FEBRUARY 11, SUNDAY

WHO AND WHERE?

I begin to wonder where I am, who I am, where and who any of us are. I think of the children in their red uniforms yesterday who heard the speech about who I was and why I was here. They seemed attentive, but I have no idea what they were thinking. In the speech in Gujarati or their tribal dialect, I couldn’t tell which, I was an educational tool, I‘m sure, a way of introducing them to the wider world, one that is beyond their comprehension.

I was in a house like their own tribal house yesterday, only probably a more elegant house with a motorcycle in the yard and everyone with a cell phone. But basically their daily life is no different, with the cows and water buffalo staked out in the bare yard and fed with grass or leaves cut and brought on someone‘s head, the charpoy used as a bed at night and a sitting place outside during the day, the same spicy food and the same daily chores and same joint family. This is the world of both the Rabari family I visited and the children‘s families.

Meet and Niddhi, Shilpa‘s (Hasmukh’s assistant) children grew up in both an urban setting in Mehsana and in the rural setting of Virampur. Meet can speak four languages, the local tribal language, Gujurati, Hindi and English. Niddhi got a degree in computer science, married an IT specialist, managed a Canadian visa and now lives in Canada. Yesterday Meet‘s wife and the family in Mehsana held a puja, a Hindu ceremony, in thanks for Meet‘s wife getting news yesterday that she has received her visa to go to Canada to study nursing. She already has an Indian nursing degree but wants a Canadian one. Meet hopes to get a visa within 6 months to join her in Canada where he wants to enroll in training to drive an 18 wheeler. Their plan isn‘t to return to India permanently, only to return for visits. They are about to enter a new world.

Hasmukh‘s very successful doctor son, Mihir, arrived from San Francisco yesterday with Hetvi his doctor wife and their daughter Prisha. They own a big house in Johnson City which they are keeping, even as Mihir works three weeks a month in Sacramento and one week a month in Johnson City, Tennessee, with telehealth the rest of the time in either direction. Hetvi was the one who most wanted to move to Sacramento where there is a large Indian community and many relatives from Gujarat. Ever since Prisha was born Manda, Mihir‘s mother, has been flying to the US for six month periods, to care for Prisha and to cook Indian meals for the family. Hetvi‘s mother has often done the same. The two families straddle two continents and Meet and Niddhi are about to do the same. Niddhi, whose wedding we attended five years ago, is also here for a visit with her two year old baby and will continue to visit yearly as do Mihir and Hetvi.

On a previous visit I was invited to a housewarming of a rich Patel relative who was retiring from the convenience store business, the kind that AMericans run into and ignore daily as part of the local gas station, as well as he was retiring from the motel business, which is run in many places by Gujaratis. He was unnoticed in the USA, but is going to retire in Ahmedabad very rich and successful, while his Americanized son and daughter, who by then owned hotels and fast food fanchises and are extremely wealthy would continue to live in two worlds.

When MAGA people demonize immigrants to create fear and gather votes for political purposes it is not the Patels that they are thinking about any more than Indian Americans like Nikki Haley or Vice President Kamala Harris or Ro Khanna the minority leader in the House of Representatives. These people fly back and forth, as Mihir and Hetvi do, and are far wealthier and more capable than most MAGA people who look down on immigrants. These people are sophisticated globalists at home in many places.

It is the desperate people escaping from Central American violence and poverty who risk drowning or being shot in their attempt to escape to freedom, that the MAGA people fear.

The people that I am wondering about here are the tribal children who were singing and chanting for visitors yesterday whose homes are like the Rabari family. They live in a completely different world from the one I live in, a world that they might see in films, but have no clue how to get along in and a place who they rarely even think of. Their entire life will be right here, marrying soon after they are able to have children and then joining a joint village family for the rest of their lives. When Jogesh prayed in the Shiva Temple yesterday he was as much a true believer, and as sustained by his belief, as any American missionary Baptist church fundamentalist. He and almost everyone here is completely embedded in their own culture and religion which they spend their lives trying to fit into and be successful in. Other places are simply almost imaginary. And the same is true of MAGA Americans, convinced that their way of life and their religious and patriotic convictions are absolutely fundamental. Here people like me, Billybaba to everyone here, are simply aliens from another planet they will never experience. And for my part I sit on the village charpoy and take photographs, as if I am visiting from another planet, that I can show to people at home to make them wonder.

It is this bubble that most people live in whether they travel or not, the one culture that gives them meaning and purpose and, as far as they can tell, is the only significant place on earth, that I wonder about. Because whatever our bubble, it is only one bubble among thousands and no more fundamental, except to us, than any other bubble. I can sit on the charpoy, but can barely sense what it is to be a tribal person living in Gujarat. And they can look at me as an alien and have very little idea or what it is that is significant in my life, which I spend every day wondering about as I write as if what I discover will somehow be fundamentally important and not just an experience of one sliver of what it is to be human, which must include all these bubbles.