just always gets in the way.”

Her voice was calm as she tried to reason with me. “How do you know that was the reason? Because he’s dating a white girl now? Does that really make sense to you?”

And it didn’t. Not really. But the idea that I had to make some sort of peace with the Indian side of myself remained, and on a snowy March night, I sat in the warm kitchen of my house in Cambridge surrounded by the cooking smells and conversation of my three housemates, filling out a work application for a job in India. We had a bottle of wine open and I read the questions aloud as we brainstormed answers as a group, joking and laughing. After we had consumed two bottles of wine and read over the application twice, I sent it by email to Mumbai. One week later, the NGO welcomed me to work there for the summer, with a warm note of thanks and a promise to look forward to my arrival as the date neared.

And so in May, at the age of 27, I find myself sitting on a plane that has just landed at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai where the local time is 12:48 am. The flight has taken 16 hours from Boston, stopping once in Frankfurt, where I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and gave myself a camping wipe-down with anti-bacterial wipes. I feel clean and refreshed after sleeping comfortably on my travel pillow from Frankfurt to here. To my surprise, no one moves as the plane taxis to a stop, all of us waiting patiently for the plane to gate. Suddenly, in rapid succession, the seat belt light dings off, Indian families begin the rush to gather their belongings and their children, the noise level rises, babies begin to wail, the plane doors open, and the old familiar smell rushes into the plane.

But this time, I breathe it in deeply. I am ready.

Decoding the Friend Crush

I noticed her right away. She was sitting next to me in our first-year biology class with a ratty notebook filled with loose-leaf paper and a yellow Papermate Sharpwriter pencil, the kind with the red eraser built into the top. We were learning about the structure of leaves and her sheet of paper was filled with perfect replicas of leaves, delicately shaded undersides, vivid cross-sections with neatly labeled parts, and in the margins of her paper, doodles of female faces with big eyes and crazy hairstyles.

She was wearing an unwarranted amount of clothing for that hot August day in Iowa: a pair of colorful pants, a batik wrap skirt, a bright tank top over another t-shirt, rings on every finger, one chunky stone necklace and one long skinny gold one. Her hair was long and braided into two pigtails that made her hawkish nose seem more prominent on her long face. In my jeans and navy blue Gap t-shirt, I looked like I was trying to blend into a suburban high school, the very environment I had just left. Where had she grown up, I thought, that she dressed liked that?

Two weeks later, we were partners for an ecology lab at a field station in the middle of the Iowa prairie. We had been told to dress in old clothes for the day. I had dutifully put on hiking boots, a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee, a white t-shirt with my high school mascot in burgundy and green, and knotted a burgundy and green plaid flannel shirt around my waist, just in case. She came down to get me in my dorm room from hers one floor above and stared at me. “Those are your old clothes?” she asked, incredulous.

I stared back at her. “Those are yours?” I asked. She was wearing a pair of paint-smeared, baggy, polyester pants that had worn thin in the seat and knees revealing patches of lighter fabric that showed the white lining underneath. Her t-shirt was also covered with paint splotches and filled with holes: the one under her right arm was so big it revealed the dingy blue tank top she was wearing underneath. She was carrying an old sweater that had moth-eaten holes in the armpits.

The only article of clothing we had in common was our hiking boots.

She was from Philadelphia, the city proper, instead of a quiet suburb of Denver, like me. I thought she was bizarre and crazy and urban and fun and brand new. She thought I was strange and well-adjusted and suburban and fun and brand new. We went out to parties together, giggled our way to kegs, bumped on makeshift dance floors, and walked to the gas station in the middle of town to buy frozen pizza at the end of the night. We ate meals in the dining hall together and talked late at night in our rooms, sharing hot chocolate and cookies and stories about our lives. We couldn’t get enough of each other.

It would be later that I would learn the term for what she and I had: friend crush.

Friend crushes, I’ve learned, are not unique to girls. Male friends have agreed the feeling is genderless: you want to be around your friend crush all the time. You never get sick of their company. You are each other’s go-to for advice and fun and a random Tuesday night outing to the movies. You spend your weekends together. You stop feeling so alone in the world.

Eventually, though, the friend crush fades, leaving behind a friendship whose strength you must now test with a more jaded view of your friend, without your intoxicating-yet-often-misleading first impressions. For us, the fabric of our friendship disintegrated after college, slowly at first so we didn’t really notice the tears, finally culminating in an explosive fight that left it ripped and tattered.

We didn’t talk for a year after that fight and have only talked a handful of times since then.

