In The New York Times, Dr. Bharati Mukherjee, perhaps one of the most recognized of the new breed of Indian writers, has told the story of herself and her sister: bound to each other by love and loyalty but torn in opposite directions in their chosen paths. Dr. Mukherjee has assimilated -- her embrace of America and Americans one of joyous reciprocity, while Mira, her sister, despite having lived in this country for over half her life, remains isolated and tentative in her interactions, her recent change of citizenship slicing deeply into her resentful psyche. 

As a result of this deep divide, the sisters meet in person, but never in soul: each questioning the other’s decision; each sanguine of what she believes; each representing, to the other, a concept frightening in its enormity; each afraid to confront the other too fully, to push too far; each holding fast to their adopted half of the globe, East and West. And, yes, perhaps never the twain shall meet. 

I find myself asking, however, is it really that simple? Is love and loyalty for a land and its people subject to the most definitive quantification and guaranteed approval (or disapproval, for that matter)? Is the line drawn that clearly? Does it fall right between my eyebrows, down the bridge of my nose, down my sternum, through my belly button into that deep divide that’s “me?” 

Am I really that black and white? Are there no thready edges, no blurry corners? Are there no shades of gray? 

My story is that of a person who is, in effect, a combination of Mira and Bharati. I came here at the age of fifteen, A tender age. A weird age. An age of little self-awareness and even less self-esteem. An age of wanting to be where I was and not daring to venture into the unknown. An age when I was yearning to make friends all the while trying to hide behind the dusty comfort of my books. An age when I was far from being the master of my choice of breakfast cereal, much less my life! 

So no surprise there. I hated coming here. Not because of the gangly boy I had promised to write to every day. Not because of the soulful, boisterous extended family I was leaving behind. Not even because of my many cohorts in crime back at Loreto Day School. 

No, it was because I simply didn’t want to go anywhere. Who does, at fifteen? 

Nevertheless, I negotiated my way through the American high school and college systems. And, because of my specific interest in politics, spent much of my high school and undergraduate years volunteering in election campaigns, newspapers, and fundraisers. I enthusiastically volunteered for the Dukakis-Bentsen and Clinton-Gore election campaigns. But I never got to vote in either of them. 

Why, you ask. Well, because I've remained an Indian Citizen. 

Why? 

Because, unlike its sister nation, Pakistan, India does not approve of dual citizenship for its NRIs, or Non-Resident Indians. But now the new immigration and welfare laws are forcing Indian citizens who have been US residents for over a decade to choose between their motherland and the United States. 

So what? You may ask. Granted, it sounds whiny. Granted, it sounds ungrateful. You'd think Uncle Sam’s clothed me, fed me, housed me for the past ten years, enough for me to put my right hand over my heart and say “I do.” You’d think most people would jump at the chance to make it official. 

Most people, yes. But nostalgia is an effective paralyser. 

The past few months have been a bittersweet experience for me as I find myself at a crossroads I had long expected, but never wished for. My passion for my country of birth seems to be in direct conflict with my heartfelt appreciation for the country of my choice. I am afraid, for me it's pledge-time. Having fought against it tooth and nail for several years, I have, much like Mira, caved in. Last year, I gave my father a copy of my fingerprints and a sullenly tacit permission to, officially, log my request to pledge allegiance to this home of the brave. 

And, now, I ask myself: Was it so hard? Is it as dramatic as Mira, Bharati, and I are making it out to be? Is it that big a deal? 

That last day of my schooling in India is etched forever in my mind. 

Everybody had left. That is, everybody except durwan-ji (the gatekeeper) and the Mother Superior. She had come out with her usual whispery step, taken a look at me perched on my favorite stunted tree trunk just below the basketball hoop, probably smiled quietly, and gone back in. I'd felt the swish of her habit but hadn't looked up. It was around 4:30 or 5 in the evening. All my friends were probably home by now--either up to no good or dutifully doing their homework. Outside the school gate, the traffic on Lenin Sarani droned on. But, the schoolyard was deathly silent, like my heart. 

Durwan-ji had come inside a couple of times ... "tumhaar ma aashbe, na kaka?" He'd quietly inquired. "Keu na..." Nobody, I'd muttered. I wasn't waiting for anybody to come get me from school. I was just... waiting. 

That last day, it had seemed as if everyone knew my plight: the reluctant exile. So they bravely made the best of it. Except for the lack of suds, the whole day had been like an Irish wake. Complete with balloons and streamers and forced gaiety. 

