the Indian Diaspora

We're everywhere. We're in Guyana, Britain, and Edison, NJ. Stereotypically, we inhabit Dunkin Donuts and the front seat of cabs and medical schools and the receiving end of 800 numbers, but realistically we inhabit artistic enclaves and spiritual nooks and political crannies shaping the face of the entire world.

That said, the Indian dude who works at the Secaucus train station snack bar needs to stop singing Bollywood songs when I'm hungry.

Occasionally, I will stop by the little newsstand in the station for an overpriced snack. I try to balance health and frugality, and so frequently end up eating my gum. An Indian man in his fifties, usually wearing a faded suit-vest from which his belly protrudes, works at the register. He sings Bollywood songs and loudly yells to people who are buying snacks he does not like. "Hey! What is that? Dinner? Hungry hungry hippo!"

Most people are in a rush to make the train, and so being called a hippo is ignored.

Some people, like me, are part of his special club (no, I get no discounts), and so he also speaks to me in a colloquial Hindi I would only understand were I raised on the streets of New Delhi. As I grew up on the streets of Ridgewood, I usually nod and politely smile, and hope that my gum satisfies the pain of void in my stomach.

Last week, I was in a particular rush to get home since I was sick. My eyes were droopy, my face was wan, and I could barely stand.

"Hey! Hey you! Going home? Need your dinner? Food? Khaana?"

I stared blankly at him as I paid for my gum. "Yep, finally going home."

He smiled. "One day I will go home, too."

"The least you can do is ensure comic relief at my funeral."

My mother gives new meaning to the notion of "going against the grain." No, she is not a nudist, she is not a Ron Paul fanatic, and she is not allergic to sunlight. Rather, she hates birthday cake, she falls asleep in houses of worship, and she wants to free the world's horses. And, she likes talking about funerals.

While my sister, father, and I prefer not to talk about the loss of a close loved one, and would rather enjoy our Saturday morning lethargy in peace, my mother likes to lead discussions on mortality. "Old people die, and young people are born. It's beautiful. It's a circle of life."

Having experienced this circle of life through Simba's coming of age in Lion King, my sister, father, and I try (and fail) to nod away the imminent discussion on death, and try (and still fail) to veer the conversation towards Michele Bachmann or hot yoga or unopened boxes of Christmas truffles.

"Ruch, when I die, I want you to write my eulogy."

After I spit coffee onto my iPad, my mother will then elaborate. "You're funny. I want there to be lots of laughter and joy and a celebration of my life, not a commiseration for the loss."

I usually smile insincerely, and my sister chimes in. "I'm funny, too, why can't I write it?"

"Of course you can, but you'll be busy with the after party. I want lots of food, especially peanuts and tea, and lots of cute babies. Make sure they're cute and fat, the kind I would have liked if I were alive."

My father then looks up from his magazine. "You are alive."

My mother scoffs. "Make sure there is also lots of dancing. Don't skimp with this party." My father nods his head, in hopes that the conversation is close to a finish, and then looks back down at his magazine.

Since my sister is still angry that I was given the task of writing the comedic eulogy, I decide to change the subject. "Mumma, the world is ending this year, and we might not make it after December 21st, so I guess we can't have this after death party for you anyways."

Every single line in my mother's face is now infused with fury. "Ruch, don't talk about death like that in front of your sister. You'll scare her."

All celebrities have to start somewhere.

RMR-Debut

RMR-A Capella

RMR-Obama 2012


Stay tuned!

burn your fancy candles, eat pizza in your prom dress, and tell her, "I love you."

330-something days till the world implodes.

(No, it may not necessarily end, but the very fact that large waves of people still bow to the likes of defeated Michele Bachmann as she leads the nation's moral recovery [post-Obamacare, no doubt], speaks to the steep decline in our global welfare. The Economist now talks about an imminent "sub-Saharan Spring," China and India are up in hydropolitical arms, and it barely flurried once this entire winter. Human development has progressed to its peak; the social institutions of marriage, government, education, and medicine have ceded to carnal desire [#willworkforfood]. Science, cultivated over centuries of meticulous research and analysis, has ceded to the whims of the one social construction that has sadly maintained: religion.)

