Things We Lost in the Atlantic Annika Karody

THINGS WE

L O S IN THE ATLANTIC

T

WORDS Annika Karody ILLUSTRATION Jordi Ng

A series of pencilled tally-marks stretches down the wall next to the door frame of my father’s childhood home. My eight-year-old mind, (fascinated, for whatever reason, by anything remotely secretarial), runs wild with possibility. Maybe they’re coded messages left by previous tenants, or some kind of tabulating method devised by a neighborhood thievery ring. My mom takes note of me staring at them, tracing my finger over the graphite and plaster. “Those’re just the mosquito exterminator’s way of noting that he’s been here every year,” she says. On a particularly uneventful day, I count them all the way back to 1963, the year my family moved into that little house in Hyderabad, a bustling metropolis in what was then the state of Andhra Pradesh, south India. It’s my proof that they had been there, too.

Meanwhile we’ve been here. And we’ve stayed here, two oceans and two and a half continents away. Our space is sterile suburbia, where the Terminix guy would get an earful for leaving so much as a scratch on the house’s fresh coat of paint. We worship in an old bank building refashioned, to a degree, as a temple. For our parents, that’s enough to recall the kind of reverence and community they felt worshipping in the puja-room at home and celebrating with friends and neighbors in the streets. For those of us who’ve grown up here, it is a bit more difficult to drum up that cultural substance. We are left, instead, with a sum of disjointed parts: a nondescript, whitewashed building and brass deities.

The second generation is, too, a sum of our parts: internalities that don’t always align with our external world. This rift is jarring, especially for those of us raised with the American “melting pot” ideal. Melting into the pot isn’t the smooth change of state that image may suggest. It is stepwise and generational, it is loss and disconnect, and at some point in the majority of American family trees it happened. Whether you came here as a newborn swaddled in your mother’s arms, or you can trace relatives back to colonial times, all immigrants struck an implicit contract of assimilation when they left familiar shores. The caveat is that for many Americans, this assimilation is, as of yet, incomplete. America is a young nation. The majority of its inhabitants are “newcomers” relative to their own familial timelines, and the result is a prevalent sense of being American by way of somewhere else. When it comes to cultural identity, many of us still reach back across oceans and continents, through decades and centuries, to a past that better rounds out our concepts of personal heritage. The degrees to which people adhere to these pasts fall on a spectrum from something as minimal as passing down an old family recipe to something as consequential as preserving an entire cultural value system. Those of us who fall close to the latter extreme exist with one foot in an entirely separate geographical, cultural and temporal space, and another in the American present.

From my second-generation perspective, this is overtly destabilizing. I am acutely aware that I span a cultural gap. I find myself moderating a dialogue between two different cultures and sets of expectations: those that correspond to the principally Indian culture I was raised in, and those that correspond to the American culture I was socialized in. The destabilizing aspect of my own second-generation experience is that I don’t have the culture that I’ve learned at home to corroborate the one that I’ve grown up in. The result was an adolescence spent attempting to fill in the gaps between the two. I have never felt able to stake claim to a completely Indian identity, but contrary to what I believed growing up, I no longer feel able to claim a fully American self either. As a country whose inhabitants mostly descended from immigrants, many of us have this loss in common. It is the reason we hyphenate our identities and make pilgrimage to Ellis Island and pay good money to spit into a test tube and send it off to have our DNA analyzed. We are bridging some kind of a mental gap between here and there, between present and past.

A group of “aunties,” my mom included, know the religious songs for the festival we are celebrating by heart. The festival originated from where they grew up, and these bhajans are in their native language. Twenty years of Marathi falling on my ears has made me a master at imitation. I let the

“The destabilizing aspect of my own secondgeneration experience is that I don’t have the culture that I’ve learned at home to corroborate the one that

I’ve grown up in. The result was an adolescence spent attempting to fill in the gaps between the two.”

syllables lilt and roll off my tongue, all the while clueless to their meaning, unable to even differentiate among the sounds and parse out individual words. We walk around the altar and kneel in front of it as we’ve always done, and light the wick in the oil lamp for aarthi. When discussing religion with a friend a few weeks later, I can’t explain why we do it. The external performance remains, but its meaning has all but disappeared.

I’m in my best: a coriander-green kurti with black and gold accents, costume jewelry, and an intricately-designed bindi. I am reminded of my grandmother worshipping every morning at home, clad in a simple sari, dabbing an understated bindi of powdered vermillion and slaked lime into her hairline. She continues her day in that garb. I change into sweatpants as soon as I get home and rub the the powder off my forehead before it stains my skin.

Such are the things we lost in the Atlantic: a pinch of tempered mustard seeds, a spoonful of turmeric and, eventually, the traction of an entire cultural footing.

A year and a half ago, in the middle of an identity crisis all my own, I took it upon myself to regain this footing. I found it in my grandfather or, rather, I found it in his music.

He was everything my eighteen-year-old self wanted to be: artistically accomplished, well-respected, with a thriving family to boot. Since childhood I’ve been told that we are similar: both stubborn, crabby as hell and musically-inclined. I wouldn’t know about those first two traits empirically; we hardly ever spoke. It wasn’t a language barrier that kept us apart, just that a grade-school kid from the suburbs of LA doesn’t know what to say to an eighty-sixyear-old composer and playwright from the suburbs of Hyderabad who dedicated his life to a form of theater rooted in Hindu mythology.

In fact, I didn’t need to say anything at all. I remember sitting behind a harmonium in the living room at age five, singing songs I didn’t know the meaning of to family members I hardly knew. Among them was my grandfather. I had just begun training to sing in the Hindustani (Indian) style and had entirely three songs in my repertoire. I chose to sing a bhajan: a religious song passed down through the ages, the kind of ubiquitous cultural relic that binds generations. My little five-year-old lungs could barely compete with the capacious bellows of the harmonium, but once my family caught on to the lyrics I was singing, they joined in, buoying my song up over the instrument for all to hear.

My grandfather passed seven years ago and left a rich body of theatrical work behind: some regular plays, others musicals, all of them crafted in the Karnatak artistic tradition: a style of music and theater specific to the South Indian region where my father’s side of the family is from. In the midst of a desperate search for my roots, I found them. They were in my dad’s car -- two identical CDs with devanagari script (unintelligible to me), and an unmistakable portrait of my grandfather on the label. I took a copy and never gave it back.

It’s been with me ever since. It’s travelled the world digitized on my laptop. It’s traversed every Southern California freeway in the CD player of my car. It’s survived trend after fad after fleeting interest as a mainstay of my musical collection. Amid all kinds of change—temporal, spatial, cultural—it has remained intact; a piece of tradition and myth as told by my grandfather for me to hold onto. In the midst of my cultural crises, it has held up. The ragas (scales) feel familiar, and the undulating improvisation of the musicians riffing on them feel strangely concrete. It isn’t a thin “performance” of culture; it’s a piece of my heritage that resonates with me and that I fully understand. It is neatly packaged and perhaps incomplete, but it has sustained me nonetheless. And for now, it will do.