The Hope Speech

When I was in high school in Lexington, Kentucky, my mom would look for competitions for me. Anything that had to do with science, essay writing, or speech making. She believed I could win anything the way only a mom could believe. It turned out I could win a lot of the time. I had pretty good smarts. My parents gave me more encouragement, financial support, and guidance than any other parents I knew of. While most kids from my school worked behind grocery store counters after class, I was at a table with a calculus tutor or pipetting DNA samples into a PCR machine at a laboratory or reading Tolstoy. The other reason I won so much was that sometimes only one or two other students showed up to the competition. You start to recognize the five other kids in the state with parents like yours. If you show up enough, you’re going to win something. A certificate, a plaque, a trophy, two hundred dollars, a trip to Pittsburgh.

With this one extemporaneous speech competition, it seemed like there was nothing to lose but a couple of hours of our time. No preparation needed, it’s off the top of your head. My mom and I drove to the location – an American Legion Post not far from our house. I hadn’t really thought much about it beforehand. I spent my whole life in the South. I was almost always the only Indian in the room. Almost always the only person of color wherever I went. So even when I walked into the hall and saw that it was full of old white men, I didn’t blink. Only one other student – a white male – showed up to the competition. Like I said, if you go to enough of these things, your odds are pretty good. I was ready. Ready to extemporize.

The hall really filled up with veterans. We’re talking World War II GIs. The greatest generation. Children of the Great Depression, victors over the Nazis. A man gave me and the other student a piece of paper with the topic spelled out. It said – the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. My first reaction was relief that I knew all the amendments to the constitution. And the thirteenth amendment – that’s a really important one, the first of the three post-Civil War amendments to free American slaves. I was thinking, at least I have a grasp of what the topic is. But after that second of relief, I really felt my brown skin sticking to my skinny body. What was I to say about slavery to old white men in Lexington, Kentucky, a city that sided with the Confederates, a city that was Jim Crow when these men were kids?

There was a coin toss. Or maybe it was by alphabetical order. The other student had to speak first. I was sent off to a back room so I would not be able to hear and have an advantage by being able to respond. Even so, I could hear little bits of what the other student said. He clearly did not know what the thirteenth amendment was. He never mentioned slavery. Never mentioned the Civil War. He was just ranting about Bill Clinton. He said Clinton was a Nazi.

When they called me out, I stood silently for a few seconds and looked at the audience. The stony-faced aged warriors staring back at me! Then I gave the speech of my life. I will never be that good again. I said, the United States has a stain on its history. I said, slavery was a travesty of justice. I said, inequality and oppression were enshrined in the founding document of our nation. That we should feel shame that the founding fathers, who spoke out against tyranny and created the great institutions of democracy that we still benefit from, failed to stop slavery. That they agreed to count slaves as three-fifths of a human being. That the injustices slaves faced were of the very worst kind. So bad that we might ask if it is possible to rise above that past.

With a few minutes left in the allotted time, I shifted tack and said that the thirteenth amendment was perhaps the most important of all the amendments. The greatness of our constitution, I said, and the greatness of our country is the capacity to change. Even though that amendment alone was not the end of discrimination and inequality, I said we should celebrate the incredible sacrifice that went into changing the law of the land and abolishing slavery. The very ability of this country to rise out of its slave-holding past, I said, was proof that we could rise above any challenge. That was what I said. I didn’t realize how much hope I had until I spoke about it to those old white men.

The MC who had run the competition said we should wait for the results. There were three judges at a table and they needed to confer. Well, we waited. And waited. More than thirty minutes passed. Finally, the MC announced that the other student won. My face got hot. I wanted to go home, but my mom – I think it was her not me – wanted to find out what happened. So she kept asking the MC questions until he gave us the actual results from the three judges. It turned out the competition was designed for a multitude of contestants, not just two. Each judge gave a score out of 100 for each speech. Two of the judges gave me the higher score. The third judge gave me a zero and the other student a 100. When they added the scores up, the other student came out on top.

