Indelible India

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Catherine Rose Torres, 31, is a Filipino diplomat now based in Singapore. She is a Palanca awardee for fiction, and her writing and photographs have appeared in various publications. She is married to a Korean and has also lived in New Delhi and Tokyo.

My India, I carry with me wherever I go

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— Raja Rao

 Ram Dass, the turbaned lascar with a monkey on his shoulder in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, was my first literary handshake with India, when I was eight. The book was one of my earliest favorites, and I have never quite outgrown it, harboring, to this very day, a secret wish to go back to my childhood and attend an English boarding school, and a visceral loathing for people named Lavinia.

It wasn’t until college that I read anything by a “real” Indian writer, if I could refer to Salman Rushdie as such, to whom I was initiated not through Midnight’s Children as one might expect, but through The Moor’s Last Sigh. The opening pages swept me off my feet like the monsoon-swollen Ganges, but in the end, I found it all too heady, too alien for my literary taste, which had been trained to appreciate the Greek classics, English and American staples like Dickens and Twain, the trinity of Ibong Adarna, Florante at Laura and Noli Me Tangere, and not much else.

And then The God of Small Things happened. It was, to me, too earthshaking a phenomenon to simply say that it was published. After reading the book in one go, meals and bathroom breaks grudgingly taken, I sat there with the book in my hand, having to remind myself to breathe again.

But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else... He was exasperated because he didn’t know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy... that Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance... So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.

As one whose love for reading was intertwined with her desire to write, reading Arundhati Roy’s beautifully irreverent prose was liberating. The fear that all the metaphors in the world had been used up was one of the things that held me back in my writing, but after reading passages like the one above, it dawned on me that life, and language, offered infinite possibilities for someone assiduous and daring enough to put pen to paper and to persist in the craft. Strangely, the writers I had read until then, who claimed English as their native and oftentimes only language, could not do for me what someone for whom English was a second language left over from a colonial past, was able to.

A decade after that revelatory moment, I got my first foreign service assignment — to New Delhi. I actually volunteered to go there, to the utter bewilderment of my friends and family members (and myself, looking back). The year before, I had spent a wonderful month touring India as part of a course for junior diplomats, and I was at a loss to understand why no one else was angling to be sent there. By then, I had gotten around to reading more of Rushdie and had gotten introduced to Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Vikram Chandra, among others, and to my mind, living in India would be like plugging into a cosmic stream of creativity and spiritual energy that would automatically make me a better writer, like them.

It sounds incredibly naive now, in retrospect, but back then, I just wanted to know what made Indians such damn good writers. Was it because they were congenitally more, er, verbose? In the end, I had to conclude that it was the culture. Why not, when even some foreign writers who visited or lived in India seemed to have carried away some of the magic with them? George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Paul Bowles, Paul Scott, Allen Ginsberg, Andre Malraux and Octavio Paz, to name a few—all of them wrote memorably about India, never mind if they were sometimes guilty of exoticizing and orientalizing their subject.

Barely a year after my husband and I landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport, I gave birth to our son, Sam (Samuel aka Sameer, which means “breeze” in Sanskrit). For the next two years, I was too busy and exhausted learning to be a mom and proving that I could juggle motherhood and work, to think of writing anything unless I absolutely had to — even e-mails felt like a struggle those first few months. Before I knew it, three years had elapsed and we were on our way to Singapore for a cross-posting, sans the sheafs of manuscripts I had expected to churn out from my India experience.

What we did bring with us were books, hundreds of them. My husband had let me wear the pants in Delhi, while he went to Jawaharlal Nehru University for his MA in English Literature, focusing on postcolonial Indian and Indo-Anglian writing. It was also an education for me. New names cropped up on our bookshelves: Parashuram, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Amit Chaudhuri and Anita Desai, to name a few, and though I didn’t always prove intrepid enough to wade through their works, the ones I did succeed in reading completely obliterated my smugness over my presumed familiarity with the Subcontinent’s literary corpus. 

Still, in the end, I couldn’t help but go back to the writers of the Indian diaspora whose works I first fell in love with. I admired them, how they managed to meld their “Indianness” with their adopted or assumed identities in their writings. At the same time, I envied them: their unforgettable “writerly” names (some names, it seems, simply sound authorial, unlike mine, just as others sound tailor-made for porn film stars), their mixed parentage, their itinerant childhood and youth — the culture shock, in short, that I imagined must have spurred them to write with a vengeance.

Perhaps, subconsciously, this was what I was trying to approximate in marrying a foreigner, in choosing a job that would require me to uproot and transplant myself in different countries every few years, and in giving birth to my son in another country. And it seems to have worked. Nearly a year after we left India, the stories have begun trickling out of me. It is difficult, sometimes, to get them down, to shape them, given the frenetic pace of life and work here in the Little Red Dot, but I’m slaving at it.

Why, after all, can’t we have Filipino diaspora writing as vibrantly as those of our Indian counterparts, I ask myself, when a tenth of our people are garlanded across the globe? Surely, we footloose Pinoys have more to give our country than our dollars — our stories, for instance, through which we can fashion a homeland of the collective hope and imagination that we can embrace and inhabit even as we live our lives abroad. Then, we too can say, “My Philippines, I carry with me wherever I go.”