I DON’T REMEMBER much of my first trip to India. I was a spoiled, restless 6-year-old monster with a litany of complaints: ‘‘I keep getting bitten by mosquitoes!’’ ‘‘There’s no shower?’’ ‘‘It’s so hot!’’ Rather than soaking up the culture of my ancestors, I was mad that there weren’t any Toaster Strudels. My classmates in America imagined I was touring the Taj Mahal and riding elephants, when in reality much of the visit was spent driving in cramped vehicles to the homes of distant relatives and old friends of my parents. And because I’ve only been on a handful of occasions, sometimes with six years between trips, my Indian aunts and uncles have never quite known what to make of me (‘‘Still playing with your Transformers, Aziz?’’ ‘‘Uh, no, not really. I just got a driver’s license.’’)
When I arrived this past December at the hectic airport in Trivandrum, a state capital in the south of India, the first thing I noticed was that everyone — the weary travelers, the surly customs officers, even the chipper billboard models — looked like me. As an American ‘‘minority,’’ it felt strange to suddenly be a part of the majority. But, as I stood at the luggage carousel, admiring an array of enviable mustaches, I noticed something stranger: white people. They seemed a little lost, probably like my family must have looked to all the white people in Bennettsville, S.C., the small town where I was raised and where the Indian community consisted of one family — mine.
Perhaps the best illustration of my split cultural identity was in the food I ate as a child. When my mother wasn’t preparing chicken korma or biryani, I was eating Southern staples cooked by Mrs. Beulah, our African-American housekeeper. One day, it was fish curry and rice, the next it was chicken and dumplings.
By Aziz Ansari
Source New York Times
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