The Crane In Us

Or the Transgressions of Identity

Who am I? At heart, I suppose, I am a crane.

Asia’s first Nobel laureate, the poet-philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote: 

I, who have the amphibious duality of nature in me, whose food is in the West and breathe air in the East, do not find a place where I can build my nest. I suppose I shall have to be a migratory bird and cross and recross the sea, owning two nests, one on each shore.

It was as if he were writing of me, to me.

I was born a mongrel: a north Indian and a south Indian, a Hindu and an atheist, an English-speaker with unEnglish skin, a half-caste with cultural capital. My mother’s family was from Lucknow-Allahabad in UP, but she had grown up in Bombay and Calcutta where she’d been educated by nuns in missionary-run convents. Her father used to eat his rotis with a fork and knife. She read English literature at university and wore sarees with insouciant elegance. There was hardly a superstition that she didn’t believe in: numerology, vastu, no cutting of nails at night. She liked Krishna and Ganesha, and also used to take me to visit a small church behind Khan Market, a shopping complex in New Delhi.

My father was a Tamilian, who had been born in Gujarat, and went to school in Dehra Dun. At university in England he spent most of his time betting on horse races and card games. He was an atheist, a writer, a reader. He liked a good beef burger whenever he was able to get hold of one.

Before I began primary school I had two “best” friends from my neighbourhood in Delhi. One was Sadia, a Muslim who lived a few houses down from us. I remember visiting her extended family in old Delhi on occasion. Her dad would cram her, her brother, her mother (shrouded in a burkha for the outing) and me on to his two-wheel scooter to take us there. We ate the best food at Sadia’s home. Then there was Simrin, a half-Sikh, half-American girl, with light brown hair and almost-green eyes, in whose home I saw bottled water for the first time. It was an amazing thing to me that there were people who paid for water in plastic bottles as if it were Campa Cola.

Once I began school many of my new friends were Punjabi Hindus with immigrant backgrounds; families who had left Pakistan immediately before partition. I learned to love the open-heartedness of their homes, the kineticism of the dancing at their celebrations and their easy generosity.

In short, I grew up in love with India, its multiplicities and ease with contradiction. Being Indian at that time, allowed me to be this complicated messy thing; to be more and greater instead of denuded and delineated. And I only became more complicated as I grew and flew.

My first boyfriend in college was an American jew who was in India on an exchange programme. He was a longhaired artist, with a street fighter’s sensibility when it came to social justice. Vive la révolucion and all that. Later there was an English musicologist at Oxford, who enjoyed playing village cricket.

And because third time’s the charm, a Spanish Sinologist came along a couple of years later and convinced me, first to move to China, and later, to marry him.

Over the next twenty years the love I had grown up with for India expanded until I fell in love with the world. The more I saw the more I realized that there is nowhere that is not wonderful. Beijing’s hutongs, Indonesia’s sambals, Brussels’ antique markets, Oxford’s libraries, Spain’s flower-filled balconies, and Tokyo’s dentists were all joy-giving, affirmations that I felt great pride in. “Look!” I wanted to tell people, “Come and see these things. Aren’t they glorious?” I suppose this newsletter is an attempt to do that

I have accreted so many identities, it’s like I’m building a luminescent shell within which I shelter, snail-like. I have become a little Chinese and a little Spanish, with a splash of Japanese. I prefer using chopsticks to forks. I have embraced Spanish nationalism when it comes to wine – to make it clear, Spanish wine is the BEST. I have learned to eat dinner at 6:00pm thanks to Tokyo and to drink hot water because of China. I call French fries, frites. And the sentences I exchange with Julio are in our own special patois:

“Chalo chalo, aren’t you ready yet?

Belum. I can’t find my chanclas.”

My older child, Ishaan, was born in Beijing and my younger one, Nico, in Brussels. Ishaan loves cricket and has already planned his retirement in Karuizawa, in Japan. Nico is passionate about foot massage and when he grows up he wants to work for JAXA (the Japanese Space agency), while running a spa on the side. They might both confront some hefty bills from psychologists in the future, or perhaps they will simply wonder to themselves why so many people feel the need to stuff their identity into tidy boxes instead of allowing it to multiply and thrive.

In this world we are constrained by passports, resources, colour, gender, religion, diet. Birth is a lottery and not everyone can fly. But sometimes we are fettered by the mind rather than circumstances. And in that case it's a tragedy not to soar, for we all have it in us to be boundary-crossing cranes.

How are some of the ways in which your identity has expanded or morphed over the years? Do share in the comments section below. And pls encourage anyone you think might be inteested in these posts to subscribe to this newsletter.