Excerpt From End of Karma

INTRODUCTION

Aspiration, Like Water

y the time I turn eight, with a cake from Flurys ptisserie on Park
Street, my parents have hawked some wedding gold, hustled for
passports, and procured three plane tickets out of Calcutta.
It is September 1975, steamy monsoon, when rain clouds break late in
the day and democracy comes to a grinding halt. By now, our prime
minister, Indira Gandhi, has declared a state of emergency for the first
time in the history of independent India, which means that newspapers
arrive some mornings with an empty front page, dissidents go to jail, and
the men of the slums are enlisted in an aggressive government-sponsored
birth control program. In exchange for vasectomies, they are sometimes
offered a patch of urban slum. Sterilization becomes the most potent
symbol of Mrs. Gandhis emergency ruleand the closest our country
comes to totalitarianism.1
The emergency forms the backdrop for our move. My parents decision
to leave is material, not political. By this time, inflation has hit 30 percent.
Refugees from the war over East Pakistan crowd into our city, erecting
vast shanties of tin and tarp across from my grandmothers house. Every
day come new corruption scandals about politicians and civil servants.
Strikes shut down Calcutta.
My parents are not among the countrys deprived. Baba is a midlevel
civil servant. Ma teaches math. They make enough to rent a two-room flat
of our own, but not enough to splurge at Mocambo as often as they would
like. They can pay for my piano lessons, but theyre not posh enough to
become members of the Calcutta Club.
Their frustrations are the frustrations of what is, in 1975, a tiny urban

middle class. Baba gets tired of hustling for a tank of cooking gas. He
scours the city for Horlicks, the malted milk powder that is supposed to
fortify a skinny, sickly child like me, but which becomes more and more
scarce as inflation rises and traders start hoarding. He can rarely afford a
pack of Rothmans, his preferred smoke. One night, walking home along
Deshapriya Park, he steps over the corpse of a rickshaw puller whom local
thugs call a police informant. Calcutta, that steamy metropolis of Victoria
and jazz, is fast becoming what a future prime minister would call a
dying city.
I imagine Baba and Ma whispering to each other in the dark, while I
sleep: Is this what you call home?
My parents want more. They want out.
And so, late one night, long past my bedtime, the three of us board a
whirring, air-conditioned British Airways jet, waving and waving to an
army of relatives who remain behind. My parents are allowed to bring with
them the princely sum of eight U.S. dollars each, thanks to Indian banking
regulations at the time.2
My parents dont know how they will make it so far from home. They
know only that they will not make the more conventional journey to
Britain. Baba is convinced that Indians clean other peoples toilets in
Britain, which is his way of saying that they do dirty, dehumanizing work
that they are, in effect, untouchables. We will not clean toilets, Baba
insists. We will go to the New World. I have no idea why he believes
Indians dont clean other peoples toilets in the New World. But he does,
which is why we opt to freeze to death instead.
We land first in a town called Selkirk in the flat cold middle of Canada,
where my uncle, my fathers older brother, has come before us. We
squeeze into his familys apartment, which is across the road from a
mental asylum. Only a field of snow separates the hubris on our side from
the madness on theirs.
Every year, Ma, Baba, and I pack up and move. We settle into a
different apartment, a different school, a different city, until, eventually,
we pack up our autumn gold 76 Ford LTD and drive southward across the
continent. We stop in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, the Petrified Forest, Las
Vegas. Motel after motel after motel. What are we chasing? I dont have
the courage to ask. I am told only that there are palm trees in California
and friends from Calcutta.
In my memory, my parents are unmoored and happy. They have a new
baby, my sister, daughter of the New World.
East of Los Angeles, on the banks of rushing Interstate 10, we buy a