I went home thinking about the irony of the whole damn thing. I was asked to speak about the end of slavery and what I got in return was mathematical proof for the continued existence of hate and discrimination. My mom and I talked about appealing. We could write letters to the national headquarters of the American Legion, but we gave that idea up.

This whole memory was buried away for years. A blip in my comfortable life. With the Obama campaign, it started to resurface. I heard that belief in hope expressed with stunning eloquence in his Iowa victory speech. And again when he conceded the New Hampshire defeat. MaGreen and I saw Obama with 20,000 other people in an arena when he came to Houston. And I thought, the country has changed. It is ready for the Hope Speech. Ready for a consensus about the grave injustices of our past and ready for the possibilities that come of reconciliation. But when the Wright videos surfaced and the TV people heaped scorn on Obama, I remembered the American Legion experience the way it happened. That judge, the one judge.

The consolation I speak to myself is that if the winner of that extemporaneous speech competition had been chosen by an up-or-down vote, I would have won. Won, you hear. As in the bigots would have gone home crying. I say to myself, the not-so-great of the greatest generation are almost all dead along with the great ones. I hear Will.I.Am singing in my head, singing yes we can.

Raising a Healthy Vegetarian Baby or Toddler

Here's to the illustrious, healthy vegetarian baby. Reading the newspapers, even talking to doctors, and certainly talking to my parents you might worry it's as rare as the three toed astronaut. But vegetarians have been raising healthy babies for centuries, throughout the world. But how to do it in Houston?

The major caveat in raising a healthy, happy, vegetarian baby is that you have to expand the kind of items you put on your grocery list. You need to start buying the exotic goods staring out at you from the bulk bins in your health food store or co-op of choice. The other major caveat is that you have to learn how to cook. No more sandwiches for both of your two meals a day, no more a slice of pizza here and some french fries there. If you can manage both these tasks, you can raise your vegetarian baby just fine.

Grasshopper, our resident vegetarian baby, usually has six or seven meals a day: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, snack, dinner, snack. She eats so frequently because she doesn't always finish a meal, and that's okay. If she eats three bites of lunch, I operate under the assumption that that old demon hunger will compel her to munch more heavily during her later snacks. (GreenDaddy's mom -- Grasshopper's Dadi -- visited this weekend and told me she'd read an article suggesting that part of the obesity epidemic in the US is linked to people forcing their children to eat every last scrap on the plate...that is, to eat when they're not hungry. I love studies that support my habits!)

The best thing about Grasshopper's frequent snacking, I think, is that it makes it much easier for me to ensure she's eating from the Green Parenting Food Circle (not a triangle because somedays she gets more of one than the other): protien, fruit, grains, water, dairy & vegetables daily between snacks and meals. I should also mention that she still breastfeeds once a day, though she's forgetting to ask everyday now.

With all this in mind, I thought I'd put out this list of foods that Grasshopper is inordinatley fond of, and/or, doesn't know she eats but does regularly. I'm certain I've forgotten or don't know about other great ideas, and I'd love any new ideas to widen our range.

Grasshopper's Favorite Vegan Foods:

Quorn. It’s a brand of meat-aping protein consisting primarily of fungus n’whey, you find it in the frozen food, next to the Boc-blech Burgers. I like giving it to Grasshopper because I don’t want to overload her with soy. It comes in fake chicken & fake meatball forms. Whole Foods has it on sale once a month, usually, and I stock up, or I can’t afford it.

Veggie/Bean/Tofu Burgers. We make them at home, usually. None of us like the store bought much.

Tofu. What can’t you do with tofu? It goes into homemade veggie burgers, in Chinese food. While I’m not such a huge fan of tofu blocks in food, Grasshopper is. In a pinch, I buy the pre-made teriyaki tofu from the Whole Foods salad bar.

Frozen edamame and lima beans. I microwave them in water for about 45 seconds. A favorite snack of MaGreen and Grasshopper alike.

All the other beans. Since I got my pressure cooker in gear I love buying all sorts of crazy looking beans at Whole Foods. Turtles, Aztecs, Black Beans, Navy, Kidney. Usually I cook these with greens.

