Oasis

This is the twelfth time I am flying to India in the last six years. I have flown alone a couple of times, but most of the time we travel together as a family. The purpose of the travel remains the same—visiting family in India, with a predictable regularity, especially for the peace of mind of aging parents, both mine (when they were around) and my husband’s. Each time we take the same Emirates flight—from San Francisco to Dubai, and then from Dubai to Kolkata, with a generous stopover at the Dubai airport breaking the two legs of the journey. The Dubai airport lounge now feels like a familiar vacation spot where you come back again and again. Nothing symbolizes our immigrant life more than this acquired comfort at an airport lounge in a country that, despite being superbly welcoming, is neither our birthplace, nor our adopted workplace.

As I try to analyze the source of this strange sense of comfort, I realize something profound. This journey is the only legitimate break where I feel temporarily unencumbered from the professional demands in the US and the personal duties in India, both of which I like immensely, but there is no denying that this dual existence keeps me stretched thin between the two continents.

This realization is more poignant this time, perhaps because of the cumulative effect of three deaths of three beloved parents in India in the last four years. Each time death, or the prospect of it, loomed in the background during the journey, but each time in a slightly different way. The saga started in 2012. In December 2012, I was flying to India knowing that my mother’s cancer was rapidly deteriorating. But I didn’t imagine I would receive a phone call from my siblings during the Dubai transit that mom had slipped into a coma, quite unexpectedly, while I was flying from San Francisco to Dubai.  She passed away the day I landed in India. Three years later, I was again flying through Dubai, knowing that my father was in the hospital due to complications from an angioplasty, but at least he was stable at that point. (He died two weeks later). Today, I am flying with my son—my husband is already in India—knowing that my mother-in-law has already passed away a few days earlier. So I know that there is no escaping, or even delaying, death this time. I have to face the reality that I have lost a parent—again—even before the first anniversary of my father’s passing.

When you have to preserve all your fortitude to bravely deal with deep personal losses over and over again, you appreciate the temporary refuge offered by a transit airport more than ever. Thank you Dubai for being the true oasis that you project yourself  to be.

What's in a name?

It was the first Monday after we brought home our puppy two days back on Saturday. I was a 'new mom' once again after 11 years! The logistics of transporting the puppy to the dog-sitter's home before going to work in the morning was a bit overwhelming. No wonder I missed the breaking news that there has been a mass shooting in Houston that morning.

Once I was settled in at work and started reading my daily dose of legal news, I saw the headline--"Man ID'd as Houston Gunman Was a 'Good, Competent Lawyer,' Ex-Partner Says." I was intrigued. I read on. The lawyer-turned gunman injured nine people before being killed by the police. The article mentioned the lawyer's name--Nathan DeSai. I assumed he must be of European origin, like DeSantis or De Palma.

More details started coming in eventually, including an interview clip with the lawyer's father by a reporter. The father looked South Asian and had a totally Indian-sounding name. And now for the first time I started thinking, could it be that Nathan was someone who changed his name? And the DeSai is actually 'Desai,' a common Indian last name? I was right. Apparently he changed his name from Niren Desai to Nathan DeSai in 2001.

This business of changing one's name has always interested me. Sometimes it is motivated by sheer practicality. I can see if your first or last name is so long that there are not enough boxes in the forms, then you could be tempted to cut it to a more manageable length. Sometimes it is just a natural outcome without anyone formally changing the name. My son's name is Jyotishko. His caregivers started calling him Jojo when he went to his infant daycare. He started responding to that. So even though he has another nickname--we Indians often do--the diminutive version of his formal name stuck with him. My own name 'Madhumita' became shortened to 'Mita', because--get this!--the information technology guys at University of Maryland, my graduate school, said I had to choose a login name that is 'no more than six letters long'! (Boy, I came to America as a graduate student a very long time ago!) And 'Madhu' was already taken. I did not choose Mary or Maddie though, that would potentially create a confusion about my ethnicity or religion. Not that anything is wrong with that. But at least in Nathan DeSai's case, I am left to wonder whether he changed his name to deliberately create a confusion regarding his race or religion, so that he appears more 'mainstream' to his prospective clients. Kind of like how Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz became Jon Stewart, or Carlos Irwin Estevez became Charlie Sheen.

