Biting through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland

3. Little India

3 Little India T his having-a-cook idea was added to the list of all tantalizing Indian things I could just remember but which were out of my reach by the age of eight: sidewalks full of people who looked like me, billboards full of movie stars with chocolate-brown eyes, ceiling fans, tea served on marble verandas. None of these were part of Kansas life. In the course of a regular day, I rarely even saw other Indians. Once in a while I glimpsed a few at my parents’ parties or on one of our occasional shopping trips to Kansas City two hours away; in the city I was always alert for sightings. I would always take immediate covert action to cross the path of an Indian family if I saw one in a Kansas City store. I wanted to poke my dad in the ribs, tug my mother’s sleeve. Suddenly, there were others. But the recipients of my glee looked uninterested. Perhaps a child darting in their path and glancing at their bone structure (were they Bengali? South Indian?) was humdrum. Really, it was a good thing I didn’t leap upon them and begin quizzing them on where they lived, went to school, and what they thought of Kansas. But the adults did not show interest in each other, did not even say hello—in Pittsburg Mom would have at least said hello. I tried to subdue my reaction, I tried to be as nonchalant as the rest of them, but I would still cross the other family’s path at least five times. After the first startled look, the other mother tried not to make eye contact. Little India 23 All things Indian intrigued me, though, most of all the religion that seemed to exist only there. So I began my campaign. On one long stretch of a Sunday in Kansas when my parents were reading Time magazine and the newspaper in bed, I climbed up between them and began asking if we could go to India. I gave them an eight-year-old’s strongest case: “I want to know my grandparents.” But my unspoken wish to know of a religion that my parents never explained was just as strong. In Kansas, God was everywhere, I learned, but without further instructions he was hard for me to find. My friends in Kansas had a network of adults that seemed to have a precise story about God. I yearned for such a map. When my mother and father arrived in Chicago in 1963, Mom brought her native dress, her lightly accented British English, a way of carrying herself and inclining her head a little to the right when greeting other Indians , a taste for the spices of India, and religious customs instilled as a child but hard to explain to children in Kansas. In India, religious customs were embedded in everyday rituals, in the types of foods eaten, in the way my parents were taught to greet others, in private home meditations and public festivals. Religion shaped my parents’ world but they had no formal teacher. Without the cultural backdrop of India, the facts of their beliefs were hard to pin down. Another reason for my lack of a map was also at the heart of a divide between East and West in the way scriptures were taught. Christian doctrine was well documented and spread throughout the known world via the printing press after Johannes Gutenberg’s first Bible appeared in 1452, with forty-two lines per page. Its tenets were in plain sight. In fact, the visual dimension trumps everything in Western culture: knowledge is based upon and validated by observation. Seeing is believing. In the East, sound may be the noblest sense, as Guy Beck says in Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound. Verbal stories passed from teacher to individual student were and still are the primary means of scripture dissemination . Transmission of sacred power is not to be trusted to the written, a difficulty for a Kansas-raised Indian with nary a priest in sight. There is a strong connection to sound in almost all religions, though. In fact, oral chants among different traditions such as Shintoist, Buddhist, Brahman, Muslim, and Hebrew as well as Western Gregorian reveal a striking 24 Little India similarity, Beck says: a one-note recitation that includes fluctuating pitch. The goal of sacred chanting...