Book Update

Fall 1987

I can taste the fire on my tongue. 

A rage of words and emotions courses through my system as I stare at the image of “India”, spread over two pages of our seventh-grade social studies textbook. Hot tears collect behind my eyes. In all these years, India and Hinduism have not come up in school. It’s been my personal secret world, safely hidden in the magical portal of home, on the not-rich side of Briarcliff Manor, the tiny village in Westchester, New York. We’ve lived there since I was a baby. And I’ve had the privacy of  entire summers spent in India, all the way on the other side of the planet, with my beautiful, generous family. 

The one exception was when Amma came to visit my first-grade class in her sari and talked about Ganesha and our temples and holidays.

Scratch that. 

There was another time when Hinduism and India came up. How could I forget? A few years ago when The Temple of Doom came out. A dark cave filled with dirty Kali worshippers as the Hindu priest grinned creepily at the audience while blood dripped down his arm from the freshly scavenged monkey brain he held in his hand. The good Christian Indian riding on the top of the train with Indiana Jones, cheerfully telling him in adorable Indian English about how he drinks the blood of Christ every Sunday. You know, your basic “Aren’t those Hindus scary savages, and aren’t Indian Christian converts adorable and relatable?” message. I was afraid kids at school would ask me about that. But I was quiet and nerdy and didn’t talk to too many people. My guess was that instead of saying it directly to me, people probably just silently thought it at me. 

Other than that, there’d been no mention of Hinduism or India. 

Until now, in seventh grade social studies class. 

I look down at the image again. My vision is framed by the edges of my luxurious new perm and the rim of my translucent beige plastic glasses. A woman in a torn, dirty sari with a large bindi is ambling down a dirt road, carrying a clay pot filled with water on her head, hips swung to one side, as exotic women do. On her right is a mud hut, on her left a colorful garbage heap piled past her head. She shares the dirt road with some emaciated cows. 

“INDIA,” the top left corner of the page announces.

I can see my classmates smelling the image. The dirt, the heat, the squalor…the exotic, disgusting, pitiable odor of the “developing world.” 

Mr. Gross is at his desk, its solid oak authority angled at the front of the classroom next to the chalkboard. I hear my heart beating loudly over my classmates’ silent downward gaze. Do they hear it? My braces suddenly feel very heavy on my teeth. The armpits of my Joyce Leslie sweater with the geometric print are beginning to swim in puberty-and-injustice sweat, heat traveling up my neck. I have never spoken out about anything before. I am shy at school. The well-behaved, rule-following, first-born child of immigrants. 

But I have grown up in a home inspired by inquiry. I have been raised in a community of Hindu scientists who are pioneering in their fields of innovation and hold deep reverence for the Divine. I have grown up immersed in the Hindu spirit of exploration and wonder, of dialogue and voice.  

I stand up, the sound of the metal legs with the rubber feet pushing against the porcelain tile floor. 

“This is not my India.”

Mr. Gross looks at me, eyes slightly widened, pushing his glasses back up into position. His mouth expands into a gentle smile. 

“Why don’t you tell us about your India?”