When my son was a bit younger, he once asked me, perhaps out of sheer curiosity, why we did not choose a more "American" name for him. I told him that if he is good, people will have to take notice, irrespective of whether he has an easy name or not, just like people once took notice of a "skinny kid with a funny name," who went on to become the President. I showed my son the video of Obama's famous speech, and he got his answer.

In case you are curious what name we chose for our puppy, let's just say he is named after a very chompable thing recognized equally in India and in America. We named him Biscuit. Goes well with his brown coat, doesn't it?

The Transcontinental Chin Buddies

From the moment he was born, my son Gogol forged a special bond with his grandfather (my father-in-law). Grandpa was the first person to figure out how to put baby Gogol to sleep. Though grandpa had to go back to India when Gogol was five months old, through our frequent visits to India (and their occasional visits to the US), the bond remained as strong as ever over the last eleven years. But what happened on August 30, 2016 was truly special!
Gogol came back from school with a deep laceration under his chin when he tripped on the volleyball court while diving for the ball. His first big sports injury! We had to take him to the emergency. When we called India to share the news that Gogol got three stitches, Grandpa laughed and told us, "Ha ha, I was not going to tell you, but now it is too much of a coincidence not to tell you that I got five stitches yesterday on my chin too! I fell while cutting the branches of a tree in the garden."

The 11-yr old and the 80-yr old naughty boys--two of the most gentle but toughest human beings that I know--became chin buddies across the globe! Blood is thicker than the (ocean) water that keeps them apart! 

Between Two Countries and Me

This is the week when I have the glorious luxury of picking any book up and start reading it from any random chapter, or any random page. The bar exam was last week, and the real slog at work starts after I come back from my vacation. So I shortlisted two books that have been on my mind—and on my table—for long: “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates [no brownie points for guessing what the inspiration behind the title of this blog is], and “The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities,” by Debjani Sengupta. Both are rich not only in their immediate narrative, but in their context also. I did not want to read these as my ‘escape reading’ while I was jamming my head with myriads of rules to be memorized for the bar exam. Now that I have the freedom and mental capacity to read something ‘deeper,’ I found myself faced with a unique problem—which book to read first?

I first picked up “The Partition of Bengal,” mostly because of the fact that the author is a very dear personal friend and relative, whose scholarly work I have always admired. But after reading a chapter on colony fiction, I realize my reality is far removed from the days of India’s partition in 1947. In contrast, with the very current conversation on race in this politically charged election year in America, I felt the urge to enhance my understanding of America's racial history by reading “Between the World.” [I will be honest—the very manageable size of “Between the World” at 152 compact pages with decent sized-font had its lure, compared to the 250 standard-size pages and extremely small font of “The Partition.”] Since then, I have been literally toggling between the two books, and it feels totally natural! I do not think I am disrespecting either book by not reading one continuously from start to finish before reading the other. And in a strange way, this act of toggling explained so much of why I fly off to India twice a year, even though I love being in California.

I have grown comfortable with my hybrid existence as a person who has lived almost exactly half her life in India and the other half in America.

In the last few years, I have traveled to India every six months, the immediate reason being spending time with my aging parents who were becoming increasingly fragile for travel to California. Now that both of them are gone to a different world, I have no immediate necessity to ‘visit’ them in India. I could have chosen a country that I have never visited before for a post-bar pamper-trip. But I am going to India again, to brave the sweltering heat. This time I am going to India not necessarily for the specific people who are related to me, but for the people who make India what India is. Just like I am one of the people who makes America what America is.

And oh yes, I am definitely packing my two books in my carry-on luggage for my in-flight and airport reading.

Spring Break

I could have written this blog on Friday, May 13^th, 2016, right after I finished my last ever final exam in law school! I had a catchy title in mind too—“Friggatriskaidekaphilia,” my own coinage for the opposite of friggatriskaidekaphobia, which is an actual word, meaning ‘a morbid fear of Friday the thirteenth’. But for those impulsive needs to put down our immediate thoughts in writing, there is Facebook. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for creating a vessel for our euphoria!

