the whistle song, pizza, the namesake

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. -Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Today was a very relaxed day. I did not sleep well last night, but laid in bed for a couple of hours this morning despite that fact, and then had brunch with the other expats at the hotel across the street. I could have walked across the street, but the driver insisted on picking me up; there is no crosswalk (here or anywhere else in Hyderabad, I believe), the traffic moves differently here, and I would have had to jump over a concrete barrier in the middle of the road, so I didn't argue too strongly over the silliness of getting a ride across the street. Brunch was delicious; they serve a lot of western food, so I had a chocolate chip croissant, a berbecued chicken pizza that was surprisingly good, watermelon, and a mocha. While it can never replace dim sum in my heart of hearts, this brunch is not a bad Sunday tradition. Then, I got a manicure and a pedicure at my hotel, then spent the whole day starting and finishing Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her first book, a collection of short stories called The Interpreter of Maladies, which I also brought with me but have not yet read. If her prose style is similar in her stories, it's easy to see why she won the Pulitzer; her writing is both accessible and powerful, and she did a great job of interweaving perspectives and capturing snapshots of a family over the course of some thirty years. The end result was a poignant examination of what it means to leave one's identity behind as one shifts between the phases of one's life, what it is important to keep and what inevitably slips away.

Of course, the fact that I was reading a book about Indian immigrants in the United States made this even more relevant to me, as an American immigrant to India. For an account of assimilation and identity, I think I preferred Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which I read for a British history class a few years ago; like Lahiri, it was Smith's first attempt at a novel, but she wrote with much more humor and a flair for the absurd. I brough Smith's second book with me as well (The Autograph Man), which I've had for a couple of months and am looking forward to reading despite mixed reviews from critics.

While here, I hope to catch up on reading as much as possible, and also to finish writing my romance novel, of course. I drive by a bookstore every day that looks really nice, so I'll have to go check it out when my collection starts to dwindle.

Back to the book, as I said, it's even more moving to read a search-for-identity story in a country and a setting where my own identity seems so much in flux. I can't quite be myself here; although I like them very much, my coworkers are not the same as my peculiar group of friends at home, and even when I am alone, there are too many external parties who take care of everything that I am used to managing myself. Despite my romantic bent, I'm rather thoroughly independent; I'm used to driving myself and my friends everywhere, cooking, cleaning, arranging trips, organizing activities, etc., etc. Here, I feel completely helpless--there are four drivers who are here only to make sure that we get to wherever we wish to go, there are cooks and cleaning people in both the office and the apartments who are unflaggingly, almost smotheringly attentive, and I don't know where anything is, nor do I have the ability to get there on my own. Things will get better in that respect once I move into my apartment, I think, since then I can start unpacking and decorating and doing other fun homemaking things, but until then I'm feeling a wee bit restless.

I'm happy to report that the loud party going on in the backyard of the hotel, outside my window, seems to have quieted down significantly in the past twenty minutes. They were playing what seemed to me to be an Indian version of 'The Whistle Song', which features prominently in DDR MAX2, and the sound of the whistle was beginning to drive me crazy. I think perhaps that it is time for bed; I only have tonight and tomorrow night in the hotel, and then I can move into my apartment! I'll be sure to take pictures when I do.