my ‘first person’ piece for the magazine writing class:

well there’s more to my experience in the United States than what follows, but these things just ‘came’ to me, you know what i mean? Displacement can be overwhelming at the beginning, but slowly …you come to terms with it….

Culture Shocked: Culture Surprised

        As I struggled to lock my apartment door, I realized how very hot it was outside. The sun barely overhead and the doorknob was already warm. A hundred and three, someone had said. I wondered how much that would be in centigrade.

Another fifteen minutes and it suddenly struck me. I was using my mailbox key. I tried the other key, and it worked. Back home in India my mailbox did not have a key, I mused. Actually, there was one single enormous mailbox, for common use of all the six flats.
Flats. I wondered why nobody uses the term here. Or does it only pertaining to footwear. Wasn’t a-p-a-r-t-m-e-n-t too long? People used ‘FYI’s and ‘ASAP’s in verbal conversations here, abbreviations I disliked and even avoided using online. I wondered, walking down the clean sidewalk, why Americans could not come up with something shorter for apartment.

        It was my first week in the United States and I was in a state of alternate shock and surprise. With bouts of disorientation throw in.

        The roads here made me uncomfortable. Sometimes there was, at a given time, no pedestrian on the road except me. Not even a cow, stray dog or a tramp. Cars swept past in both directions in a blur. No blaring of horns, no screeching of brakes, no loud curses. Wait! They were blowing horns this hot August morning, what’s with them suave drivers?

        Then I discovered to my horror that I was the reason. Like yesterday, I had not waited for the walk sign; I had not pressed any button. I was crossing the road unmindful of the very very fast traffic. As two more cars screeched to a halt, I recoiled under the intensely indignant gazes of drivers. I sprinted over to the other side, mumbling “sorry” under my breath to no one in particular.

        I missed my home in Calcutta. I also missed the city where I spent six years of my adult life alone, juggling my roles as a research student and magazine writer in the morning, and party hopper and lone star watcher on the roof at night. I missed riding my scooter. I missed getting narrowly killed by the crazy traffic on roads. I missed the cows and pigs and dogs and cats on the road. I missed the din, the gay confusion and the unpredictable weather of Pune, my city of loneliness and unrepressed liberty.

        I wondered why all of us at our group in the University of Pune had to end up in the United States sooner or later. I was the last to come. I could not defer the experience any further. India is the largest sender country of international students in the United States. I was one now a part of the 76503 official figure for 2006.

        But was this the experience I was looking for? I only felt like myself—enthusiastic and articulate in the classroom. The pedagogy here was liberating. Everything outside the classroom seemed standardized, sterile and contrived. Everything was too clean, everyone too polite. I almost wished someone would snap at me over something.

        At work, every little bit of thing I did was rewarded with profuse praises. Whether it was conducting a survey or doing some online research, the praise began with –“Team, Debjani has taken the leadership on…. and has done a fine job of………” and so on and so forth. Back home drawing out a word of praise from ‘superiors’ was as difficult as opening a bottle of wine without the corkscrew. No matter how hard you worked. And the concept of weekend did not exist. Every workplace ranging from the slickest corporate firms to the diminutive offices permitted one grudging weekly off. The Sunday.
There were aspects of my new life that I was really beginning to enjoy. The effervescent campus life, the speedy freeways, the two storey high cacti, the constant traffic of airplanes in the sky, the pumpkin pie; yet somewhere deep within I felt disoriented, unreal, bothered. Plus I had this extended jet lag, or whatever condition it was that made me drowsy in the afternoons and sleepless after midnight. However since I had located all my familiar stars and favorite constellations once again, star gazing on clear, typically Arizonan nights filled me with a sense of contentment and constancy. I would sometimes look for my grandma in those stars who had believed until the day she left me behind to die a pointless death that I would be the first among her grandchildren to go ‘abroad’.

        I kept on asking myself if I was happy to be here. I just wasn’t sure yet. I was helpless without a car. I stared wide-eyed at couples kissing openly by the fountain in Cady Mall. I was upset at not spotting jackrabbits on A-Mountain as promised in the plaques across the trail. I hated the dry heat. I was terrified of out of state tuition.

        “What am I moping about?” I wondered later that day in the restroom, looking frantically for a way to get some paper towel out of the holder, the huge white roll so visible yet so inaccessible. A rosy-cheeked undergrad came to my rescue.

        “ You press this lever here and tear the paper, see?” I was surprised again at a simple functionality that so utterly eluded me. I thanked her, still eyeing the towel dispenser warily.

        She looked curious. “Where are you from? …India? Awesome! This is your first week? Your English is so wonderful already!”
I was about to inform her that my ‘wonderful English’ was the result of twenty-eight years of constant use. Or perhaps, of two hundred years of imperial rule, which imposed British education on culture-shocked traditional Indians, grappling with fragmented identities. English was not just a language; it was a device of empire building. I wanted to tell her all that –make her understand. But something in her youthful naiveté told me she would not get it.

        I smiled at her and said, “Thanks.”

I was still smiling to myself as I walked absently out of the restroom. Smiling in nameless irony, and in a sudden spell of pleasurable excitement. This was one hell of a journey of discovery. “I am here,” I decided, as I stepped out in the atrium bathed in golden light, a feeling of sudden joy engulfing me, a joy born out of traveling almost nine thousand miles to be ‘culture shocked’—“I am here, I am going to enjoy myself.”

~ by feistyfeline on March 1, 2007.