In fact, let's just say the world will explode. Seriously, the Mayans were on top of their shit.


At the risk of sounding like a poor cocktail of Oprah, Simple Abundance, and the usual trite New Year's carpe diem sentiments, I must say that this is the year to claim. It's the year when you travel to Zimbabwe just because it was the only Z-country you could think of when you played Scattegories; it's the year when you wear fuscia pants to work, even if it's a Wednesday; it's the year when you burn your fancy candles, the ones saved up for a special occasion.


It's the year when you rid yourself of fluff--of the shapeless pink dress in your wardrobe, that will only increase in its aesthetic horror, of the friend whose lies you continue to forgive, of the piles of miscellaneous papers gathering dust under your bed.


This isn't like any other new year, when you resolve to lose weight, work harder, and "be better." The time for nebulous goals has passed. In fact, the time for all goals has passed. Wistfulness ends. Fantasies end. Delusions of friendship, of happiness, of success end.

The time has now come to just do.

This is the last chance we have to turn our dreams into reality. All wishes must be fulfilled. All fantasies must be carried out. And the delusions upon which we have built our lives must crumble in the face of our own awakening.


On December 21st, if we're all still here, then we'd have spent an entire year living life, not just surviving. And if we're not, then we'd have spent our last year without secrets, without regret, without the uncomfortable uncertainty that the girl you've fallen for is yours for the taking.


Ten bucks says, she is.

And the clock's ticking. 

fingernails grow back.

My best friend's dog bit me about four months ago. My finger was in pain and quite mangled, but after a heavy dose of antibiotics and compulsive slathering of topical ointments, the bites soon faded, my skin grew back, and my finger looked almost human.

(Almost.)

While there were no traces of trauma on my finger (insert plug for Neosporin), my finger nail was cracked in the middle. After three months, the crack only worsened, and what was initially a slight discomfort grew into a routine nuisance that prevented me from running my fingers through my hair, typing without a Band Aid, or eating spicy food with my hands. After I returned from India, I discovered the snag had become a hole in the middle of my nail. 

I was permanently damaged. I was 23, had three white hairs and a dosa belly. I had a flesh wound without even having joined the CIA (yet).

And so while I sat in a corner and wailed about the end of  my life, my mother stroked my hair and told me what she tells me whenever I have been hurt, wounded, punctured: "Let it air. It will soon grow out, beta, and you won't remember it ever pained so much."

So I aired it (much to the dismay of work colleagues and unsuspecting subway car passengers who were forced to be in proximity to the flesh). I threw caution (and all my Band Aids) to the wind, and as I consumed myself with life, I did not realize my nail bed was slowly and steadily restoring itself. I promised myself that I would get a manicure (I actually hate seeing paint on my nails) once it was healed. The hole had moved up several millimeters. Diaphanous fibers had begun to germinate.

I was cured. 

At least, I was en route.

Vestiges of the wound now remain only in the crooked tip of my nail, and in a subtle dent right in the middle that I can only feel with the pad of my other index finger. It was an ephemeral pain (unlike my three white hairs, which have refused to budge), and it's been rendered obsolete with the new year.

I am getting a manicure on January 16th.

And all I did was air it out.

No white Christmas, but a potted plant.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

The Manushi Who Stole Christmas

There was no white Christmas this year. Rather, the weather was dry, grey, and insufferably banal, and the usual surge of cheer that lit the streets had been slightly dampened. People sent e-gift cards instead of buying lumpy sweaters, and ate apples instead of truffles (well, I ate both.)

My family, however, spent one of warmest and most colorful Christmases, the kind that Jesus himself probably intended (no e-gift cards).

A few weeks before the holiday, my home had already been littered with red and silver cellophane, gold ribbon, boxes of Godiva, and empty bottles of Japanese plum wine. We neglected to go to the gym for the sake of "holiday chores" and by the time Friday, the 23rd, rolled around, I could barely fit into my pink snuggie.

