Indian imitations

My husband Arun and I visit India on an average of, oh, maybe eight or nine years. We live in California and our parents left India a long time ago. My family is in Sydney, and his family lives ten minutes from our home, so we have never faced the usual reason to visit India – visiting the family. We have always thought of India the way you think of an old teddy bear –it’s cute and full of childhood memories, but just doesn’t attract us the way it once did.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was in college, I was obsessed with India and all things Indian. For me and many of my friends, travelling through India was a rite of passage. My husband who grew up in

… and strongly suggested that we wait until he was a few years older. We didn’t

Our son was 18 months old when we booked our flights. Arun was keen on visiting a few cities in the north, where he could hear people speaking in Hindi on a daily basis, something he finds very exciting since he doesn’t speak a word of Hindi himself. I have never lived in north India, the little time I have ever spent in didn’t make a fuss when restaurants didn’t have high chairs for babies. We didn’t take the camera out on every single occasion. We tried very hard not to give money to every single beggar we saw, and that was pretty hard. We ate local food. We spoke in the local language, wherever possible. We even rode a motorcycle in Goa like a typical Indian family with my husband in the front, and me in the back holding the baby. Oh, we had a wonderful time. really came across as foreigners. We had decided to continue the tradition of Arun’s family by getting our son’s first haircutactually, it was a head shave - at the holiest Hindu temple in the world. We joined a big line of parents and their babies outside the barbers’ stall next to the temple. We watched the baby before us get her head shaved. We panicked. This barber was using a razor, an unsterilized, blunt-looking instrument and the baby was crying as her parents kept trying to get her to stay calm. The barber was done in a few minutes, but the tiny drop of blood on the baby’s head made me lose my nerve. I refused to have my son go through the ceremony. Arun supported me. The barbers laughed and

California, had his share of visits to India –but neither one of us had ever been there on our own. When we married six years ago, a trip to India was on the cards but years went by and it never happened. There were too many other countries that we wanted to visit, and the India trip remained on hold.

Until we became parents.

I don’t know exactly why, but when our son was born, we both suddenly realized that we wanted to take this baby to India. We wanted to expose him to the country we had always taken for granted, and we wanted to do it without our parents. It was another rite of passage – a trip of the second generation Indians, and one which the first generation saw as a bad idea. Our parents, uncles and aunts told us stories about babies getting sick in India, about the heat, the diarrhea, the kidnappings

India has been in Bombay only. Still, the north Indian cities were my territory as far as negotiations and bargaining with shopkeepers was concerned. I was keen on visiting Bangalore, Goa and the famous Tirupathi temple in south India. Since I don’t speak a word of Tamil, this was to be his territory. We booked our hotels, our rental cars, packed a few emergency medications and lots of diapers.

And, when we reached India, we tried. We really did try to pass as local tourists as much as possible. We didn’t make a fuss when our rental car didn’t come with a child’s car seat. We

But we didn’t succeed

From our very first day in India, we realized how lost we really were, and the strange sensation of being tourists in the land of our ancestors overwhelmed us.

in fooling anyone. From our very first day in India, we realized how lost we really were, and the strange sensation of being tourists in the land of our ancestors overwhelmed us. We fell for all the tourist traps. We overpaid for everything. We all got stomach aches. We dressed in the wrong attire for everything. My husband’s Tamil, as it turned out, was not as good as I was led to believe. My Hindi on the other hand is so good, nobody talks like that in India anymore.

But it was at the Tirupathi temple situated on top of a mountain in south India that we before we could try explaining, a razor ran over my son’s head and tufts of hair fell on the ground. It took no time at all to finish the job and my son smiled and remained still throughout the procedure.

Arun and I were stunned, the barbers kept laughing.

On a whim, Arun got his head shaved as well. I could hardly recognize my son with all his curls gone, and my son wouldn’t recognize my husband at all. He would cry if Arun came near him, and didn’t accept Arun’s affections again until we were back on the plane to Los Angeles.

When we returned, a friend looked at our trip photos and told us that we looked like local Indians.

We beamed at each other. At least we’d fooled one person.