Now, three and a half years later, I am sitting here at my “grown-up” job thinking of her. I am getting married next year to a man she has never met. I live in an apartment she has never seen. I have gone back to school and finished a master’s degree in the time we’ve been apart. I have no idea what changes and successes she’s had in the last few years.

I can’t help but wonder if I’ll ever feel that way about a friend again. I have had friend crushes since her, but none as strong, as evidenced by the fact that I have stayed friends or acquaintances with the others. Will anyone ever be as intoxicating and as life-changing? Do we outgrow that type of friendship as we get older in same way we outgrew playing pretend and dressing our Barbies?

Case Study of a Good Girl (GG) in a State of Trauma

Background: S is a woman in her mid-20s. Her family is intact and stable, and she appears to have a strong relationship with all members, traveling home to visit them (in another state) every four to six weeks. S’s voice and manner are typically pleasant, although often punctuated with comments and complaints about any given situation. S seems happy with her employment, and has recently gotten married to her boyfriend of three years.

Presenting Problem: Recently, I had dinner with S. S was four weeks post-wedding, and appeared to be in a fragile state. Gamely, I took her proffered pictures, smiled at her breathless “these aren’t the real ones, just some my friend took” apologies, and slowly perused each picture before handing them to the other woman at the table. S looked beautiful and happy. The photographs of the tables at the reception featured huge white stargazer lilies. “Those are gorgeous!” I exclaimed, truthfully. “I love tall arrangements!”

The other woman agreed. “I love white flowers,” she said sincerely.

Then it happened.

A verbal dam broke. “OH!” S exclaimed. “You should have seen the room! It was SO AMAZING. We had these round tables with these tall arrangements, and then these square tables with a smaller arrangement,” S paused to flip though the pictures frantically. “I don’t have the pictures here, but there were these boxes and the flowers were sort of bending toward the boxes. It was incredible. We had draped the walls of the room and the rabbi actually thanked us at the end because we had shown everyone how beautiful the room could look. And trust me, it wasn’t beautiful before. We were there the night before for…”

This went on for two hours, or 120 minutes, or 7,200 seconds, all of which I cannot get back. Two hours WITHOUT A PAUSE. A short list of topics covered (in between breathless bouts of “I’m not boring you, am I?”):
• Food at the wedding (“Everyone said it was the best food they’d ever had”).
• Mistakes that were made and detailed instructions of what would be done differently given the chance.
• The “amazing energy” that surrounds the day (there were tears during this part).
• Trials of dealing with her in-laws (“They all hate me” and “They think my parents’ house is too big”).
• Adventures her and her husband (“I LOVE saying my husband!”) had experienced since the big day, including moving in together for the first time.
• Lack of contact with friends post-wedding (“I haven’t talked to ANYONE since the wedding. It’s been all about me and my husband!”)

Diagnosis and Analysis: S is a “Good Jewish Girl,” which is similar to a “Good Indian Girl,” or a “Good Christian Girl,” or any other “Good (INSERT HERE) Girl.” A typical Good Girl (GG) has probably reached her mid-20s with the following: very little boozing or drugging or whoring, a whole lot of parental control (either by choice or overbearing parents), and limited contact with friends outside of her race, social class, or sexual orientation. A GG will almost surely experience a surprisingly sharp rise in sexual proclivity post-engagement or nuptials.

We all know a GG or two: They are kind of boring but nice enough, a little plain but pretty enough, smart enough but not intimidating. They don’t bother with “What does it all mean?” or “Why am I here?” types of questions, and will instead get fixated on a character from a television show, or maybe a friend whose behavior is shockingly un-GG (boozing/whoring/drugging), or most likely, on the latest irritations due to a boyfriend/fiancé/husband.

The latter is what separates the GG from the rest of us: the GG always has a committed guy in her life. And she won’t shut up about him. A typical conversation may look something like this:
You: How are you doing today?
GG: Oh fine, but you’ll never believe what happened with [INSERT NAME OF BOYFRIEND/FIANCE/HUSBAND HERE]! He was at work, totally normal day, and then the mail guy delivered his mail to the WRONG office! And he almost missed a really important letter! It was horrible!
You: (stunned silence at this unexpected non sequitur, then slowly) Oh…wow, that sucks…(voice trails off).
GG: (oblivious) I know! Can you believe it? I mean, really, I don’t know who they think they are messing with his mail like that? Seriously? The mail guy should be FIRED. [BOYFRIEND/FIANCE/HUSBAND] was so stressed out that he went out and had drinks with his coworkers and they all decided they were going to talk to their boss about getting the mail guy fired. I mean, isn’t that awful?!?
You: (wondering if it’s possible for a stiff gin and tonic to be willed into your bloodstream to dull this experience) Yeah…(glancing around casually for instruments of self-harm)…mail guys can be rough to deal with.

