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.