Junglee Girl

Glossary

Ciphers

The woman claiming the berth across from mine in the train compartment must have been my age, but she looked older, more self-important. She had the red mark of the auspicious married woman in her hair parting and three young children to prove her fertility. She stopped her children from sitting on the long hard seat, motioning them to wait.

It’s dirty, she scolded them in Gujarati, pointing to the dull green vinyl which had worn away in parts to reveal the coarse padding underneath. She reached into her oversized plastic shopping bag, pulling out a printed cotton bedspread that she snapped open with a quick flick of her wrists. She covered the seat and tucked the edges in. The woman nodded in satisfaction, patted her hair into place, then sat down and lifted the three children up beside her so they sat propped up against the seat back. The four of them sat squashed against each other in the middle of the seat, with ample room on either side.

The train whistle blew, and the tea and snack vendors who droned their wares by the windows suddenly switched into high gear, running from one window to the next, shouting out Hot tea! Hot tea...! Fresh puri-bhaji...! Hot samosas! Thin porters in bright red shirts raced by with tottering mounds of baggage balanced on their heads. I was sitting on an Indian train for the first time in a decade, but the scene was just as I remembered it from childhood. The big difference was that, this time, I was traveling alone.

The train slowly pulled out of the station. The woman across from me looked at me then for the first time. In her quick look, she took in my short hair, my knee-length dress and ringless third finger. Her evaluation made, she avoided my eyes. She looked over my head, through my feet, at the door and windows, but not into my eyes. Though her children were staring at me, through a series of subtle cues from their mother, they had understood that I was to be given the silent treatment.

I remembered being that young age, and staring at strangers in that same fascinated way, knowing that they were humans like us, but knowing that they were not from our family. If, by some chance, it was determined that these strangers were friends of friends, or hailed from our parents’ natal villages, or were otherwise established as people of good family, then the ice would break quickly, and food would be offered from both sides, followed by the sharing of board games or card games or amusing pastimes like guessing the names of Hindi film songs. But until then, the adults sat stone-faced and the children stuck to their own.

The young mother across from me spoke to her children in a shrill Gujarati punctuated by such endearments as greedy, idiot, blackie and pig. The children were obviously used to these mocking asides and did not respond. But it had been years since I had heard those insults spoken with such fluency, and I was immediately flooded with memories of shouting matches when our group of young cousins would exhaust the usual English insults: You stupid! You idiot! Fool! Crackpot!, all of which had a peculiar weightiness that would quickly tire us out. But then we would switch to our reservoir of delicious Gujarati insults: Pig! Monkey! Cockroach! Elephant!, and somehow these abuses from our mother tongue were so much more raucous and full of abandon that they elevated us back into good humor and collaborative play.

Giggles rose up in me like bubbles as the woman chided her children. I stifled the first few, but I couldn’t help but smile when the woman called her son a goat, and I finally had to guffaw and cough when she called her daughter a donkey. The woman looked up at me sharply and I pressed my twitching lips shut.

She opened her mouth to speak, but then turned and frowned at the window, unsure of whether to engage with me. After all, I was a stranger, and it was probably best not to get involved. But then as I snorted and cleared my throat again, she took a deep breath and sat forward.

You are Christian? she snapped. I shook my head apologetically. She looked pointedly at my dress, or frock, as she would have referred to it.

You are Muslim from Delhi? She was still cross.

No, I replied politely.

You are Madrasi, she sneered.

No. I’ve never been to Madras.

Then you must be Punjabi, she taunted.

I smiled faintly. She was bent on pinning me down.

Where you are from? she rasped.

From right here in Bombay, I said sweetly. She nodded and waved her hand.

Now I know. You are Malayali. She looked away, signaling that the discussion was over. But from the corner of her eye she saw me shake my head.

Maharashtrian, she continued emphatically. She straightened the pleats of her sari.

I stared at her. I was suddenly aware of feeling hurt. If she weren’t so prejudiced by my short hair and western dress, and the quickly made assumption that I was unmarried and childless, she would surely have seen right away that I was Gujarati. I opened my book and began reading to signal that the conversation really was over.

I know a girl from Goa who looks just like you.

I turned the page and crossed my legs, settling into my stance.

But naturally you are Bengali. She turned to her children and nodded sagely.

