Otis Redding on a Dreary Day

If the purpose of writing is to be honest, then I will start with a confession: I am blessed, as I was once told, with the gift of tears.

I am embarrassed to admit this. I have tried for the last five years to cultivate myself in the image of the masculine tropes which defined my formative years. From my White peers, I discovered how to cover up my anxieties with a detached coolness. From my Black peers, I learned humor can go a long way to mask my biggest fears – laugh to keep from crying so to speak. From my Sikh friends, who I hold in the highest esteem, I found that pain can be washed away with one phrase: tension nai lehna. A beautiful phrase that roughly translates to, “don’t worry.” A quick fix!

Above all, I was taught a lot through the silent gestures of my father. A true hero in my life, I saw that perhaps my troubles were irrelevant compared to his; after all, he is a man who has been through the proverbial ringer – to be an impoverished immigrant in the US is no tall task. To be an impoverished immigrant with a turban has proven to be even more difficult in recent years. Yet still, for a man who held an off-suit 2-7 hand, he only displayed the quiet confidence that comes from holding Pocket Aces. So what if I had troubles related to my romantic life (also, quickly, if writing is about being honest, I have now absolutely shown my own cards. I come from a conversative Indian household; as far as my parents are concerned, I will not have a relationship status other than “betrothed.” OK, back to our narrative!)? So what if I cannot get an apartment in the best neighborhood? So what if – enough, enough, you get the picture. Only one question matters...who am I to complain?

And so I write, a few days before what should be one of the biggest days of my life. Here I am, in London, starting a job, a real, serious job. I, Hashwinder Singh, son of Ranvir Singh and Aarti Roy, am the first in a long line of Bengali urban slum dwellers and Punjabi rural farmers who get to sit in Victoria and work for a reputable company. And I, yes I, feel the pride sweltering around me from my family and friends. Oh, achaa, Hashwinder. You’ve become so grown now! Yes bhai sahib, I can answer in the affirmative!

Yet here I am, sweating profusely from the eyes. I am teetering on a tight-rope, oscillating between fear and joy, travelling between London and Oxford, jumping between quitting and continuing. Calls come in from the suburbs of LA and the backwaters of Charleston. I hear the voices of Chicago permeate through my phone while a drawl from Alabama cuts through my headphones. Despite my acquaintances from London to Calcutta, from Seattle to DC, nothing seems to assuage the feeling of being alone in the big city. Is this normal? Am I a coward? Am I overreacting? Potentially. Yet I was also once told in a class that in difficult moments, we should draw upon the strength of those who we come from. Maybe for the first time, I will take that suggestion.

II

In many respects, it was impossible to avoid that “gift of tears.” After all, I grew up in a very theatrical household. My father was largely absent from my memories of childhood because of his work, so that left my mother and I to form a very special, though challenging, relationship.

She was largely uninterested, and perhaps incapable of understanding, the world of the material. This was because she was a woman who had little conception of it in her earliest days. Aarti, my mother, grew up in what was ostensibly a tin-hut in Calcutta; the water retrieved for the household sprung from a communal well; her father simply wore a primitive dhoti (and as a member of the Indian Communist Party, was even willing to give that up!). But these stories only evoke a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her face. It mattered little that her house was the size of my dorm room – the characters who comprised that house made her feel more valued and loved than any queen could have. It mattered less that they ate the same meal – it was cooked with such love that it made her feel as if she was dining with Jawaharlal Nehru. And it meant absolutely nothing that everything was shared among each other – how I would trade my privileges now to share that feeling of togetherness that she felt. Only when she entertains her Proustian reveries does my mother feel pure bliss.

Love, however, changes the course of our lives in odd and permanent ways. For our Bengali brishti, she learned that lesson fairly quickly. At the age of 20 (the same age in which I deemed a B- on an International Law paper to be the end of my life as I knew it), Aarti came across a handsome, middle-class, broad-shouldered man; he was an athlete, an actor, and especially notable, drove a motorcycle – the coolest cat of Calcutta creeped into her life, and stole her heart.

And then the two lived happily ever after, defying class, sectarian, and regional clashes.

