Garam Tea Chat

By Padma Shandas

“What goes up will eventually come down!” I heard this philosophy many times while growing up. Grandparents routinely taught us children to anticipate the ups and downs of life.

“Today you may be rich, but tomorrow may arrive and make you a pauper,” we were warned.The same rule applied to happiness and sorrow, success and failure, good fortune and bad fortune, and so on. The pairs of opposites were all too familiar to us, five-year-olds. We tried to be somewhat even-tempered when things happened, although that was not as easy as the elders preached us to be. But we learned, at least in theory, about the unevenness of life experiences. Nothing lasted forever. “That is the nature of life,” they assured us. “There will be good times and bad times.”

Even with such ancestral wisdom, I have been easily brain-washed in America to think that we can be perpetually happy, pain-free, and young. All you need to do is, go shopping. If we can divide Americans into two groups—say, shoppers and non-shoppers—I know which one would be the larger group. I bet, the shoppers would outweigh the non-shoppers. The businesses are so persistent in showing us pictures of a perfect world waiting around the corner, if only we would purchase their products, that we begin to believe so ourselves. Thin hair? There is an easy solution— use this “voluminizing” shampoo; soon we begin to believe voluminizing is a real word. So we go shopping. Fat bust? Yes, the remedy is a click away; this minimizing bra. Irregular bowels? Don’t despair, call the pharmacy. Worries about those monthly cycles? Here is how you can stop them. Restlessness and leg-shake? Not a problem. Wrinkles? Depression? Just relax and call the number… so we shop again.

There is not a malady that doesn’t have a cure; not a disappointment we can’t overcome in an instant. Our belief system changes dramatically—we indeed can be forever happy, pain-free, and young.This becomes our rational approach to shopping.

But not everything about shopping is rational. I have read that there are millions of people in America, who are addicted to shopping. They are called shopaholics, just as there are people who are alcoholics. I am not surprised that we can easily become compulsive shoppers. Some go to shop when depressed, or elated, or when feeling overweight, or famished, or had a trying time at work, or after being fired, or on being hired into a new job, or before going on vacation, or after returning from vacation. We can shop non-stop, because there are 24-hour stores for our convenience.

Shopaholics use any excuse to indulge in their compulsive behavior, I learn. They defend their habit, and they rationalize their addiction to credit cards. They amass debts. Worst of all, they regret their shopping spree later.

For no fault of mine, I belong to the minority group– I am a non-shopper. Shopping is an ordeal for me. I go shopping when I must; if I can survive the morning without milk, I postpone my grocery store visit till the afternoon; if there is enough moisturizer in the bottle for one application, I wait; I convince myself that I have sufficient clothing in the closet to last one-hundred-fifty years.

Now I am in a quandary, though. I may have to join the shoppers’ group for the sake of American economy. Uncle Sam is paying me to shop! The new economic stimulus plan requires me to go shopping. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I am on the verge of falling into depression, just thinking about it.

But there is hope. “What goes down will eventually come back up!” says my age-old philosophy. It works both ways, you see: to cheer you up, or to sober you down.

But if that doesn’t happen, I’ll go shopping, happily.

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Padma Shandas is the author of Spices in the Melting Pot: Life Stories of Exceptional South Asian Immigrant Women.

By Padma Shandas

 “I am a self-made man!” the man declared, his voice climbing a triumphant note. “I ran away from home at seventeen, joined the army and figured out what I wanted to do in life. There was no one to show me the ropes, to guide or comfort.” He went on describing his challenges, the critical moments, the paths he took, the hard work.

“Wow!” I said. Then I fell silent, because I was awe-stricken by his commitment and courage. I looked at the balding head and the eager, bulging eyes. His forehead was marked by a hundred lines, alive, analyzing, thinking. But it was the rigid contour of his lips that caught my attention more. There were no laugh lines bracketing the mouth as he spoke. The corners of his eyes didn’t crinkle either.

Obviously he was serious about his life, what he had achieved. A “self-made” man.

I knew such talk as a sign of confidence in America. Such a man is looked up to as a role model. 