The ‘day after,’ Saturday, May 14^th, was too sumptuously perfect to confine myself in one place long enough to write a full-fledged blog. I had too much restless energy still bubbling in me! I had old photo albums to organize, trips to plan, calls to make, son’s soccer game to attend, movies to catch, and a million Bollywood songs to listen to! Then came the luxuriating lull of laziness. I became acutely aware that I don’t have to sit down with the hefty law books at least for a few days! It felt surreal, and luscious! I needed to celebrate by doing nothing. The blog could wait.

Today is Sunday. Seems like I am now removed enough from the adrenaline-dominated feeling of lightness to appreciate that I will never find a better time to reflect on law school than now—the ephemeral ‘gap days’ in between the end of the finals and the beginning of the grueling bar preparation schedule of the summer.

Law school was quite a challenge, possibly the hardest that I have ever willingly undertaken, considering where I was in life when I started thinking seriously about law school. I had a full time job at a law firm as a patent agent. I had a full family life with a son in elementary school. I also had ageing parents in India who were not in the soundest of health to visit me in California, so I promised that I would visit them twice a year, no matter what else I had going on in my life.

While I was preparing for law school admission test, my mom was diagnosed with stage IV liver cancer. The doctors gave her six months to a year. So she encouraged me to get done with LSAT before going to India to see her. I planned exactly like that, as my siblings were taking care of my mom. But in a cruel twist of events, while I was up in the air, en route to India, my mom went into a hypoglycemic coma. She passed away on December 21, 2012, literally a few hours after I landed in India. My only consolation was that I did get to spend time with her in the summer of 2012, prior to her diagnosis, when the whole family gathered for my nephew’s rice-feeding ceremony.  

After coming back to California, motivating myself to meet the February 1, 2013 deadline to apply for law school was a real struggle. I was still shocked by the new reality of my life—the fact that I was motherless, and I might have to fly to India on a very short notice if my newly single dad needed me! I remember I started writing my personal statement for the law school application package in the very morning of the February 1 deadline. Writing about my mom’s deep influence in shaping my dreams gave me an outlet to deal with the pain.

My law school orientation started on August 13, 2013, the day my son turned eight years old. We pre-celebrated his birthday the weekend before. My in-laws were visiting us in California that time. Nobody, including myself, had a clue what to expect for the next three years. But if there was any doubt inside their mind, my family didn’t let it show. I was sent off to the ‘first day of school’ in style!

Then came the whirlwind of endless reading assignments, writing assignments, quizzes, papers, mid-terms, end-terms, peppered with occasional client deadlines at work. I cut down my work commitment significantly to make room for law school, but deadlines are deadlines! Saying “no” to friends’ and family’s well-meaning invitations to join them for something fun became routine. The effortless balance that I achieved in life before law school went missing, at least for the first year of law school. I tried to draw inspiration from the collegiality of the classmates, the sincerity of the professors, and the giving spirit of the university, organizing countless social service events. The first respite came when we went to India in December 2013 after the first semester was over. Seeing that dad was somewhat adjusting to his widowed life was comforting. We took him to the Sunderbans---the storied mangrove forest by the Bay of Bengal, so close to home, but never visited before! Another semester went by, followed by a busy summer catching up on billable hours at my law firm. Then it was time to go to India again in August 2014 to see dad. My son says India is the best summer camp ever! Playing with my son in the monsoon rains in my hometown rejuvenated me to take on another year of law school.

This time law school felt different. I could choose some of the elective courses that were of professional interest. There was opportunity for teamwork built into some of the courses. I became more familiar with the study techniques that produce results. I learnt how to mentally decouple from my office work. I started appreciating the fact that law school infused me with a precious dose of youth at this stage of my life! Dad could see the difference in my attitude when we went to India to visit him in December 2014.