Again, I have a flair for the theatrical; such a smooth ending would be impossible to write. No, Aarti could only be accepted by her wealthier in-laws under one premise: she became their ideal version of a wife. Uprooted from an environment that probably produced the script for a Satyajit Ray film or two, my mother had to take on the role of a completely different woman. She changed her name to Amandeep Kaur (to signify that she was now a Punjabi Sikh). She stopped dancing and learned to make a good daal. Red was no longer in vogue; her saris were yellow, pink, and orange. A foreigner in her own home.

To compound things, Aarti-Amandeep stood steadfast by her husband’s decision to migrate from India to the US. Here stood a woman who could not speak English, let alone read or write it, but she supported the decision whole-heartedly. In 1991, while India became liberalized as a result of its economic crash and the US dropped bombs on Baghdad to “liberate” Kuwait, my mother experienced similar challenges internally. A forced change as a result of circumstances, a new world order for a better future.

III

This was the mother I inherited. My most vivid memories of her start when I was aged 10. Both of my sisters had left our family apartment so that they could go to college. My father meanwhile was trying to subsume himself under the label of “hardworking American.” So the two of us remained, separated only for 8 hours of the day, her working at the local Goodwill while I attended school. And at the age of 10, uncomfortable with leaving me at the house alone at night, she took me to her night time job where she worked at a retirement home. Some days I slept on a couch, other days in the bed of open rooms in the retirement home (upon reflection, those rooms were likely open because someone had recently passed away in them – probably the reason for my morbid sense of humor).

Taking a cue from my mother, I cannot help but smile at those moments. Sitting in my Oxford dorm room, I would do anything to relive my childhood, even though I spent those years with a persistent sense of shamefulness. I laugh at recalling how she would, at the risk of being reprimanded by her boss, steal ice cream meant for the old folks and give it to me. Remembering that I was a fan of WWE, she also used to let me sneak into available rooms so that I could jump onto the bed and act like I was Eddie Guerrero doing a frog splash. And knowing that I wasn’t allowed to spend the night there, she would wake me up at 6am and we would both sneak off, slick as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, into my father’s car when he picked us up in the morning.

To relive these moments also brings me to another recognition that has been 13 years too late. I was the only person my mother could talk to. I rarely understood what she was saying to me; she spoke in riddles and religious hymns. But I guess I felt the pain heavily. She was often in tears, reminiscing about a life prior or about how difficult it had been in the early years in the US. One story always stuck with me that I felt encapsulated how we would both navigate the world moving forward.

It goes something like this: Her first job in the US was at a retirement home called Franklin House. My mother knew little English, even six years into the American chapter of her story, but we were destitute as a family, and someone needed to pick up the slack. I never asked why retirement homes. Perhaps it was the only job available to an undocumented woman. Perhaps she connected with its symbolic value – here sat a collection of spirits neglected by their family, shown love only when expedient, isolated from community. Nonetheless, she entered that job, and spoke to no one. She kept her mouth shut on the first day, in awe of the size of the printer and the shrieking nature of the telephone. A few hours progressed and things remained calm. Yet, out of nowhere, piercing through the silence of the midnight shift and the burgeoning confidence of my mother, a fire alarm rang. WOOP-WOOP-WOOP. Aarti only knew one response, perhaps the only human response in that situation. After hesitating for a few seconds, she sprung and clutched onto the leg of her co-worker, crying, and yelling through the tears, please don’t leave me. The fire alarm was a false one. No fire emerged, no danger present.

The only thing that carried on from that night was simply that phrase: please don’t leave me. Embedded in that phrase was the history of philosophy. Amidst the chaos of the world, enmeshed within the loneliness of her thoughts, the only reasonable course of action was to make one's presence known. I’m here too, I matter, don’t forget about me.

IV

This was the mother I failed to understand. The pressures of pre-pubescent adolescence (which extended far too long in my case) drew me further away from my mother. There was nothing “cool” about picking up your mother from work...so I began to argue. Why should I help my mother clean our apartment, even when she worked three jobs, when I could do something more valuable like watching terrible high school sporting events? And if my mother even thought about articulating her dreams of me getting married, a torrential downpour of anger spewed from my mouth. For all the sacrifices my mother made for me, I did little in return.

