When I first arrived in India, I found most aspects of life confusing, but pretty much nothing confused me as much as my job.
I worked at a big newspaper, and in India, big newspapers are largely seething masses of entropic chaos. I know this is supposedly true of the universe on a cosmic level, but an Indian newsroom actually embodies this principle as a daily reality, ie, every day thoughout the day all its actions contract to that moment when a black hole eventually emits - spits out? - that tiny carbon particle we call the actual newspaper.
I worked six to seven days a week, usually ten hours a day. I had clear deadlines, but exactly what I did to meet those deadlines was largely up to me; a mixed blessing if ever there was one. I probably would have spent a lot more time confused and frustated - and maybe even quit before I did - if it hadn't been for a friend whom I'll refer to (not entirely kindly) as my "lunchroom Aunty."
She was several years older than me and had been in journalism her entire life. Every so often, when I felt like India, or journalism, or just life, were getting me down, I'd send her a text that said something like, "Want to get tea?"
She'd usually text back: "Meet me there in 5."
I'd go down to the office canteen and order two cups of hot tea, which they brewed fresh every hour after 4 pm. Journalists, after all, need their caffeine.
She'd arrive in a swirl of cotton salwar kameez - she was allergic, she said, to most other fabrics - and settle down across from me with an expression of gleeful sympathy.
"So what is it this time?" she'd ask.
And I'd pour out my troubles. A lot of my problems involved issues with work culture, with location, with adjustment, with woeful questions about love and man's place in the universe. There was no problem too small or too large for me to share. There are probably few people on earth who knew my life so thoroughly, before or since.
She'd invariably interrupt me and give me the "straight truth." This usually meant an amalgam of reality and anecdote, much of which I found difficult to swallow.
She was the one who advised me about what middle-class Indian values really were and what work culture expected of me. She told me I was too picky, in a lot of areas of life, and it was making me unhappy. She called me out for not solving my problems forcibly up front - something I still struggle with. She told me to my face when I was totally messing it up - and sometimes, she said so a bit more energetically and in more detailed a fashion than was strictly necessary. She criticized my accent, my clothes, my choice in friends and my homeland, but with a constant and surprising generosity.
I often wondered: why the heck is she willing to listen to me? This must be insanely boring.
Fast forward two years. I was sitting in my office cafeteria with a co-worker who is several years younger than me, and she was upset.
"If you're feeling this way, you should go home for a visit," I told her kindly, although she hadn't asked for my advice. "What you're doing - moving to a new city as a young single woman and working in this industry - is so hard, and not a lot of people get it. It's okay to be upset."
A few minutes earlier, she'd told me about how she didn't know how to properly iron her kurtas.
"What you have to do is mist the kurta with water and..." I'd said.
Then she complained about being broke.
"Why do I keep buying expensive food if it's not in my budget?" she wailed.
"Because if you eat nothing but Maggi you'll get scurvy," I told her succintly. "This is what you're going to do. If you have to, ask your parents for a little bit of extra money every month, and continue to eat well. If you live on a poor student's diet, your brain will atrophy."
And then I had to stop talking, because I realized at once - it was late afternoon and the sunlight was bright, it's just turning into winter - that I'd had this exact same conversation two years earlier, when I'd been broke and helpless.
And my friend had told me, "Call your parents and ask them for help. Don't stop eating properly."
There were so many things about my friend that I understood in that moment. Why she usually insisted on paying for tea, for example. And also: why she listened to me. And also, more importantly: how much she'd obviously cared about me, to keep giving me advice when I cried, or fought with her, or (more commonly) just never took it.
I wish this were a story about immigration or translocation, but I'm not sure it is. It's true that my mother still tells people the story of the first friend she made in America, a newly-married Indian woman who, when she heard a new family had arrived on the block from India, cold called my mother and invited her over for pizza.
"It was my first slice of pizza in America," my mother still says, fondly.
But this isn't a story about immigration. It's a story about someone who, at a time of conflict and challenge in your life, opens a door and allows you to see that maybe your choices weren't all a mistake. That you will, somehow and with help, be able to figure things out and be happy.
I'm not saying that I am that kind of friend to the girl I work with. But I can see that I would want to be. I see how I maybe even could be, one day. And that, my friends, shows me more than anything else how far I have come in this country.
