Desi party:home

Yesterday I coincidentally found kau6 online and was too excited. We just started talking and I mentioned to him that I often go to desi parties here.

To which he said that probably desi implied the “negative” aspects of Indians back in India. They became the other. Hmmmm….And the question was whom we called us, Indians like me who had migrated there or those whose parents were of Indian origin but they were born and brought up in America.

Later on I was talking to Mayur. I bug the guy quite a bit but he sometimes actually listens to me and we had a discussion about being desi.

When I first came here and we decided to go to a desi party, I found it ridiculous. Because i did associate the “negative” aspects of being “Indian” with the word. Indian did not sound as bad as desi.

What was desi and who was desi here?
“Conventional”, not “cosmopolitan”, provincial, not urban?
They became synonymous with …………

If your food would “smell” when you were eating Indian food in an office filled with White Americans. The smell (no aroma) implied oil, unhealthy, unhygienic. It was not hospital clean……

A Gujju diamond merchant.
Surname Patel….The Patel brothers as they are called… Patels here have a dubious entrepreneurial fame…. you’ll find them everywhere mostly in Indian grocery and food stores…and who have migrated here in hoardes…..
To those who listened to Punjabi/ bollywood music or someone who wore a sari/ salwaar kameez in the public space and had a strong regional accent.
Or with general things which got associated with uncultured immigrants…. like having dirty nails or unwhite set of teeth….

This politics of image completely dictated how your character would be judged and the same politics compelled you to throw your earlier clothes (like shedding your earlier image) and buy from here, from gap, or old navy (whose clothes are as good as the ones in khokha market, parle) or banana republic.

However this discomfort is not completely satisfied with buying. You have to watch the Nicks game, or know the Yankees, eat with chopsticks in a Thai restaurant, leave a tip of 15% of the bill, say thank you if someone holds the door for you (which is a nice gesture in any case) or be extremely conscious of someone else’s space….say sorry if your bag accidentally brushed someone or the strap of your bag touched someone….

For me......
Somewhere in this I also carried my own notion of desi. To me it represented men who would ogle at you in bombay or conventional men, the young Punjabi business boys who call a woman slut if she claimed her body her own and danced for her pleasure or to be looked at or men who are very stiff/ conscious of their bodies.

I wonder what was desi to the guys??

The Desi space......
Firstly these desi parties become a big meeting ground for long lost outoftouch friends. I bumped in to people I met straight after school i.e. 8 years! They become a space to find your own… look for familiarity…the desi space and particularly bollywood becomes home. You are connected simply by the fact you are here…. you don’t have to explain who you are or where you come from… you think you know someone because you relate say over a bollywood song .... say like ek mein aur ek tu hein or even beyonce’s count on it….

The question still remains.. whom do we call our own?