Still, we were excited to spend time together, to love each other, to enjoy some time without the vagaries of our work. I came home early the day Manu and I were going to assemble and decorate our tree. We're raging Eco lovers who have come to enjoy the tradition of building the same tree every year, saving the whales one Christmas at a time. This year, Manu took issue with the whole procedure. She wanted to go to the mall instead. I looked longingly at the wine and chocolates that would have accompanied the assembly line (a new aspect of the tradition I included this year).

I swallowed. "Yes, let's go." We never got a chance to put up or tree, so we put all of our gifts beneath another fauna.

We had intended to wrap lights around our potted plant, but forgot to do that, too.

That evening, I wrapped my mother's gifts, a chore I find quite pleasurable, and after several hours of talking about nothing whilst curling ribbon, we finally went off to bed. It was a bit difficult to get up for work the next morning, but since our new way of functioning was indulging in confectionery and cocoa, somehow we managed to get through the day.

My aunt and uncle had flown in from Alabama, and so my cousin's family and mine enjoyed Saturday morning, Christmas Eve, doing nothing but eating fruits and chocolate and fried Gujarati  foods that we judge other people for eating. (I most likely will have type 2 by Wednesday).

While my aunt and mother divulged their 2011 regrets and their 2012 goals and their innermost secrets and their deluded love affairs with Bollywood actors, my cousin, my sister and I filmed ourselves and posted videos on YouTube and Facebook. We learned three things through our endeavors: rapping is difficult, the pain from stubbing your toe is difficult to conceal, and the three of us will probably be famous by Thursday, the day after the effects of our gluttonous consumption will kick in.

(this video doesn't show on all web interfaces, so if you want to see it, shoot me an email!)

We opened presents on Christmas morning, after another round of goals and feedback on these goals (read: unsolicited adult advice on life and that funny thing they keep mentioning, "future.").

My parents had gotten me a snow globe.

We then drove for many moons so we could test the malleability of our seemingly pregnant stomachs, which within three days were carrying approximately 9 months of food. We ate (devoured, ravaged) South Indian food at a restaurant where seating was first come, first serve; naturally, the survival-of-the-fittest Indian roots surfaced, and my parents and aunt and uncle circled the full tables like hawks, eyeing the contented patrons with glares.

Yes, how dare they chew their food before they swallow. Chop, chop, unassuming diners, it's time to go.

We finally saw some people take a pause for breath, and in the hiatus that followed, they were suddenly surrounded. My family did not even wait for the waiters to clear out the tables before sitting.

After our glorious meal, we rested our hands on our protruding stomachs and walked over to the real Christmas spectacular: Don 2, Shah Rukh Khan's newest film.

I almost peed in my pants with excitement (and from washing down spicy sambhar with 4-5 glasses of water).

The movie was brilliant, as expected. All we needed to end the weekend was the drive into sparkly midtown Manhattan, where we all argued about the expression of the lights (were they tear drops or melting icicles?), shared bags of roasted peanuts for which my generous aunt overpaid the nutsman, and the youth issued declarations about the commercial banality of midtown and while the elders of the pack mused about their next snack. Once my mother reminisced drinking tea in silent, suburban Ridgewood, where we could also fill up our almost empty tank, we drove back up north.

Back at home, we loudly claimed a lack of hunger, and then continued to eat popcorn with chaat masala, peanuts, grapefruit, ice cream, blueberries, more Gujarati specialties dear to our clogged hearts, and Godiva truffles whose caloric count is nonexistent on December 25.

We ended the evening by Facetiming (if Google is a verb, why not Facetime?) our grandparents in India, who were too fascinated with my cousin's new abominable snow man look (read: strategically grown beard), to realize that we were all present, connecting to each other through a small  machine thinner than my diary, each of us thousands of miles apart, and still within three inches of each other, grasping for the other's face, unable to touch.

The next day, everyone dispersed, and all we had left of the weekend was a few dozen boxes of chocolate, my pink snuggie still sprawled on the couch, and a few music videos we had created to change the world.

No, Manu didn't steal Christmas. She actually brought it to life.

And we get to keep our potted plant all year round.