Lentils & Dahls GreenDaddy has a favorite traditional Gujurati dahl, and I have a few favorites I make. Grasshopper munches them up.

Rice. A quarter of our meals are served over brown or white Basmati. This was one of the baby's first favorites.

Hot Cereals. I alternate between oat grout, seven grain, and plain old oatmeal from the bulk bins.

Rainbow Light NutriStart Multivitamin Powder. Grasshopper needs Iron supplements and the iron drops the doctor prescribed taste exactly like you’re eating a pole in winter: metallic and you can’t unstick the flavor from your tongue for hours. Rainbow Lite is a brand my friend Kayte turned me onto when I was looking for prenatal vitamins. They’re free of “artificial colors, flavors, sweetners, preservatives and other objectionable additives often found in vitamin products.” Since they don’t have any goodies in them they taste like blech, which is why I buy the powder packets. I put them in her cereal.

Quinoa & Amarynth. Super protein filled seed-grains of the Aztecs. I add them rice whenever I cook it, put a little in her seven grain cereal in the morning.

Noodles. Who doesn’t like a good noodle every now and then?

Sunflower & pumpkin seeds. Sometimes I grind them and put them in food, sometimes I just put them in food, sometimes we just snack on them.

Nuts. Walnuts, peanuts, cashews. No allergies in this house, thankfully. She’s just learned how to chew them well enough to snack on.

Peanut butter. Grasshopper likes it on slices of apples.

Dried, unsweetened cranberries we always have on hand. And I also usually have another sort of dried unsweetened fruit, pineapple if it’s available, or mango.

Veggies. Broccoli, corn, carrots are her favorites. I don’t put any sauces on them, except butter on occasion. I remember my dad trying to “mask the taste” of broccoli with melted cheese and just destroying the vegetable for me. I was shocked to discover I loved it when I was twelve or thirteen and my always dieting stepmother demanded he serve the cheese to the side so she could eat hers with lemon juice over it. I believe I told every single person I met for a month about this amazing discovery of lemon juice on broccoli.

Greens. The vegetable that one ups all the others. We're in the south, we get a variety of Kales, Collards, Mustard, Beet, Dandelion, Chards, Spinach...and a few I just can't think of. For grashopper I choose the more tender varieties and least pungent: Spinach, Chards, Dinosaur Kale. I usually cook them with beans or if it's a tough green, I boil it in the water with pasta. Grasshopper loves them sometimes, hates them sometimes.

Mushrooms. She likes cooked mushrooms.

Berries. Frozen blueberries. Seasonal raspberries, blueberries, strawberries.

Fruit. Apples, oranges, bananas, mango, melons, grapes.

Crackers. Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies or TLC cheddar crackers. But also just regular wheat crackers.

Catsup. What can you do? She loves to dip.


Non-Vegan:

Whole Yogurt. Grasshopper eats a few bowls of plain yogurt with honey in it a day. It’s her primary dairy intake.

Honey. She inherited her craving of honey from my mom. For yogurt and cereals.

Whole Milk. In her cereal. On occasion she’ll drink it.

Eggs. She’s on and off with eggs, and we eat them rarely.

Cheese. Grashopper isn’t a fan of cheese, but some other babies might be.

The Big L.I.

I'm going to use my favorite BabyG names in the next few posts to see which ones feel the most like our little sweetie pie. Today's name of choice: Verdita (and variants).

GreenDaddy and I have been very busy the last two years doing all sorts of little things to make the world better for Verdita: we learned to compost, planted a garden, switched to 100% wind energy, joined a food co-op, searched out local and organic foods, turned more to buying used goods, got rid of one our cars and didn't buy a new one, we started avoiding petrochemicals, stopped using shampoo (usually), switched to nature store deoderant, joined freecycle to lessen our junk load in the dumps, & continued recycling, even our glass which means driving it to the recycling plant off Highway 59 and Westpark.

There's a lot more obviously green things out there we're not trying yet, but we're working toward: I want rain barrels and solar energy and a xeroscaped lawn and a meadow on our roof and less energy sucking cracks in the home and less time in the car and more efficient fuel and all sorts of things, these are just the first that come to mind. I think we'll get around to most of these things, as our life progresses.

