While attending graduate school in Oregon, I heard about the first annual Miss India Oregon pageant, to be held in Portland, and I was intrigued. Was the idea to be the most Oregonian Indian girl, or the most Indian Oregonian, or was it to be the one who could stand, without faltering, squarely in the middle? Having come from such a small community, I assumed that Indian girls who grew up in larger communities like the one in Portland had it easier, that because they had a place to be Indian and lots of people to be Indian with, they had their identities all figured out. I attended the pageant expecting to find young women who had grown up more comfortable with their hyphenated selves than I had been, but what I found was just the opposite. Because they had a clearer picture of what it meant to be Indian, they were more conflicted about what it meant to be Indian American.
The young women I met at the pageant described their collective experience as one of living in two worlds at once. None of them spoke of anything as monumental as arranged marriage, which many people associate with the Indian experience. Instead, they spoke of the everyday business of teenage life, the ordinary happenings that take on extraordinary importance for girls who are the first in their families to grow up American. As one of these young women, Meera, put it, “Being Indian is just like one more thing. It’s one more thing to deal with in high school, like everything else isn’t enough.”
The food can be the best and the worst part about being an Indian kid in America. It’s the best because we have the sweetest sweets, so dense with butter and sugar they crumble apart in your fingers, or saturated and dripping with so much saffron-scented syrup you can feel the sweetness in your ears. Every dish, even in the everyday meals, requires so much soaking, sifting, rinsing, chopping, kneading, rolling, roasting, crushing and stirring that we can taste our mothers’ intentions in every bite.
It’s the worst because it can just be so weird. Filmy sheets of real silver are pressed into the tops of carrot-orange or cashew-tan pieces of rich, milky halvah to add pizzazz. The silver makes them look shimmery and festive, but to our friends they look more like fish than dessert. The slurping and smacking that accompanies eating with our hands can seem uncivilized. Not as proper or elegant as the sterile clink-clank of silverware to plate that punctuates family dinners on television. And worst of all, the smell.
It’s a heavy smell, thick and sticky as tamarind paste. The smell of cumin seeds and black mustard seeds snapping and popping in oil. Of sizzling onion slivers. Of round, rolled-out circles of dough, deep-fried so they puff up into hot, greasy pooris inflated with steam. It’s the saturated red, brown and yellow smell of ground spices mingling over stove heat. Chili powder, coriander and turmeric. The smell fills every room in a house, floor to ceiling and wall to wall. It wraps itself around every thread of curtain, carpet and clothing, infuses every hair on a head, seeps into every pore. It’s the reek of Indian food, and it’s impossible to escape.
Meera hates that smell. Actually, it’s not the smell itself that she hates so much as the way it lingers and clings to her. Before her friends come over, she opens windows, sprays air freshener, changes her clothes. She’ll jump in the shower if that’s what it takes. Meera loves her mom’s cooking, but that smell is so…it’s just so embarrassing. Once, when I visited Meera at her house, she opened the front door smiling. She was barefoot and still in her tennis clothes from morning practice, a crisp white skirt and a baby blue satiny T-shirt. Behind her was a wall of aroma, dense as a wool blanket. The air outside was cool and crisp. Meera noted the difference before she even said hello, and her smile faded. She looked mortified.
With one hand on her hip, she greeted me with a sigh and a roll of her eyes.
“Great,” she said. “Guess what we had for lunch?”
I wanted to tell Meera that one day, she’ll come to think fondly of that smell. She might find herself, as I often have, driving slowly past Indian restaurants with the window down, inhaling deeply. She might appreciate a first failed attempt at cooking her own Indian meal in her own first apartment, just for the nostalgia brought on by the scent of home. But then, I remember what it’s like to be a 15-year-old girl.
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