Or was it really forced? Maybe, just maybe, my teachers were all actually glad to see me leave. I certainly hadn't been shooting for the class valedictorian slot. In fact, with my constant chatter and penchant for practical jokes, I could have safely applied for the much sought-after position of Mother Superior's doorkeeper. 

So come to think of it, of all my teachers, who would most gain from my absence? 

Sister Marygrace of Physics (I could envision her fist stabbing the air the next day - a definite "yes!!")… 

I was horrible in Physics. The pits. The very, very worst student a Physics teacher could ever ask for. I was Isaac Newton’s, Stephen Hawking’s, and Sister Marygrace's worst nightmares come true. 

"Indrani, poor child... she will NEV-V-VER get the hang of physics!" she'd warned my father, a mechanical engineer, during a Parent-Teachers' meeting. Little did she know that my attention during physics lab was trained not on her and the bunsen burners but on the horrendously colored movie theater billboards right outside the huge bay windows of the lab. 

Ah yes, those poor neglected bunsen burners. My woefully short attention span was instead trained on the much more pertinent exploits of debonair Rishi and dimpled Neetu in Khel Khel Mein; on spellbinding Tariq and what's-her-name in Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin; and, the worst possible distraction... on heart-stopping matinee idol Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony. 

Yes, little did they all know. Or, worse, they knew all too well. 

Miss D'Souza of Phys Ed -- "you can't just play cricket you know ... that's not the only goddamned (see? I even made her curse. And inside those pristine Loreto walls, too) game there is!!" 

And poor tortured Mrs. Basu of the Classics of Bengali Literature... my favorite class. 

She loved me, I knew. But, at times, even she had had enough of me -- "Indrani-i-i-i-i-i ... phajlamo-r akta sheema thaka uchit ... eta ki peyechho ... natyoshala!?!" All because I giggled incessantly in her class. I've no idea why. As penance, she sent me to Mother Superior's office to rest my dusty knees more often than I care to remember. 

And, last but not the least, the pwim and very pwoper Mrs. Botobyal of Comparative European Literature... 

To us starved-for-fun-Loreto ninth graders, Mrs. Botobyal was a scream. Shrilly invoking Dante's Divine Wrath on fifty-four conspiring heads while catapulting out of a chair graced by three very juicily real, NOT rubber, cockroaches in a memorable ninth graders' April Fool's Day prank. 

A prank by no means unappreciated in Mother Superior's office in the long, and dusty, hours to come. Back then, my knees knew no shame. Ah, youth. 

(Yes...yes...YES... BANISH the girl!!!) 

That was, it seems, eons ago. 

Time-transported to Teaneck High School in Teaneck, New Jersey, where, a little more than a year later, I made some incredibly ghastly gaffes. 

Right on the first day of my schooling in America, tenth grade, fresh-faced little-ole me stood up as my Homeroom teacher entered and wished him a cheery, convent girls-school-flavored "good morning SIR!" 

The rest of the class was politely silent. Or, rather, speechless. Then, as if that first little "rebellious" act hadn't sated my soul, I insisted on getting up every time I answered a question. And, yes, I answered a lot of questions. 

Tirelessly. 

Tigers? Sure, I've had pet tigers. But they grew up and went back to the jungle. (Who said I couldn’t have some fun while on the hot seat?) 

The red dot? Sure, you can get tattoos of those, too. 

English? Yeah, I spoke some. But American! Ah, now there's a language! 

The teachers, of course, liked me. My fellow students, of course, wanted me drawn and quartered -- the very opposite of my story at Loreto Convent on Lenin Sarani. 

Was I happy? No-o-o. 

Was I miserable? No. 

Was I lethargic? A bit. 
Nostalgic? Very. 

Was I resigned? Kinda... 

Over the next few months, my brother and I had to sink or swim. 

We made a silent pact with each other. We would look out for each other. We would warn each other of oncoming traffic. And we would blend. Yes, we would become, on the outside, as American as our new favorite dessert -- the apple pie. To be honest, it was easier than we'd thought it would be. 

We watched TV voraciously (NOT a difficult thing, ya know!); heard our accents undergo an irreversible change over a matter of a few months; went to the Junior and Senior Proms; ate beef for the first time in our lives at the school cafeteria -- those juicy little "mystery meat" burgers; worked summers in Dial America, the local PathMark, Prentice Hall Press, the school paper and the yearbook… 

Went to New York City every weekend -- to the Greenwich Village Tower Records, to the Lexington Avenue Curry in a Hurry, to nearby Naghma House for copies of The Cricketer, to Coney Island, to Great Adventure; spent hours exasperating our father on endless parallel parking practice sessions, and finally took the drivers license test with the usual, impassive examiner intent on psyching out our innermost "adolescent" thoughts while muttering multiple "ahas!" into the dashboard. He passed me, albeit, grudgingly..."young lady, I know you just love to drive ... but THERE ARE RULES !!!" 

