Is ‘desi’ a four letter word?

The really funny bit about the Time magazine article written by the much-maligned Joe Stein is that we all have a secret Joe Stein lurking inside us. The first generation immigrants may have wanted the comfort of a shared language, clothes and food, but not anymore! None of us, when we come away from India, want to be associated

with the desis at all. Oh no — we are far too urbane for that. No one wants to do the desi stuff and, believe me, we are downright snooty about it. Look at that sequin studded sari, we squirm. And omigod that peculiar accent! But it’s alright so long as we (the non-desi desis) are being critical about ourselves; when an “outsider” points out the despair of desi-fication we go ballistic. Yet, we love being parochial about our own community because under our own skins we are all coconuts, to borrow a popular racist term. That is, we are brown outside and white inside. Wouldn’t it have been lovely if a coconut were white outside and inside as well? Oh! well…
So on behalf of the non-desi desis in the UK, I would like to issue a health and safety warning for all the summer migrants who appear in London when the mercury rises in India and imagine we are thrilled to see them. Please remember that we, the London non-desi desis, groan collectively when June arrives. But why do they have to come here? we grumble, Delhi and Mumbai have all the shops now. When malls in Delhi sprung up with Marks & Spencer and Armani, the non-desi desi community in the UK felt a huge sense of relief. Perhaps now, we thought, those Indian hordes won’t descend on London. But alas, they did. And when they do, we have to cut a wide swathe around Hyde Park, Oxford Street and St. James Court, the desi dens. Most of us are forced to leave London altogether for the summer months. Others are reduced to mumbling excuses about “emergency health operations” and “excruciating work loads” so that we do not bump into each other for breakfast, lunch and dinner. After all, why do we live in London, if it is not to enable us to put thousands of miles between us?
Fortunately, we may be soon be rescued by sympathetic friends in India who are equally worried about desis hanging out with each other all the time. I have been authoritatively told that experienced seasonal migratory experts like my friend Suhel Seth are setting up Joe Stein consultancies in India on how to avoid going desi in London. Lectures are being delivered on stepping out of the comfort zone and actually trying out completely non-desi attractions in London. That’s going to be the best thing since Thornton’s chocolate! But I would urge him, on behalf of all my NRI friends, to dissuade all Indians from coming to London altogether… how about encouraging them to wander around Kazakhistan or Turkmenistan… those countries probably need desi-fication. Like Joe Stein, I agree that the character of London has been changed beyond recognition by the outrageous number of Indians who think London is their second home. Even if they bring a spike in high street sales, let us agree that the time has come for all desis to explore new destinations (Alaska? Timbuktu?) or just stay at home and eat their paranthas and pickle in peace.
My sympathies, therefore, are with Joe Stein who spoke of his own wonderfully manic childhood in New Jersey which has now been wrecked with the arrival by what he not-so-fondly refers to as the dotheads. No more kleptomania, shop lifting or watching R-rated films — i.e., the end of the all-American lifestyle and the influx of us pure-ghee darkies with gold chains and open shirts and gelled hair. What could be worse? How come he did not notice the nylon saris tied six inches above the ankle and the long shapeless sweaters? How come when Jhumpa Lahiri writes breathless tomes about the Bengali diaspora stereotype (academic, bespectacled, eats loochis and lives on Harvard square etc...) she gets the Pulitzer Prize, but when someone phoren notices our non-intellectual idiosyncrasies we pulverise them?
My own experience of New Jersey was very Steinlike, I am afraid. I had gone to leave my daughter at Princeton, and we decided to stroll around the neighbourhood park. It was a peaceful, sunny day and we were admiring the thick dense trees and lovely lakes — when all hell broke loose. Suddenly sirens were screaming and rangers on motorcycles arrived. They quickly surrounded a bunch of startled Gujaratis, caught in mid-bhajan just ahead of us. It made an astonishing sight. This lot, complete with gold chains and gelled hair and nylon saris, had decided to bathe a sculpture of Ganesh in milk and then dunk it in the park pond. This was being done with the same normality as they would back home, invoke the gods and chuck plaster of paris moortis into an already polluted Ganga. Now — I am not sure whether this is a cultural clash or that the dotheads had forgotten they were in a different country — will they ever, with their plastic chappals and Bollywood dance, ever understand that public spaces are not theirs to misuse, and that it may be time to try to integrate into the host country?
Every where in the world, even in Southall, or East End, it is inexplicable why Asians chose to live like they are still in Bhindi Bazaar. Perhaps if someone like Stein holds a mirror to us, we should at least acknowledge that we are like that only... and Suhel, we really have too many Indians in the UK, please keep your friends outta here.

MEANWHILE, A word in defence of desi-fication! I went for a BBC Asia network studio interview with the evergreen and wonderfully erudite Dev Anand. It was a totally sentimental morning with grown men in the audience shedding tears at the sight of their childhood hero. Many of them had dreamt of meeting him for decades — one even confessed that when Dev Saheb lost a tooth in his youthful hero days, he too had his tooth pulled out, in empathy.
We were given an exclusive glimpse of Chargesheet, Dev Saheb’s new film. It has all the oomph and vitality we associate with Dev Saheb — yet another example of his unique ability to combine screenplay writing, acting, directing, producing… and make it look like a cakewalk. Now if all desis coming to the UK were like him, debonair, excellent raconteurs and truly sophisticated — none of us would ever mind. And yet, he was once a simple boy from Gurdaspur who dreamt big. Navketan is now 60 years old, but Dev Saheb is as young as ever!  

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com [2]