“But you are American women!” he called out.
It was odd that Satish was the one saying this. Mohan would never have called Ranjana American. He forever saw her as a transplant from India. In fact, he took pride in retaining his Indian nationality as much as he could.
“Are you really trying to tell me that there is no difference between us and the other women you see in this country?” Seema asked. “Weren’t you just complaining yesterday about some woman who cut you off on the highway?”
“Well, she couldn’t drive because she was a woman, not because she was an American woman.” Satish cackled while Ranjana and Seema rolled their eyes.
“There is no such thing as an ‘American woman,’” Satish continued, finished with his chore and returning to the doorway. He leaned against its frame with his stomach as a cushion. He had a common Indian male physique: second trimester with a possible sail into the third. Ranjana remembered Dr. Butt telling her that the reason why so many Indian men looked like this was because their ancestors had spent centuries farming in the fields and doing other hard manual labor, whereas now, in this modern world, their heirs were much more stationary and, well, lazy. “So all of the fat gets pushed to the front,” Dr. Butt had said, pushing his hands together in front of his own flat stomach and pantomiming a potbelly.
Satish continued: “America has become full of so many different types of people that we can’t define it anymore. It’s true!” he was saying to Seema’s scoff. “Just look at you, yaar. Look at this mess on the table. You and Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama are all ‘American women,’ but I’ll bet their dining room tables don’t ever look like this.”
“But that isn’t really the point,” Seema said. “Fine, there are different types of American women. But what we are talking about is whether we Indian women in America are more open to change, more accepting, and I think the answer is a resounding yes.”
Ranjana found herself agreeing with this blunt statement. Not just because of someone like Stefanie or someone like Cheryl. It was because, if she stepped back and considered her life in relation to those of the American women around her, she had a firm sense of having always been criticized, at once exoticized because she was Eastern and resented because she was different. If American women had been more accepting of adaptation, then she and all of the Indian women she knew would have felt validated. But they constantly felt self-conscious—indeed, this entire conversation with Seema was predicated on feeling self-conscious—and so the only possible explanation was that Indian women hadn’t been made to feel comfortable. Wasn’t “diversity” the word that everyone used about creative industries now? So why was her writing group, her creative outlet, not providing a safe space for her? Because she was seen as inferior due to her ethnicity.
She wasn’t a particularly political person. Whenever an argument broke out in their temple about the controversial organization Vishva Hindu Parishad and how its increasingly nationalist followers were forming a small but dedicated group within their community, she shrugged and complimented herself on having a drama-free family in this regard. At the same time, she also couldn’t slough off politics entirely. She had always found inspiration in the ascent of Sonia Gandhi, whose own political career seemed to have embodied the confused nationality of Ranjana and her contemporaries. The Italian woman who had married Indiraji’s son, Rajiv—not just married but fallen in love with him, leaping over the chasm between their two cultures—seemed like a rare branch of India’s political tree, and Ranjana loved this idea of an interloper, an oddball. More than this, though, she loved how Sonia Gandhi had defied the defeatists around her, the people that had predicted that she would die a quick political death after Rajiv’s assassination. Everyone had expected her to bury her Italian face in her Indian shawl, grab her children, and become a shut-in, but she had seen the opportunity to wrest every last bit of power her husband had left her, and soon she had become a nationalist heroine. She argued and debated and showed up to rallies where her face was enlarged on billboards and placards; she had inhaled whatever political fervor had blown into the wind with her husband’s ashes.
Sonia Gandhi was not American, of course, but Ranjana did find some solace in the idea that a nonconforming woman could enter and fully master a culture while respecting it all along—and be embraced by it! It was possible to move to a new country, to absorb it and to be encouraged. Ranjana wanted this kind of encouragement from the non-Indian women that she knew—especially from ones who had the secret, fragile material of her writing in their hands.
“I just wish that these women—at the very least—would see me as equal to themselves,” Ranjana said, plainly.
Satish sucked in his cheeks and went back into the kitchen. Seema just batted her hand in the air.
A few minutes later, Ranjana was back in her car, driving home, and her forehead tingled from all of her confusion. She had driven to Seema’s house with the aim of commiserating about her treatment at the hands of American women, but something flashed into her head now: she wasn’t sure whose side Seema was on. She felt scrutinized, beaten down by the constant anxiety of dealing with her writing class (not to mention her writing itself), but she didn’t exactly feel comforted when she was with Seema and Satish. Not only had their conversation become something more of a comedy act—something they performed for her rather than a true translation of their feelings—but now that she had her own problems with Mohan to deal with, she felt every one of their “jokes” as small, burning reminders of her own problems at home. And they would engage with her only to a certain extent: Seema was more focused on organizing her lipsticks than listening to Ranjana’s concerns.
As she pulled into her driveway and saw the pale lights on in her living room, Ranjana thought of Harit—someone neutral, someone also caught between social circles, someone equally confused. She had always hoped that there would be some friendship with an American woman that would zap her out of her status as an Indian immigrant and legitimize her connection to America, that she would find a sidekick who truly understood her and introduced her to the complex social structure of this country. But what she hadn’t considered was that another Indian immigrant, one who was stuck between India and America, could play this same role, and perhaps more effectively. This man, this prisoner between worlds, might be the confidant that she had been searching for all this time.