Third year of law school started with a unique experience—a full-time externship at a federal courthouse in San Jose. I just took one evening class, and spent my entire semester working at the chambers of Judge Beth Labson Freeman. It was a 180 degree departure from my normal life in so many ways! For the first time, I had a female boss. For the first time after graduate school, I had to share a windowless small office room with another extern, and had to make do with a modest desk and a prehistoric computer with a tiny monitor. But none of them mattered because of the intellectual thrill of finally having an insider’s perspective on the judicial system! On my last day of the externship, I went out to lunch with the Judge, and she asked me about my parents. She was curious about the life of a working couple in India in her generation. Suddenly it felt like law school is my most favorite thing in the world!

But can life be that good for long? Of course not! A few days before Thanksgiving 2015, my dad had a ‘mild’ cardiac arrest. My sister valiantly took care of things in India. Dad had an emergency angioplasty that looked all successful initially. Once again, my dad told me to finish my final exam before coming to visit him. But I guess I was a little wiser this time remembering how three years back waiting to finish my LSAT robbed me of the opportunity to see my mom before she went into coma. So I was seriously contemplating the idea of postponing the exam and go right away. My dad’s second heart attack within days of his angioplasty made it easier for me to just drop everything and book the flight to India on Thanksgiving day. This time life gave me a little more opportunity. I could spend nine whole days by the side of my dad, chatting with him, cherishing childhood memories, before my dad rejoined my mom in a different world, reunited for their 46^th marriage anniversary. I would never forget the feeling of emptiness that I felt leaving India in January 2016—the first time dad didn’t come to the gate to say goodbye and to wish me good luck for what would be the last semester of law school.

Looking back, I see that my life outside of law school interweaved itself with my life in law school in a strangely inseparable way! My parents’ death made me realize that there are bigger things in life than worrying about law school. At the same time, law school kept me occupied, making it easier to deal with the loss of both parents in three short years. Perhaps that is the reason it is bittersweet to say goodbye to law school. It was quite a journey that we had together for three years! It was my extended youthful spring break in the scorching summer of my life!

Privilege and Monodimensionality in the Media

Prologue (April 25, 2016): I just finished watching the HBO docudrama "Confirmation," that sheds light on one of 1990's political flashpoints--law professor Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment against her former boss Clarence Thomas, the then-Supreme Court nominee. After watching the feature, I felt like re-posting (with some edits) the reflection that I wrote for my 'Gender and Law' class in Spring 2015 at the Santa Clara University regarding male privilege in the media. 
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Colleen McCullough was a beloved and wildly successful Australian novelist, who passed away on January 29, 2015. Her obituary in the prominent newspaper “The Australian” started like this: “Colleen McCullough, Australia’s bestselling author, was a charmer.” So far so good. However, the next sentence in the obituary was: “Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless a woman of wit and warmth.”

This sentence is wrong on so many levels, that I cannot even conceive where to begin. All I can say is that I found myself imagining with horror a future obituary of Stephen Hawking (sorry Dr. Hawking---I wish you a long life!) that may read like this: “Hawking was no Tom Cruise, and his looks certainly deteriorated over the years by the debilitating disease of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). He was, nevertheless, a man of intellect.”

I realize the fruitlessness of such a retaliatory gut reaction, and I would be remiss not to mention the huge public outcry against the Australian newspaper for publishing that churlish obituary of McCullough. But this incidence certainly made me think about how the media treats men and women differently. It is unlikely that Stephen Hawking would have a future obituary that will go into his looks. It may be more flattering or less flattering depending on who is writing, but the discussion would likely focus on his talent. Male privilege is a real thing in the media.

Professor Stephanie Wildman’s book "Privilege Revealed" has a chapter called “Privilege and the Media” that focuses on the media’s role in propagating gender stereotyping. The chapter uses the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas saga as a vehicle for discussion. I was in India in 1991, when Anita Hill became notorious for accusing then-Supreme-Court-nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment--a very powerful term for which we are grateful to celebrated feminist theorist Catherine MacKinnon. Because of the American media’s one-sided depiction of the Hill-Thomas judicial hearing episode, back then I had no inkling that Hill was an accomplished legal scholar. I am not denying that her professional stature was somewhat justifiably overshadowed by the larger-than-life stature of Clarence Thomas. But the media could have done a much better job in establishing Hill’s credibility as the accuser and the testifying witness by focusing on her accomplished career. 

