My Step-Motherland, India
“Socially, India is a sore wound in me. It is the land that has consistently rejected me as a stepmother.”
by Usha Akella
Australia appears to me as a nibbled croissant placed on the corner of the world’s plate. I cannot speak of Australia without speaking of India and vice versa. For a good many years, they were like the skins covering both ends of a narrow drum; what ensued was the not-so-syncopated rhythm of my identity. Australia became my ‘motherland,’ a metaphor for my mother’s unusual fixations and telling of her own inability to ever create a present. It was a fog in her mind, a country forever hovering above India never to be forgotten. It was the reason I could never fully integrate as a child and India was never fully home socially. It was the reason English became the language of my childhood, emotions and dreaming. The reason India received me with tightly folded arms and not an embrace. I was not suitably en-cultured like homemade yogurt. Socially, India is a sore wound in me. It is the land that has consistently rejected me as a stepmother. Spiritually, she branded me as her own. She is a goddess with two faces.
I was one year old when my parents left India for Melbourne. My father was enlisted at Melbourne’s Monash University. I cull the country in snapshot memories, faded photographs and hearsay. The first photo in the album reveals a hopelessly naïve looking toddler in a silver dress holding a doll. Another photo was one taken at the airport when I was six holding my mother’s hand. I looked thin and boyish in a mini skirt. It is said that I remarked to my parents, “Are you sure?” referring to our return to India. Perhaps, my mother projected her own concerns using me unconsciously as a mouthpiece. In the photo, my mother is wearing a black Kanchi sari, beautiful and six months pregnant. She has a frailty in demeanor. There is also a young woman in a mini skirt named Diane, a family friend who passed away young afflicted with leukemia. She was married to a ‘Verma mama;’ a mama (uncle) in a line of mamas and aunties who were part of our social circle.
Upon returning to India in 1973, we first lived in Hyderabad; initially in a locality called Nallakunta and then in Vidyanagar. The Vidyanagar house was a spacious enough house with a large backyard. My mother grew ‘dondakai’ and okra. The vines curled on metal wires. I would sit on a granite slab by an Asoka tree and pretend my badminton racket was a guitar. I wanted to grow up, and write songs for world peace and become a rock star (I am guessing this was a Melbourne influenced dream; becoming a rock star was not the general aspiration a Telugu Brahmin niyogi community would instill in a child.) At school, it was teasing classmates and jeering. “Green monkey” was a moniker inspired by a green Sears dress. Learning Telugu and Hindi became a torture. Two new languages, a jump up from grade 1 to class 3, new environment and culture marked the transition. I dropped ‘Telugu’, my mother tongue, in grade 4 with relief and was allowed to pick the ‘Special English’ option. At home, I wasn’t spoken to in my mother tongue, Telugu. I lost out on being rooted .When you don’t know the language you are born into you lose out on a culture, a cultural sensibility, a herd and the comfort of belonging. I’ve lived with an unanchored feeling all my life, a vagueness within like a cloud. I am not sure how to belong and whom to belong to. Till this day as an adult, I long for belonging while being incapable of completely subordinating myself to any social culture. As a child, I found myself in India, first as an outsider. Thereon, I found myself in the world as a wanderer.
I remember the day a lorry delivered our goods shipped from Melbourne; dozens of cartons filled the house. The fruity scent of erasers, a banana yellow Snoopy pencil case, a green plastic vegetable stand and a blue sling Bambi bag became my link to my Australian past. A washing machine and cooking range never got resuscitated however arduous the attempts and became lame symbols of useless pride of the ‘foreign returned.’ My mother baked scones, saved the pages of her recipe books of gingerbread houses. She kept her acquired Australian accent for a few years and an obsession for punctuality sense that India scoffed. A GE refrigerator was discarded after a few years for a local brand. An elementary school friend’s father asked me about aboriginal Australians one day when I visited them. He told me how they had been slaughtered and the land taken from them. I listened to this information without any reaction. I couldn’t relate it with the Australians I knew- Mrs. Jones, my baby sitter, her burly husband and her strapping sons. At seven focusing on the chicken curry in their home made more immediate sense. I’d learnt how to eat meat in Melbourne foisted upon me by baby sitters and no resistance from my parents- cold cuts, sardines, ham and Kentucky fried chicken were a habit. My meat eating dwindled away in my mom’s Brahmin kitchen over the years till vegetarianism became a conscious choice.
