Alas for the egg if a stone falls on it,

Alas for the egg if it falls on the stone.

A proverb.

An NRI is that egg above. Figuratively speaking, that is. To explain the metaphor let us take an example. Anita Desai, who has for long been a global citizen, depicts in her novel Fasting, Feasting the NRI Arun. It has not been long since Arun arrived in the US of A from India. He lives with the family of his American host and despite being provided with plenty he finds it difficult to adapt. He cannot stomach the food overflowing from their refrigerator as much as he cannot stomach their lifestyle. In the end we find him discarding from his bag some of the contents brought from India. It is an indication that he is making room for the new. He has learnt to adapt. The novel ends. But what after the adaptation? We may as well consider a short story, Winterscape by the same author. Here the NRI, Rakesh, ‘how completely… had transformed himself into a husband, a Canadian.’ But when his aunt and his mother visit him and cook for him ‘the foods of his childhood’, he longs for his favourite pasta. Therein lies the NRI’s dilemma. Alas for the egg…

No doubt NRI writers while depicting NRI characters in their fiction are preoccupied with the theme of rootlessness and the sense of displacement. What gives more poignancy to this depiction is that the sense of dislocation is not merely a change of address but also a socio-cultural sense of displacement. The world today is a global village afflicted with the problems of immigration, refugees, exiles and they all give birth to that very sense of displacement and rootlessness. Hence the NRI writers’ depiction of NRI characters as seen against the geo-political background of the vast Indian subcontinent gains immense importance. That is precisely why such works have a global readership and an enduring appeal.

Indo-Anglian literature is in a dynamic phase and this dynamism blurs any chronological classification of NRI writers. Yet in more than fifty years since independence two generations of NRI writers have emerged from the diaspora. If we are to classify we can do so with NRIs in general, which obviously includes NRI writers as well. One class of non-resident Indians are those who have spent a part of their life in India and have carried the baggage of their native land offshore. The other class of non-resident Indians are those who have been bred since childhood outside India. They have had a view of their country only from the outside as an exotic place of their origin. The former group of NRIs has a literal displacement whereas the latter group find themselves rootless. Arun and Rakesh belong to the former group and their predicament is well explained in the words of another NRI character, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s short story The Courter,

A fine example of the latter group of NRIs is Ila from Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines. Ila’s father being a roaming diplomat, her upbringing has been totally on foreign soils. She finds herself as much out of place in India as any foreigner. But when she conjures up the story of her doppelganger Magda being rescued by Nick Price from Denise, we find how acute is her sense of rootlessness. Amitav Ghosh acknowledges as much when he says through the narrator that Ila ‘… has seen much but experienced nothing.’ What is important to note here is that today’s world is more accomodating and hence one cannot be a cultural outsider in a foreign land. The big issues like religious intolerance and racial discrimination are no longer the daily concern of an NRI. The world has changed and now what matters are the small things. They confront the NRIs like everyday chores. They keep reminding them of their rootlessness.

Even the English language, which is unifying, has its peculiarities which is diversifying- as the narrator of The Courter finds out why his English schoolmates giggle when he uses ‘brought-up’ for ‘upbringing’, ‘thrice’ for ‘three-times’, ‘quarter-plate’ for ‘side-plate’ and ‘macaroni’ for ‘pasta’. Fortunately he learns the difference between ‘nipples’ and ‘teats’ from his father’s mistake before using them inappropriately. NRIs learn and adjust but a sense of belonging can never arise in a person by making adjustments. NRI writers have explored this angst of NRIs in their fiction either through their own sense of alienation or through their empathetic observation of the lives of other NRIs. What becomes apparent in their exploration is that little things matter much.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs. Sen’s is a typical example. Mrs. Sen, the wife of a professor in Boston, is not exactly a cultural pariah. She has made herself at home buying and chopping and cooking vegetables and fishes. Yet a sense of loneliness gnaws at her being so she decides to baby-sit eleven-year-old Eliot. But she has to baby-sit at her own home because she does not know how to drive. She practices with her husband but is always afraid to drive on road. Once on getting the information that some tasty halibuts have arrived on the boats, her desire to get a whole fish to cook overcomes her dread of driving. She drives only to meet with an accident. So what is the crux of this story? All NRIs must learn to drive before going to buy a whole fish. No. If Mrs. Sen were to be in Bengal her inability to drive would not have been a hindrance for her. But her being in Boston, it becomes her handicap. Her handicaps are the real cause of her loneliness.

Thus we see, through an NRI writer’s work how an NRI’s problem manifests itself from unexpected quarters. Little, unacknowledged things gain enormous proportions in changed situations. The small things stoke the soft embers of ‘non-belonging’ in the NRI mind to keep it burning. In another Jhumpa Lahiri story called The Third and Final Continent we see how the NRI father brings his son home from Harvard University every weekend ‘so that he can eat rice with us with his hands, and speak Bengali.’ When the NRI father says towards the end of the story- ‘I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years’, we are not surprised. What has been his home for thirty years is still a ‘new world’ for him. It is best to summarize the essay in the words of this NRI character only,

Truly, no imagination can grasp bewilderment.

Works referred: -

By Anita Desai (b. 1937)

By Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)

The short story The Courter from the book East, West (1994).

By Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956)

The novel The Shadow Lines (1988).

By Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967)