I once took summer tennis lessons at an all-boys private school. I was easily the worst player in my age group. I refused to wear shorts or tennis skirts, instead opting for skintight black jeggings. During the afternoon ice cream break, when the golden-brown sons and daughters of the American aristocracy reclined artfully on the grass and flirted hazily to pass the hot hours, I sweated through serving drills and endless rounds against the backboard. What I lacked in innate talent, I decided, I would make up through hard work. That is the immigrants' mantra; I absorbed it before I learned to talk.
The tennis instructor, a tall and muscular 20-year-old, felt bad for me and decided to throw me a bone. "You know," he said one day, watching me practice alone on the tennis court, "you might be strong enough to hit a one-handed backhand. Most women aren't."
And for the next two weeks he worked with me tirelessly - through breaks, after classes - to make it happen. I'll always be glad that he admired my work ethic, and that he didn't ostracize me for being different. Not everyone is that kind.
Unfortunately, Indians are the opposite of kind. Whereas that long-ago tennis instructor honed the strength and precision of my one-handed backhand, Indian relatives are born masters of the backhanded compliment. With a few pointed words, they can inflate your ego only to puncture it at the same time. Build you up and take you apart. In the United States, we're warned that Indian culture is unusually direct, but actually it's often just gleefully mean.
Witness some relatives of mine. When I first told my grandmother that I wanted to be a journalist, she looked delighted and crestfallen.
"That's a great ambition," she muttered. "For a girl, anyway. Obviously you couldn't be a doctor."
This didn't bother me as much as it bothered my mother, strangely enough.
"Please," my Mom huffed, probably thinking about the hours she put in to get her MBA. "We all know women are smarter than men." But her post-feminist feminism was lost on her audience.
Another cousin of mine once told me,
"Gosh, you look just great in everything you wear." I smiled and opened to mouth to thank her, but she was quicker. "Not like last time you were here. Then you looked a bit fat."
"I did," I gamely agreed. This time, my sister leapt to my defense.
"She wasn't that fat," my sister protested. "She looked fine."
"Oh no," said my cousin, lowering her voice for dramatic effect. "She was quite, quite fat. Everyone talked about it afterwards." Most of my relatives weigh at least 300 pounds, so I wasn't all that upset.
Another friend of mine was told the following:
"Oh you look so good now! Last time you came here, you were so thin and dark that you looked like a malnourished African child."
By far, the most alarming backhanded compliment I ever got actually came from an Indian co-worker. I'd never spoken to her, but she called me over to her desk one day.
"Anika, you remind me of this girl I worked with 20 years ago. Her name was Basudha. You look exactly like her. She was very pretty."
"Thanks?" I started to say.
"But she died very young in tragic car accident. Now every time I see you, I think of her, and it makes me sad."
I wandered back to my desk in a daze. Who says women aren't strong enough to hit a one-handed backhand?
Women are uniquely great at left-handed compliments. Indian extended families exercise strict control over women's lives. Girls are useful so long as they are diligent or beautiful, but the hard labor of marriage erodes both of these things. A traditional Indian mother-in-law would rather dance with fire than compliment a daughter-in-law on anything. Part of this modesty comes from superstition, which suggests that too much praise can attract the evil eye. But nowadays it's become a way of keeping young women in their place.
Because of this, I always felt that I was luckier than a lot of my female Indian cousins. I lived alone, I traveled the world, I went to college, I saw movies with boys whenever I wanted. I carried a foreign passport and I had a foreign accent. My female relatives loved me, but I defied their expectations of what a woman's place should be, and I escaped the consequences of that rebellion. Sniping about my looks was their way of leveling the playing field, and that's why it never bothered me all that much. It struck me as their private way of penalizing someone who didn't quite fit in. (It's worth mentioning that my more progressive aunts and cousins don't give many left-handed compliments) Which is also why I tried not to participate. I always knew that in that particular game, the winner wasn't the person who hit the hardest but the one who never bothered to play.
No comments:
Post a Comment