We talk a lot on intersectionality of gender and race in the context of feminism. I feel like somewhere along the way the Hill-Thomas saga lost its rich intersectionality aspect. Initially the media decided to focus only on gender--as both the accused and the accuser were Black (hence no racial difference). But, eventually the initial focus on gender got distorted to such an extent that sexual harassment became a secondary issue, and media became obsessed only on racial issues, as Judge Thomas used his formidable oratory skills to describe his tribulations at the senate hearing as "high-tech lynching of uppity Blacks". A powerful male voice got the media's ultimate attention no matter what the real issue was.

May be one of the reasons the media oversimplifies the stories based on either gender or racial stereotyping, but not both, is because intersectionality is just too complex to communicate to the masses. Still, media cannot shy away from the inherent power that it holds to act as an agent of change. In the shooting death of an unarmed Black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson by a White policeman, both the killer policeman and the unarmed victim were male, but belonged to two different races. So the media's focus immediately, and may be justifiably in this case, became race. If the Ferguson incident was altered hypothetically into a situation where a female White policeperson fatally shot an unarmed Black man, then the issues of gender and race would have been intertwined, but I wonder if media would have picked up the gender aspect as much as the race aspect. In my view, if the angle of violence is relevant in the discussion of police shooting, then one cannot avoid addressing both gender and race. Is a female policeperson with a gun more likely to shoot an innocent Black man, because in the heat of the moment, her perception may have been muddled by thinking that the man may become violent towards her because of her gender? Catherine MacKinnon would probably agree that (according to her Dominance theory) the policewoman would have felt threatened when confronted by a man in an adversarial situation. I find myself feeling quite disturbed by the thought that the perception of threat, rather than real threat, may lead to unwarranted violence. And that perception of threat is rooted in both gender and racial identity.

Instead of propagating stereotypes--as the Colleen McCullough obituary did, media should do a better job at covering all aspects of a complex issue, especially when the public is receptive in the wake of a high-profile incident, be it a police shooting incident or a sexual harassment accusation.

Life and Death Between and Beyond the Blogs

My first blog in 2015 was somewhat self-aggrandizingly titled "Time." It was about my visit to a watch repair shop in the neighborhood that made me all philosophical. And my last blog in 2015 was titled, "The Answer is 42!"--self-laudatory once again, as I was describing the beautiful things in my mid-life that I am grateful for, including my 82-year old father's "successful" angioplasty after he suffered a cardiac infraction. Life was near-perfect between the first and the last blogs of 2015. Until it wasn't. Two days after I wrote my last blog on November 23, 2015, my father suffered a second infraction. The angioplasty turned out to be not that successful after all. I rushed to India on the Thanksgiving Day to see my father. I got to spend nine precious days with him at his bedside, thinking he is on his way to a slow recovery. Then his aging, battle-torn heart stopped beating forever---he didn't survive the third infraction. My optimism was silenced, and how!

My father's demise taught me one vital lesson. I can blog to my heart's content, but life and death happen on their own terms beyond what I can control through my wishful blogging. No matter how fancifully I title my blogs, time doesn't care to stop for me or my loved ones. This feeling of powerlessness is painfully and poignantly real. But strangely enough, I also cannot think of any other way to catharsis. So here I am--trying to get over the pain caused by the loss of a parent by blogging about the act of blogging itself! Talk about meta!

I brag, I breathe, I bleed and I break down through my blogs. Celebrated novelist Haruki Murakami once wrote, "Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives, we nurture death." My blogs nurture me as I nurture my eventual inevitable death. But until death comes, I plan on living my life every day--a life shaped partly by shiny memories of my parents, but mostly by the thriving hopes for the long list of things to come before I join my parents in their journey to eternity. Here's a slightly belated toast to living life in the new year 2016!