Per most moments in one’s life, I find Toni Morrison apropos. Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

To constantly be a foreigner, to be constantly misunderstood. This must be true heartache. That’s when her tears began to flow. If I could not hear her pain, I would have to see it. Each drop represented something different – missed opportunities, the inability to see her own mother on her deathbed, lost hopes for socioeconomic mobility, fears about whether her golden son would amount to anything. Her skin, meanwhile, darkened, with all those sleepless evenings making her one with the nighttime. And her bones became limp, disintegrating under the weight of the constant uncertainty of her existence.

Yet she still persisted. She would wipe away the tears, smile at me, tell me to kiss her cheek, and say that awkward phrase Lubba-Dubba, which amounted to “I love you.” And when I left for college, she would wake up at 5am PST (8am EST for me), to make sure that the first message I read each day was from her. It read (oftentimes misspelt): “Good Morning.” While I was studying, and arguing about, buzzwords like “post-colonial,” “institutional oppression,” “reinscription of hegemony” and the like, my greatest case study was trying to communicate with me everyday. It was proof I never knew what I was talking about, never transitioning from that culture of theatrics.

This is a strength I cannot understand. My mother never quit on us as a family, and she never quit on herself. She was taken advantage of by her coworkers for being an immigrant but she never stopped working. She fought with her husband routinely, but despite working three jobs, always made sure he had a tiffin full of food for work. She slept four-five hours a day, and yet still, was consistently lauded as the hardest worker at every job she worked at.

Unfortunately, those tears flowed daily; the Puget Sound owes debt to her waterworks. However, in a weird way, those tears watered the seeds that became my maturation into adulthood, a process I have only begun in the past few months. Tears for my mother were nothing to be ashamed of. They were a way to cleanse her soul, to gain courage, to connect her with her God. Only through this process could she fight the world. And she conquered. From working at three retirement homes at a time, to owning one, if my mother taught me anything, it was this: to be your best, you must give your all, which invariably means you cannot hold in the tears.

V

It's a lesson I should really internalize at this moment. All around me is the beautiful, big city of London. And at this moment, I am sitting in the apartment of friends who have treated me with nothing but love and respect. But perhaps this is the ultimate paradox of the city: despite being surrounded by faces all the time, familiar or unfamiliar, one finds it easy to feel isolated. And I say this while my friend tells me how he’s going to teach me about meditation if we lived together; while my best friend, making his own way in a new city, spends 3 hours on the phone with me once a week reminiscing about the past; while the friends and confidants in my life, despite my selfishness, my dumping of anxieties, my lack of communication out of fear of sharing those tears, continue to invest in me, sometimes with negative returns. All that I can muster is this: please don’t leave me. It is clear that I am scared of the chaos of this world. I am scared to enter a new part of my life. I often feel as if I do not deserve these luxuries: my friends, my apartment, my job, all while my mother sacrificed everything. So I respond in the only way I know how – to reject it.

But the gift of tears has begun to kick in. Clean the slate, Hashwinder, connect with the courage of your mother. And the clearest thought to date has come into me. My mother, in spite of the challenges, fears and stress, never failed to pour into the cups of those she loved, to serve those she cared about. Pain in my heart, Otis Redding sings into my headphones on a dreary day, someone stop this pain in my heart. I’ve heard this song plenty of times but never felt connected to its emptiness before. How had others responded to the gauntlet thrown down by this singer?

I must tell Ronak and Sreejith, who comprise my daily social activities, that despite meeting them far too late in the year, they have become like the family I have not seen in over a year. I must tell Donnie, my first friend in life, that I apologize for never taking the time out of my day to call him. I must tell my sister that in my moments of feeling alone, she’s always reminded me that family remains a constant. To a certain old head who roams the hallways of Georgetown, I must say that as long as you are still kicking around on the pavement in your beat up Jordans, I’ll be just fine.

And to a certain mother, I must say that the gift of tears was the best present a son could ask for. Those tears she shed have taught me what love and graciousness, service and sacrifice look like. These past few days have reminded me what I must set out to do. She once cried in my arms when I was in college, and she said, “When you get older, write about me. Write about all the struggles I went through.” To be frank, the writing part is quite easy.

The hard part is to live with the same principles that catalyzed those tears onto my shoulder.