But there are some difficult things you have to do to make the world better for your children, and you can't twiddle your thumbs and do it when you're ready.

First thing sounds silly, but it's on my mind a lot: we have only planted one tree in our yard, and we've cut three down. Choosing where to plant a new tree, what kind to get, thinking about how it will grow, whether or not it'll bump into the neighbors' trees...we keep getting caught in this indecisiveness that means there are three years of tree growing we have wasted in this house. I feel bad about that.

But I feel worse about the big L.I. Life Insurance. And how we still haven't bought any. Even though, like a tree, it's something you need to have planted last year. Once, GreenDaddy's work was going to send over a man to give him a checkup, and we totally forgot. That's the closest we ever go to it.

We're caught up on questions the way we are with the tree: how much should we buy? from whom? what kind is best? how will we know we have the best deal? Basically, we just want to have already had it. The rigomorolle is daunting. But daunting in this way we have no business of actually acceding to. Because there's this little former baby, Verdita, who needs us not only to do what we can to save the world, but also needs us to provide her some kind of security in case we don't survive the world long enough for her to grow up in it.

Our whole parenthood we've struggled in accomplishing legal and financial issues, the way I think a lot of people who don't want to be materialistic do. You don't want money to matter. You want the way you raise your baby to be enough. And I do think the way you raise your baby is a lot. But then, you, meaning I, I really want to make sure GreenDaddy and the baby, or just the baby, can recover as gracefully as possible if I kick the bucket. Money isn't all they'd need to do that, but having no money, and being short a parent, or two, isn't what I want for the baby either.

We did finally get around to writing a will, and we got it notarized, a few months ago. So our next hurdle as financially and legally responsible parents is the insurance thing. I wasn't sure this is something that belongs on Green Parenting...but it's a parenting issue we're grappling with and I wondered what other people are doing, how other people are faring on this front, and what other perspectives on the issue people have.

Material Differences

During our trip to India, I tried to pay attention to the material conditions that my family there live in and the way they choose to consume. Last year, the state of Gujarat, where my family is from, grew at a 10 percent rate. That is equivalent to China’s growth rate.

So the material conditions and choices I want to describe are those of middle-class Indians in one of India’s most prosperous states. The very poor in India consume a fraction of the resources used by people in the US, but what about the rising middle-class? Is the Indian middle-class copying American behavior? For example, George W. Bush defended his decision not to sign the Kyoto agreement by saying, "Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I couldn't in good faith have signed Kyoto," and claimed that the treaty didn't require other "big polluters" such as India and China to cut emissions. Indians were quick to point out that pollution rates per capita for India are extremely low. But even environmentalists in the US shake their heads and lament the thousands of new cars on the roads in Asia canceling out the virtues of those who buy hybrids in America.

What I saw was that the middle-class in India go to great lengths to conserve energy and resources. We ought to consider carefully how middle-class Indians live and actually compare, in a detailed way, their lifestyles with those of people in the US before we come to conclusions about what respective initiatives are needed by each nation. I wrote out a list of sustainable practices and design choices that I noticed in the homes I visited in Gujarat:

Multiple overhead fans strategically placed over seating areas that rotate at extremely fast speeds

Window air-conditioning units in specific rooms that are kept closed when the unit is in use, so that people gather in an air-conditioned part of the house rather than air-condition the entire home

Easy to open shutters that let breezes in

Marble or tile flooring that stays cool in the heat

Reupholstering of old furniture rather than purchasing new

Lines strung in the balcony for drying clothes

Long rows of switches that can turn off each light, appliance, plug, or electrical device so that nothing is left running on standby

Western-style, sit-down toilets with a knob that controls water coming from the pipes so you can flush using just the right amount of water rather than always having to empty the entire tank.