I worked at a big newspaper, and in India, big newspapers are largely seething masses of entropic chaos. I know this is supposedly true of the universe on a cosmic level, but an Indian newsroom actually embodies this principle as a daily reality, ie, every day thoughout the day all its actions contract to that moment when a black hole eventually emits - spits out? - that tiny carbon particle we call the actual newspaper.
I worked six to seven days a week, usually ten hours a day. I had clear deadlines, but exactly what I did to meet those deadlines was largely up to me; a mixed blessing if ever there was one. I probably would have spent a lot more time confused and frustated - and maybe even quit before I did - if it hadn't been for a friend whom I'll refer to (not entirely kindly) as my "lunchroom Aunty."
She was several years older than me and had been in journalism her entire life. Every so often, when I felt like India, or journalism, or just life, were getting me down, I'd send her a text that said something like, "Want to get tea?"
She'd usually text back: "Meet me there in 5."
I'd go down to the office canteen and order two cups of hot tea, which they brewed fresh every hour after 4 pm. Journalists, after all, need their caffeine.
She'd arrive in a swirl of cotton salwar kameez - she was allergic, she said, to most other fabrics - and settle down across from me with an expression of gleeful sympathy.
"So what is it this time?" she'd ask.
And I'd pour out my troubles. A lot of my problems involved issues with work culture, with location, with adjustment, with woeful questions about love and man's place in the universe. There was no problem too small or too large for me to share. There are probably few people on earth who knew my life so thoroughly, before or since.
She'd invariably interrupt me and give me the "straight truth." This usually meant an amalgam of reality and anecdote, much of which I found difficult to swallow.
She was the one who advised me about what middle-class Indian values really were and what work culture expected of me. She told me I was too picky, in a lot of areas of life, and it was making me unhappy. She called me out for not solving my problems forcibly up front - something I still struggle with. She told me to my face when I was totally messing it up - and sometimes, she said so a bit more energetically and in more detailed a fashion than was strictly necessary. She criticized my accent, my clothes, my choice in friends and my homeland, but with a constant and surprising generosity.
I often wondered: why the heck is she willing to listen to me? This must be insanely boring.
Fast forward two years. I was sitting in my office cafeteria with a co-worker who is several years younger than me, and she was upset.
"If you're feeling this way, you should go home for a visit," I told her kindly, although she hadn't asked for my advice. "What you're doing - moving to a new city as a young single woman and working in this industry - is so hard, and not a lot of people get it. It's okay to be upset."
A few minutes earlier, she'd told me about how she didn't know how to properly iron her kurtas.
"What you have to do is mist the kurta with water and..." I'd said.
Then she complained about being broke.
"Why do I keep buying expensive food if it's not in my budget?" she wailed.
"Because if you eat nothing but Maggi you'll get scurvy," I told her succintly. "This is what you're going to do. If you have to, ask your parents for a little bit of extra money every month, and continue to eat well. If you live on a poor student's diet, your brain will atrophy."
And then I had to stop talking, because I realized at once - it was late afternoon and the sunlight was bright, it's just turning into winter - that I'd had this exact same conversation two years earlier, when I'd been broke and helpless.
And my friend had told me, "Call your parents and ask them for help. Don't stop eating properly."
There were so many things about my friend that I understood in that moment. Why she usually insisted on paying for tea, for example. And also: why she listened to me. And also, more importantly: how much she'd obviously cared about me, to keep giving me advice when I cried, or fought with her, or (more commonly) just never took it.
I wish this were a story about immigration or translocation, but I'm not sure it is. It's true that my mother still tells people the story of the first friend she made in America, a newly-married Indian woman who, when she heard a new family had arrived on the block from India, cold called my mother and invited her over for pizza.
"It was my first slice of pizza in America," my mother still says, fondly.
But this isn't a story about immigration. It's a story about someone who, at a time of conflict and challenge in your life, opens a door and allows you to see that maybe your choices weren't all a mistake. That you will, somehow and with help, be able to figure things out and be happy.
I'm not saying that I am that kind of friend to the girl I work with. But I can see that I would want to be. I see how I maybe even could be, one day. And that, my friends, shows me more than anything else how far I have come in this country.
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