Most typical Hindus are bound by cellular longings for rama rajyam, the ideal society, or look forward to Samadhi, the real state worth living for beyond any geography. My mother’s yearnings and longings were pinned on a land whose allure was the aural ‘todai’ instead of ‘today.’ Melbourne, for my mother is forever associated with utopia, where shackles of Indian society loosened to let an easier breath pass. Her world was Sears and Woolworth, accent classes, her job at the Springvale High School as a science teacher, Inees her wickedly mischievous Latvian friend, and the Moomba festival. Australia was all that India wasn’t. It was there that she tried to ski, had frost bite and learned to enjoy a glass of sherry. It was exotic, a paradise that was replaced by harsh heat, frayed nerves, migraines and struggles of the middle-class in Hyderabad. For decades, she carried Australia inside her much the way we carry our collective identity. It replaced her Indian roots with an inexplicable ease, had her loyalty and became the land to long and weep for. Something in her died when she returned to India. My mother would have gladly traded her nationality if she could.
Shri Aurobindo’s father shipped him off at a tender age to England so the shadow of India would not fall upon him. My mother tried to achieve the same unconscious goal while living on the land she sought to erase; and if not erase, with pointed focus was unappreciative of. The flighty Upanishads, classical dance and music, vratams and pujas, antique languages, boastful long history, traditions and chaste women extolling Hindu womanhood could not hold a candle to Australia. All of this signage was bypassed in my upbringing. She was atypical and brought me up atypically. I wasn’t brought up as Telugu Hindu girls are. She inculcated none of it.
I wasn’t seen as the next carrier of family culture as parents think their kids are. Parenting just happened in our household. My father was indifferent to our upbringing, and maybe even indifferent to us. We kids happened as life happened, just karma that had to be endured. He took me to mythological movies that were magical and gripping and did his bit by way of ‘enculturation’. But in a weird way I was a carrier. My father’s family is one of writers, journalists and spiritual seekers (even a few women saints feature.) I wanted to be a poet early on. The genes had trickled in. And those mythological movies and books ignited something. Like Shri Aurobindo, during my early youth I became hypnotized by the spiritual heritage of the land, consumed by its mystical visions of the goal of human life and it made an idealist of me. I wanted to be a monk. The archetype of transcendence dominated my sensibility. The mysticism of the ancient seers that states consciousness is supreme, and freedom means knowledge of the self as divine caught me young. It has fuelled my entire life as an ideal to aspire toward. In yet another layer of irony, my parent’s laxity in my cultural upbringing gave me the unusual freedom in intellect and spirit to experiment spiritually without feeling bounded. When one is not defined too strongly, one is fluid, one has the ability to simply connect with anyone as human. There was no ‘other.’ It was a gift of sorts. It may not sit well with the traditional minded. But when I can break bread at so many tables in the oneness of the human spirit, I choose this rootlessness. Perhaps, this is the true mark of the Indian spirit. My parents allowed it to be.
Decades later, in 1993, when I walked into a grocery store in Baltimore for the first time, I stood rooted. I knew the chill and the odor of cold meats; the sight of ice cream in gallons and canned vegetables and fruits. They claimed my senses and told me that those five years of childhood may have been Freudian after all. They came to my aid and I was spared the initial phase of strangeness. It was the smell of home. It was Melbourne.
Lands insert themselves into the mind like love letters into envelopes. As time goes by, you forget the words but the fragrance remains.