Then it occurred to me he had forgotten to mention something; actually many things: he came into a world that was going on for several millenniums, for one.

I tried to imagine his parents. May be, just may be, he didn’t have parents; nor a grandparent who might have offered a wrinkled hand to hold on to when he was a teetering toddler. Nor did he have a brother or sister who once gave him a hug and brightened his mood. Never did he have a baby-sitter.

He would never have gone to a pediatrician either.

 Why go so far back, I thought. What about the breakfast he ate that morning?

Even assuming that he had made it himself, where did he get the bread, or the muffin? Who baked it, who milled the flour, who harvested the wheat, who planted, watered, weeded the field? Who tilled the land? Where did the coffee he drank come from? Someone must have spent hours and days picking the coffee beans in some country, cleaned them, dried them, shipped, roasted, powdered, canned and sold them. If he considered the sugar he added to the coffee, could he ignore the sugarcane farmers, the sugar factory workers, the packers? How about the cows that gave the milk for his coffee? Who raised them and fed them and milked them?

As he entered his car, he said, “I am late for my meeting. Not that it matters, because they are all my employees: in my pay-roll. Each and every one of them!” I didn’t know what to say.

I still recall the day. It was a Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. What would he do for Thanksgiving? I wondered to myself, as I started to walk away. Somehow, that was a bizarre thought. And I felt sad.

But, wait a minute, didn’t he say, they all worked for him? In other words, they made him who he was? Still, he calls himself a “self-made” man!

By Padma Shandas 

Self-identity is a tricky bird. Try to corner it, and you may end up chasing wild geese. If you are lucky, you may get a floating feather.

Try to imagine, for a moment, how Gregor Samsa would have felt one morning when he discovered that he had become an enormous cockroach with many legs. I am certain we can all imagine the young man’s predicament in the frighteningly realistic story, The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, published in 1915. Feeling powerless, not knowing what to do or where to turn, the gnawing emptiness inside, is a terrifying experience.

American psychologist Dr. Rollo May wrote about loneliness, emptiness and anxiety as the three problems of modern man, in his book, Man’s Search for Himself[1]. We are quite familiar with temporary anxiety, the sweaty palms and the palpitating heart, the classic symptoms of stage fright.

But in today’s globalized life, especially in the post-September 11 era, we feel more anxious than ever before. Our anxiety spreads into more and more aspects of our daily living. Even high-technology and the million gadgets are not helping us yet. We try to be in constant contact with others, in continual vigilance. There is a ceaseless chatter in our ears. It is ironic that we are trying to ward off some of our anxiety by being alert 24 hours a day! We are afraid to turn off the cell phone or the email, as though the ensuing silence would trigger our primordial aloneness. We are inching toward a perpetual state of anxiety.

In the case of immigrants, the situation can only be worse. We bear the additional burden of what I like to call ‘cultural anxiety.’ It is a gnawing perplexity that combines a feeling of ‘cultural loneliness’ and ‘cultural emptiness.’ I am sure those who have experienced them would know what I mean. Do we see a plethora of cultural organizations around us? By joining them with other like-minded people, speaking the same language, we hope to overcome some of the loneliness. Perhaps for a while it would help. But what happens when we come out to the ‘real world?’

Questions like, ‘who am I?’ or ‘what do I truly want?’ or ‘what is my passion?’ continue to harass you if you are even minimally introspective. These questions may never bother you as a South Asian living in the home country, because there are clear cultural guidelines that you follow, even without thinking about them. The answers become critical in a country like America. Here we live with a strange feeling of cultural emptiness. There are no roots to lean back on, no home-brand tradition to steady you, no clear answers to questions about one’s identity.

So you begin to search for yourself in others. One day they make you feel you are the character Gregor Samsa, and you would want to crawl out of here any moment. But the next, you may feel as though you just ate a bit of the moon, out-of-this-world, radiating cool light. The conflicts begin. Anxiety rises. One answer pulls you in one direction while another pushes you toward the opposite. Besides your skin color, your clothes, your manner of speaking, all of which define you for other people, you begin to wonder about your own self-identity. You struggle with the idea of who you should be.