Key features of a conversation with a GG include:
• Inability to separate self from partner, as evidenced by answering questions about her with information about her partner. Also evidenced by overuse of the plural “we” in answer to questions about her (i.e. “WE enjoyed the movie” or “That is one of OUR favorite restaurants.”)
• Decrease in interest when asked about topics other than partner, as noted by glazed eyes, silence punctuated with a half-smile, absent nodding)
• Failure to relate to any aspect of life that does not have to do directly with her or her partner. Thus, you may tell no stories about boozy mistakes, cute outfits found cheap, your volunteer work with homeless teens, Hillary/Barack showdowns, that dumb Miss Teen South Carolina, the person you’re dating, etc.)

Treatment: There is no treatment for a GG. They prefer to remain in the company of either their partners or other GGs. Those who do not fall into either category should steer clear of this type.

A Mission Statement

Like so many aspiring writers, I can tell you that I have always been drawn to writing. Again, not unlike many of my fellow wordsmiths, from a young age, I have written stories, poems, and kept prolific journals (in my case, the latter only in spurts of a few months at a time), hoping to gain some sort of understanding about my world from my scribbled thoughts. And although a deeper comprehension about my place in the remains somewhat elusive, writing can still calm me better than a great conversation with a trusted friend, or even a good long rant or cry.

Yet even though I love putting “pen to paper,” I have always been uncharacteristically wary about sharing my work with the wider world. I will be honest here: though I love to write, I do not consider myself a particularly gifted or talented writer. I have been blessed with teachers and professors who have pushed me to develop the confidence to try publishing, but I am painfully aware of my own shortcomings: my tendency to use the passive voice, or my overuse of adverbs and adjectives stick out as evidence of how much I still have to learn. I do not want to be another crappy wannabe writer.

Complicating matters, I am simultaneously amazed and irritated by the proliferation of poorly written material that floats around the Internet these days. I am fascinated by the self-serving, narcissistic quality of blogs, and I have been surprised by my feelings of admiration or affection or hatred for these anonymous voices, known to me only by the words they self-publish. It boggles my mind to think that a person’s diary, or hastily typed comments that accompany a photo journal of shoes worn each day can turn into years' worth of written material.

In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote a blog for a short time while I was completing a practicum requirement for my master’s degree in public health. I was working in India, and maintained the blog during the time I was away in order to keep in touch with my family and friends. Again, being perfectly honest, I felt somehow that keeping this blog was an acceptable form of communication, rather than another nobody oversharing intimate details of their lives.

And though I shared details about my life, I still loved writing every word on that blog. I waited eagerly to read comments on my work, glowed when it was positive, and was shocked by how angry I felt when an anonymous reader left condescending comments about a few of my posts. It was a skin thickening, self-esteem boosting, and wholly rewarding experience.

While I wanted to keep writing the blog when I returned from India, I felt funny transitioning the blog from a travelogue into one that fit into my daily life. I can’t quite explain this except to say that I didn’t want to be another outlet for ritual navel-gazing or a mundane recitation of my day’s events, though I had indulged in both of those while writing the India blog. I wanted to write SOMETHING MAJOR, which is as asinine and pretentious as it looks written here.

So in the interest of pursuing my own ridiculous quest for literary perfection, I’ve kept silent and not shared my writing for two years(!). During that time, I’ve become an avid reader of many blogs, both group-written and individually-penned, both sparkling with witty originality, and riddled with clichéd turns of phrase and stock observations. Though I read everything, I comment rarely, and this makes me a “lurker” in blogging parlance, which is a word that is completely the opposite of my real-life personality.

However, rather than being a sign of how coolly detached I am about the world around me, I’ve realized lurking is a sign that I am growing slowly complacent, and less likely to engage with people and ideas. This is unacceptable to me: I don’t want to be a consumer of someone else’s thoughts. I want to produce my own ideas. To be as melodramatic as humanly possible, I am afraid that I am wasting away slowly, watching my brain grow sluggish with each day that passes without my expending any real creative effort.

Continuing the melodrama: I am 29 years old and completely afraid of becoming dead inside.

So I’m throwing a lifeline out into the world in the form of another unneeded blog. In academics, we would call this an independent directed study. The topics are varied, the observations and thoughts are all mine, and your comments, be they constructively critical or laudatory, are welcome.

Let my education begin again.