Suddenly I tired of her game and decided to burst her bubble. I reached into my purse and pulled out a package of Gluco biscuits. I tore the wrapper slowly, to make sure that I had the attention of all three children. They looked at me hungrily.

Biscuit aapu? I asked in Gujarati and held out the pack to the older boy.

The woman gasped in horror and slapped down her son’s outstretched hand.

You’re Gujarati! she howled in rage. She was so offended by this realization that she instinctively reached back and covered her head with her sari for protection.

Yes, auntie, I said in wide-eyed sing-song. I am a pukka Gujarati.

All three children were staring at me slack-jawed. Their mother slapped each one quickly across the mouth. She shouted at them. How many times have I told you not to take things from strangers, huh? Have you no shame? Sit up straight and keep your hands to yourselves!

I put down my book and looked at the woman fumbling for her handkerchief with shaking hands.

Are you also Gujarati? I asked with a smile.

She pursed her lips and looked out of the window. Her fingers twisted the handkerchief into a tense rope.

"We are the real Gujaratis, from Gujarat!" she spat.

My family is from Saurashtra, I said gently. We are Jains.

Her face turned pale and her brow knitted furiously.

These days anybody can say they come from anywhere, she muttered in exasperation. I’m not so stupid that I will believe everything!

She pushed her children out of the way and stretched out on the seat. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest and pressed her lips shut. She stared pointedly at the miniature ceiling fan. The three youngsters re-seated themselves timidly by the window, looking at each other nervously. Their mother was now in a bad mood, and any disturbance was likely to result in a hard slap across the head. Even though I was Gujarati, I was obviously a troublemaker if I had caused their mother to reach this state.

The first time I realized that there were others besides Gujaratis in the world was when my oldest cousin married a Punjabi woman. My cousin had returned from studying abroad and announced to the family that he was now a married man. The adults were shocked to hear that she was Punjabi. That made her completely different! There was much grumbling among the women of the family about having to cope with her on top of all their countless chores.

We children could tell she was completely different because she laughed a lot and gave us lots of sweets and kisses every time we went to her room to visit her. Her kisses left big red splotches on our faces which we gigglingly rubbed off each other. She dressed in chiffon saris printed with dazzling sunflowers, roses, hibiscus. She let the saris fall carelessly across her bosom instead of securing them at the shoulder with pins. She wore tight blouses that were always on the verge of bursting, and didn’t mind in the least if we barged in on her while she was dressing. She wore her hair short, with an enormous red bindi moistly spreading between her eyebrows. And to top it all, she had the most daring collection of sunglasses we had ever seen.

This woman was not Gujarati, most especially with her given name of Lajinder. My grandmother, matriarch of the household, quite firmly changed Lajinder’s name to Lakshmi, after the goddess of wealth and prosperity. After all Lakshmi bhabhi hailed from a very wealthy family and should bring a considerable dowry to her husband’s home, even if the newlyweds had joined in a love marriage. For many months there was an angry stand-off in the house between my grandmother and Lakshmi, as Lakshmi refused to negotiate any dowry from her family. During those early months, every morning Lakshmi would perform the young wife’s duty of massaging my grandmother’s feet, but she did it wearing the lowest-cut blouses, the tightest dresses and the flimsiest nightgowns, kneeling dutifully at my grandmother’s feet so that the old woman was forced to look at Lakshmi’s bouncing breasts, or hold her head high and look away. One morning my grandmother had had enough and she burst into tears, wailing to god to release her from the torments of her life. From then on, all talk of the dowry ceased, and Lakshmi dressed far more modestly in our family home.

For all the ease with which Lakshmi bhabhi picked up the Gujarati language and followed every Gujarati custom concerning food, cleanliness and finances set up by our family, she was never ever considered Gujarati. She was always referred to as that Punjabi. There was an invisible line that she was not allowed to cross, even after she had become one of the most powerful women in our family. For me, the very fact that she would never turn into a Gujarati made her my favorite female relative. I couldn’t really explain why.

I sat on the train wondering about my clothes. I was wearing a printed rayon dress and closed shoes. I wore no jewelry other than my silver hoop earrings and my nondescript watch. I had eyeliner around my eyes and a little petroleum jelly on my lips. Would I have gone unnoticed in a sari or salwar-khameez?

