sign of india

Heartbreaking, at times humorous, and almost always a little reminder that I am far from home… There are little signs in much of my day to day life that pop –out and remind me that though I have gotten used to routine-life here, I am still am very far from home.

The word CASTE jumped out at me in a newspaper word puzzle; I usually breeze through these types of things- the Soduko, and the Mumbai Mirror crossword- without thinking-- and the underlying meanings of the word made me stop. life here used to be...discrimination was built into society because of birth.. social divisions affected everything. How some things may have changed and how in other senses, they still are the same.

My basic Hebrew class last night. We were reading a simple story illustrating new verbs and vocab related to cooking. One of my students, while working on a ‘ Correct’ or ‘Incorrect’ exercise, stumbled through a sentence: “She baked cake in the Street.” Everyday on my walk to and from work I pass many who bake -chappati- bread in the street, bathe in the street, hang their kapra, sleep, play, and weave bamboo baskets in the streets. It was an uneasy laugh in the classroom when deciding if the sentence was or wasn’t possible.

For the Israeli film festival ( by the way, the Indian- English pronunciation emphasizes the “L” in Fi-li-m Festival) one of the items on the to-do list is to run the fi-lims by the censorship bureau. Interestingly enough, heterosexual kissing is seldom seen on the silver screen in Bombay flicks, through many of the gay kissing scenes in the movie Brokeback Mountain apparently made it through censorship with no obvious cuts. The national anthem “Jana Gana” is played before every showing of every movie in India- Bollywood, or not.

Family ties. There are so many interconnected families in this community that now I automatically assume that everyone in fact is related to everyone else here. Kinship is much more highly defined here- with different words for every familial relation. The name of ones’ mothers’ brother is different from ones’ fathers brother; cousins are called “brother’ and ‘sister’ and Grandparent is a much broader term here than back in the States. This morning I had a silly "argument" with Solly ( Uncle) * ( called Uncle because he is older and it is a respectful term) that he is not the Grandfather of one of my students, but the Grand Uncle, because the boy in question is his sisters’ grandson. Turns out that in India, I’m wrong. Which is a good thing, as one can never have too many loving Grandparents.

It makes me wonder sometimes, what would be the signs of my culture, were someone to come in and observe me and my life back home. Empty dark streets in the cities? lips touching the lip of a glass when drinking water? Only a few Grandparents, brothers, sisters? Families living without their elderly in-laws in the house? "Children" moving out of home before marriage?