First Darling of the Morning by Thrity Umrigar

Author:Thrity Umrigar
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, I struggle to learn Marathi, so that I can converse with the middle-aged woman who works as a servant in our home.

Every once in a great while, it occurs to me that I lead a schizophrenic life: I am a Parsi teenager attending a Catholic school in the middle of a city that’s predominantly Hindu. I’m a middle-class girl living in the country that’s among the poorest in the world. I am growing up in the country that kicked out the British fourteen years before I was born but I have still never read a novel by an Indian writer.

But this is what it means to be a secular Bombayite, I tell myself—to take all the contradictory parts of your life and to make a unified whole out of it; to know that you are a cultural mongrel, the bastard child of history and to learn to be amused, even proud of the fact.

Because the alternative is unacceptable. If, instead of bemusement you allow yourself to feel rage at being the product of a colonial education system that scarcely prepares you for the realities of living in your own country, if you question why you know the words to every Bob Dylan song instead of the words to songs by—but there you see, that’s the problem, you don’t even know who your country’s Bob Dylan might be—then you are asking questions whose answers you will not be able to handle.

And the story is complicated and it is hard to know who is implicated in it. The British, with their famous declaration of building an Indian elite who looked Indian but were English

‘in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect,’ yes, of course the British are implicated but that’s too easy. And then you examine the complicity of those Irish nuns whom you adored as a child and who left their green, fertile island to come to this dry, sunbaked subcontinent in order to educate the pagans and you are swept in a tidal wave of mixed feelings, resentment and good will battling each other for supremacy. But wait, the moving finger moves on and now it points at your community, the chauvinistic old women who kept framed photographs of ‘apri’ queen on their peeling walls, and the old Parsi men who carried parasols in order to protect their light skins so as to distinguish themselves from the Hindu hordes, and your parents, who insisted you take piano lessons instead of learning to play the sitar, as many of your Hindu friends did. And finally, you yourself are implicated because surely you could have sought out the novels of Tagore as you did those of Hemingway, surely you could prevent the others from teasing the Hindi teacher in ways you would not dream of teasing those who brought you the works of Shakespeare?

The only hint of my childhood love affair with Britain now comes from adoring The Beatles and the Fabs are not really British any more, seeing how they now belong to the world and seeing how George Harrison himself was infatuated with India.

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