house in a suburb of strivers. Our street is lined with identical L-shaped

houses with jutting-out double garages, sloped roofs, oak trees out front.
We have avocado green wall-to-wall carpeting and a calla lily that
someone before us has planted by the door. Our neighbors are secretaries
and schoolteacherswhites mostly, some Chicanos, a handful of
Japanese-Americans who never speak publicly of the internment during
the Second World War. We are the only Indians for miles. And so the
questions thrown at me are banalnothing terrible, just foolish.
Do you eat monkey brain?
Hey, Gandhi!
Whats that red dot mean?
Et cetera.
Daughter of the Old World, I tell myself to keep my eyes on the road
ahead. Draw a thick velvet curtain over memory. Dillydally, look back, and
youre likely to stumble and fall.
This is good guidance, except that nearly every other summer, during
school holidays, I am ferried back to Calcutta to commune with the past. I
no longer know how to respond when a barefoot child on Park Street tugs
at my American clothes, wanting coins. I cringe when Ma bargains with
the hollow, barefoot rickshaw pullers. When the electricity goes out, which
it does every day, because theres a shortage of power, the ceiling fans
stop rasping and the air gets choking hot. What I would have known how
to handle, had I grown up there, I no longer know how to handle. As I get
older, the Indian oddities are joined by prohibitions: Dont go to the park
by yourself. Dont wear shorts. Dont open the fridge when menstruating.
Dont touch the untouchable. There are so many rules, more because Im
a girl. They are stultifying. They make me want to run back home.
Except that coming home to California is also awkward. How do I
explain a summer in the City of Dreadful Night to friends who have spent
their holiday listening to Olivia Newton-John?3
This toing and froing, this explaining to one side and then the other,
demands considerable dexterityand occasionally fibs. When Mrs. Gandhi
lifts the state of emergency in 1977, only to be ousted in the elections
that follow, her political rival and successor, Morarji Desai, appears on 60
Minutes to extol the virtues of drinking his own urine. It is ancient Vedic
practice, he says on prime-time American television. The next morning, I
feign a bellyache and skip school. Indians drink their own pee? This is
not a question I want to deal with during recess.
Perhaps this is when my parents question starts to become mine: Is
this what you call home?

For my parents, the question doesnt recede. They just roll up their
sleeves and re-create the home they left behind, and, unlike me, they
seem to know exactly what that requires. By the time I am in high school,
they and their Calcutta friends bring over their most vital piece of home:
Ma Durga, the mother goddess herself, who arrives at Los Angeles
International Airport, all ten arms intact. Made of plaster of paris on the
edge of Calcuttas most storied red-light district, Durga is stashed away in
a friends garage in another Southern California suburb, only to be
brought out every fall and worshipped with ululations and prayers. A
friend of my parents, a Brahmin by blood right, performs the service. Baba
prepares the offering: an enormous vat of slow-cooked, chili-bathed
mutton.
I worship other goddesses. I spend hours in front of the mirror trying to
feather my hair like Farrah Fawcett. My hair is too wiry to feather like
Farrah Fawcetts. I try to brush it like Donna Summers glossy, wavy
tresses. But it is too unruly. My hair is a mess, a daily burden. The part of
me I hate the most.
Mas advice is to tame it with oil, which is sensible, except that greasy
hair will earn me about as many social points in high school as talk of
drinking pee.
Throughout the 1980s, news of home comes on flimsy, blue, thricefolded, international aerograms. Theres no kerosene in the market,
relatives write; the government has banned Coca-Cola; so-and-sos son is
also going to America. Indias economy crawls at an average of just over 3
percent a year through the decade: Hindu rate of growth, people call it.
Occasionally, and only for the most urgent of matters, comes a crackling,
rushed phone call. We all speak very loudly, as though our voices have to
carry across the ocean. What? We cant hear you. What did you say? is
how the conversations often go. I learn of my grandfathers death this
way. Baba lights the ritual fire in our laundry room; its the only part of the
house where theres no wall-to-wall avocado green carpet.
Nostalgia and desire swim in opposite currents in my parents lives.
They cling to a country they left during the rains in 1975, while India
churns.
Im a high school senior in 1984, the year Prince releases Purple Rain.
That fall, Mrs. Gandhi is shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards, which prompts
deadly attacks against Sikhs across India in one of the worst incidents of
communal violence in independent India.
The Berlin Wall collapses the year after I graduate from college. Nelson
Mandela, whose freedom struggle shapes the way I look at the world, is

let out of jail. Our neighbors tie yellow ribbons around their trees, as
America goes to war in the Persian Gulf. Global oil prices soar as a result,
sending India to the edge of a foreign exchange crisis. Officials in New
Delhi crack open the state-led economy. They ease government
restrictions on the private sector. They do it out of necessity. They do it
quietly, making no announcements, because they fear unrest. This paves
the way for changes that can barely be imagined at the time. Eventually,
this also paves the way for a psychic shift among Indians who come of
age in the years that follow: they come to believe that they can write their
own destinies, that they are not defined by the past, that they live in an
age that I begin to understand as the end of karma.
I try to find my place in the world. I work in a blues bar. I host a radio
show. I try my hand at community organizing. Nothing quite satisfies, until
I land in a newsroom. This is where I discover I can make a living toing and
froing, poking my head into one world, then another, having to belong to
none. Cognitive dissonance becomes my travel mate. I become a
journalist.
I am a fish in water. Home.
Also, I chop off my hair.