I walked out of the compartment into the swaying corridor of the train. I slowly walked past all the compartments in the ladies’ section, looking at how the women were dressed. Rich, poor, thin, fat, none of them resembled me. It wasn’t just that none of them wore a dress, but that all of them looked at me with burning eyes, without recognition. I walked back to my berth and sat by the window. I watched my reflection in the dusty window pane, superimposed on the dazzling green fields that stretched out to the horizon.

I thought about how and where I directed my gaze when evaluating an unknown woman. Whenever possible, I always looked directly at the eyes and mouth first, then at the rest of the face, and only then would I attempt to integrate the woman’s clothing with what was expressed in her face. My guess was that even in a sari, or other traditional Indian clothes, something in my eyes, and the set of my mouth, would give me away, would mark me as other, outsider, oblique.

The second non-Gujarati whom I remember being aware of was my Maharashtrian ayah, or bai. She was most certainly different, because she wore her sari in the traditional Maharashtrian manner, the long material pulled through her legs and out the other side and tucked in at the back of the waist in such a way that her buttocks were perfectly outlined. This way of wearing the sari was similar to how Indian men wear the traditional dhoti, but somehow the material stretching taut between the legs of the men never outlined anything quite as interesting as my bai’s wonderful hips. As a young girl I never thought about her body consciously, but every time she walked by me, I was drawn to look at her shapely quivering flesh.

Neither the Gujarati style nor the North Indian style of wearing the sari allowed for the outlining of any sensuous shapes below the waist. Thus, in my childish imagination, it was only Maharashtrian women servants who had buttocks. As I visited the houses of my Gujarati friends, most of whom also had bais working for them, I came to have an appreciation for the various kinds of sari-wrapped buttocks that jiggled and sweated on the hips of our bais. Eventually my friends and I realized that we could do our bai-watching in the park, where dozens of these women came during the evening, bringing their young charges to play on the swings and slides.

These bais were definitely not Gujarati. They were too different! No matter that in some Gujarati households the Maharashtrian bais had worked there for decades and spoke only Gujarati, ate only Gujarati food and regaled their gods with only Gujarati bhajans. Wearing their saris the way they did, there was no question of these bais ever becoming one of us.

After all my years in America, my being Gujarati had lost its potency. In the West, I was Indian. Nothing further. In India, we had never been Indian. Though the word India was used everywhere all the time, Indian was used so rarely in my early years that the American term cowboys and Indians entered our vocabulary unchallenged. The only uses of Indian I can remember from my early years were from the radio reports of the steadily advancing Indian Army during the 1971 war with Pakistan, and from the title of the English-language newspaper, The Indian Express.

Sitting on the train, watching the Gujarati woman carefully avoiding me, I wondered if my retort to her angry attempt at pinning me down should simply have been, I’m Indian! She would have looked at me blankly. On top of everything, the woman might have wondered, is this insolent girl so stupid as to imagine that I can’t see that she is from this country? My dark skin, hair and eyes made me visibly Indian. On the other hand, if I had been light-skinned, there might have been some doubt about my identity, and consequently, less of a need to judge me harshly.

That reminded me of where else the term Indian had come up in my youth. It was to describe yet another non-Gujarati, a Kashmiri girl, who was appraised by my mother as being so fair-skinned that she definitely did not look Indian. This was my friend Radha, who looked exactly like a doll, with her curly brown hair and eerie hazel eyes. Her eyebrows were sparse golden arcs, unlike my black ones that almost met in the center of my forehead; her lips were light pink, unlike my dark purple ones. I didn’t see any of this until my mother pointed it out. To me, Radha was exactly like a doll, a foreign doll. I wanted nothing more than to play with her.

Radha had the most benevolent nature of any child I knew. She was always mentally alert but quiet, always ready for action but motionless. She would do anything I wanted her to do. She would lift up her dress for me, higher and higher, until her entire gleaming white torso was revealed, right up to the sloping pink nipples. I would shout, Simon Says, keep your hands in the air! and she would stand rigid for minutes on end with her face hidden behind her upturned dress.

I would walk up to her and lightly dig my finger into her bellybutton. She would sigh, but not laugh. Then I would walk behind her and wedge her hand-sewn white panties in between her buttocks. She would clench the muscles as I touched her, then relax them. Then I would order, "Simon