We started college ... Rutgers ... American University... 

Life was good. Life was actually fun. 

Then, during the summer of my sophomore year, we went HOME. 

We’d dreamt about this trip home for five years. 

Eighteen hours in a screaming jet and we were home. Well, actually, not really home. We were in Bombay. Though I was born in Calcutta, Bombay and Poona are the cities where I spent my first few years. 

I love Poona -- a sleepily quaint, historical town in the western state of Maharashtra. Nearby Bombay, for all its glamour, does not make my heart go a-flutter. Yet, there I was. Bombay: the city of dreams, where glittering Bollywood and festering Dharia -- the biggest slum in Asia -- sleep and wake in an obscenely tangled embrace. 

So there we were. I was twenty. My brother -- seventeen. My mother, forever being mistaken for my older sister, had accompanied us. My mother's dogged insistence on being served Indian food on an airplane yielded a hideously uncoordinated Air India itinerary that unapologetically dumped us in Bombay at 11:30pm with no connecting flight to Calcutta in immediate sight. Carted out of Bombay's Santa Cruz Airport we -- an exhausted, straggling bunch of Bengalis -- were unceremoniously piled onto a minibus that would be, hopefully sometime that week, on its way to a nearby hotel. My brother was deep into a heavy, exhausted sleep; my mother was a bit peeved but also slumberous. 

The other passengers, I surmised, hadn't the stamina to stage the requisite comeback when the minutes, then the hours, started rolling by. 

I had finally dozed off when -- hearing a noise nearby -- I jerked awake. All around me, people slept fitfully. The night was quiet. But I could feel my heart leaping against my ribs. Trying to calm down, I focused on my watch. It was probably way past 2:30 a.m. and the bus had not moved. My brother's head felt heavy on my left shoulder. On my lap was the lead weight of my duffel bag. Goodness! What HAD I packed? 

My head felt sluggish with the hint of a sonorous headache. My eyes itched and watered. And, as the air inside the bus sat upon me, a dank and musty smell began to invade my cringing olfactory nerves. 

Then a sound -- subdued but brittle -- forced my head to the right. In the choppy darkness of the Bombay night my eyes strained to pick out the khatia… a spotted Indian Collie curled up under it… a man in a fetal curl on top of it. Umm, something else… a laundry line? No… can't be… but the ghostly strip of a white dhoti blew, in a sudden gust of wind, over the man's blurred contours. And the breeze brought, with a sweet and pungent intensity, the tinny sound of a transistor radio and the undulating melody of ancient, latent longings… 

"dil dhuNdta haiN… phir wohi… phursat ke ra-a-a-t din…" 

The keening melody of that old favorite… that half-forgotten lament of a song cut through my consciousness, jerking me awake. And for the first time in my twenty-year-old existence, I knew what those words had been written to mean. 

They had been written for me. 

And, at that moment, I knew I had come home. 

But now: too many moons, too many struggles, and too many tax returns (but no voting booths -- here OR there) later, I find myself resolute, but not alone, in the sheer vulnerability of my situation. 

In the backdrop of the current political atmosphere, my strident and insistent “so-what-if-I-am-not-a-citizen?” doesn't seem to wash against my father's continuous warnings of imminent socio-political second-class status for US non-citizen residents. He finds my feelings about the whole situation superfluous, self indulgent, impractical. He thinks I should think of being a citizen of the world, not just a nation. He thinks I’m being provincial. He has a point -- I catch myself thinking. Maybe… just maybe he has a point. 

Dr. Mukherjee says that her sister, Mira, has resolved to 'change back' when the right time comes. And, well, why not? We always were a nation of chameleons. She can do whatever she thinks is best for her. 

I find myself wondering, however: Is 'changing back' the only answer there is? Does pledging allegiance to one country automatically banish the other from the heart? If not, should it make much of a difference? Why should it be THIS big a deal? 

If, however, Judgment Day does arrive and I find myself placing my hand on my heart... I will be true to myself. I will pledge my allegiance to where my heart belongs.

 

Indrani DasGupta grew up in Kolkata, Poona, Durgapur, Teaneck, Ewing, and Washington, DC and ekes out a living as a freelance writer, translator and editor. Rarely seen without mouse in hand, she is working on her current obsession -- a novel based loosely on the emotional undercurrents of this very essay. She can be reached at indranee@yahoo.com.