Mementos, Artifacts and Hallucinations from the Ethnographer's Tent by RON EMOFF DAVID HENDERSON

Author:RON EMOFF, DAVID HENDERSON [RON EMOFF, DAVID HENDERSON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology
ISBN: 9781136770357
Google: oRwUQfqV8_wC
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

And so it comes to me that I have become a part of a new stereotype, a stereotype of privilege. One that, when applied to Indians (especially writers) living abroad, proceeds, as Vikram Chandra recounts, in the following manner: “They are disconnected from Indian realities and are prey to nostalgia; and besides, the bastards are too comfortable over there and don’t have to face Delhi traffic jams and power cuts and queues for phones and train tickets and buses, and so they don’t suffer like us and they can’t possibly be virtuous enough to be good artists.”

* * *

Two years after coming to America, I moved to Minneapolis and enrolled in a Ph.D. program. I was living in a small, attic apartment— through the sloping roof close above my head, I heard the scurrying of animal feet as I slept—and would come down at rigidly prescribed hours to cook my meals. My landlady, who allowed me the use of her kitchen, was a recently divorced woman in her fifties. She lived alone, playing the piano and drinking martinis at night, and I was struck by the fact that she never ate the green olives she put in her drink. Before I moved to Minnesota, I had never seen an olive. Now, each morning, there were two or three plump olives lying discarded in the kitchen sink. On Saturdays, a Native American woman would come to clean the house. I cleaned my room myself, and I was permitted to do my laundry in the basement on weekdays.

One evening, I descended from the attic to cook supper after my landlady had eaten, as was my custom: rice and Progresso lentil soup, disguised with a few basic spices to taste a bit like dal. When I sat down at the kitchen table, I saw that the landlady—I had not thought of her until I started writing this, but I believe her name was Meg—had left the day’s New York Times for me, with a blue arrow pointing to an article. The headline read: “Street Dramatist in India Slain Over Play.” The story began: “A leftist who was one of India’s most popular street theater directors was beaten to death by thugs last weekend after he refused a politician’s demand to stop a drama in support of an opposing candidate, witnesses said.”

The slain theater activist’s name was Safdar Hashmi. I had watched his plays with great interest in India, before I came to this country; in the two years prior to his death, I had written poems with which I hoped to emulate the didacticism and the wit that were the hallmark of Hashmi’s plays. I sat looking at the Times photograph of his corpse. Around him, illuminated by the light of the Delhi morning, stood many progressive intellectuals whose faces I recognized. I do not think I had ever felt as alone as I did that evening in my landlady’s kitchen.

I will not claim that Safdar was a friend of mine, although I had exchanged greetings with him at the bus stop, or at his street performances at Delhi University.

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