Bidets rather than toilet paper, so less trees cut and less water required to flush

Solar water heaters or small, gas water heaters that make hot bathing water on demand rather than the huge contraptions we have in the US that keep a big tank of water hot all day and night

Buckets in the bathroom for “dhol” baths

Rooftops that collect rainwater and channel it into wells, which prevents flooding, replenishes aquifers, and averts salination in seaside areas

Pressure cookers with stacked containers inside of them, which make the most of the energy used by their gas stoves

Wall-mounted water purifiers rather than bottled water

Numerous stainless steel canisters for efficient storage of dry snacks, lentils, grains, and rice instead of disposable containers

Scooters for small commutes and running errands

My relatives in India live in comfort. They have refrigerators, air-conditioning, washing machines, microwaves, gas stoves, hot water for baths, good drinking water, well-appointed living spaces, and their own transportation. And yet, they use a fraction of the resources that people in the US do. (My cousin said he would share his utility bills with me so I can back up my claim with some numbers in the near future.) When middle-class Indians – the so-called biggest polluters according to Bush – have gone to such efforts, how can we in the US demand “equal” commitments to reductions in emissions. The burden is on those of us in United States and Europe.

How the Sun Shines on the Soda Men

Two young male workers unload bottles from a Coca Cola delivery truck in Bangkok. Their shirts are a brighter red than the truck. The taller one is broad-shouldered and the veins of his forearms are thick. The shorter one has a Buddhist amulet around his neck. They are proud. They step out of the shade and pose for me in the full sunlight. They stare at the camera, but just underneath their serious looks are smirks. I want the picture to document how they collect used glass bottles while delivering full ones ready for consumption. In Thailand, as in India, soda bottles almost never go into the garbage. They are not melted down or remade. They go back to the bottling plant and are used again in their original form. You must drink your Cokes where you buy them. No sipping while strolling down the streets. No casual toss and clink of bottle against bottle in the garbage bin. I want the picture to be about recycling in Asia, but the picture is about something else. It is about Thai men who want the world to see how vital they are. I think they want their country to be seen shining, attractive, and modern.

Seven Greenish Things About Magreen

Like GreenDaddy's post below, I'm responding to cake's tag: we were both supposed to write seven things about ourselves people don't know. Because I am stickler for the title of our website, mine are loosely based on ideas I associate with being (or not being) green.

1. I drank a glass of shelack, as a child, and had my stomach pumped. I don't remember the pumping, but I remember eying the shelack and thinking it looked tasty.

2. My friend Shelly and I used to clean my dad's bar every Saturday and Sunday morning, while playing barmaid. We stole a sixpack when I was six, drank it, and threw up all night long.

3. Throughout my pregnancy and even the delivery of BabyG I never actually envisioned having a baby at the end. I was thinking: I'm pregnant, or I'm in delivery, but never: I'm creating a child that will one day actually exist. I was determined to come through the 'phases' of pregnancy and delivery, but was totally shocked when suddenly there was this tiny other being, my baby, in the delivery room.

4. I learned to swim in an irrigation ditch full of leeches. Every summer I stepped on at least one rusty 'pop top'.

5. When I am depressed, I imagine myself curling up and resting in some coral cave deep in the ocean. When I'm happy, I look forward to passing lots of time swimming and canoeing in cold, cold clear rivers.

6. I once hitchiked out of Zion's park, during a Spring Break backpacking trip I took there with college classmates, because I missed my father so much and couldn't stand being so close to him without visiting(I went to school in Minnesota and he lived in Salt Lake City).

7. Whenever I am very angry at somebody I fantasize about supergluing their car's tires to their driveway.

Okay. I tag anthromama, fiddlehedz & pirate papa...none of whom I've met face to face, but whose blogs I've read awhile. I also tag top secret blogger juju, and anybody else out there yankering to yammer in meme form.

We Don’t Want BabyG to Throw Herself into a Fire, But...

About a month ago, MaGreen and I took BabyG to a Hindu temple for the first time. Our friend Melissa was selling us a used bike and she lives to the southeast of Houston. We decided to meet her halfway at the Sri Meenakshi temple in Pearland.

Completed in 1982, the Meenakshi temple is one of the oldest Hindu temples in the United States. Loosely modeled on the original Meenakshi temple in Madurai, the temple is made up of a walled compound with five buildings inside. The walls are covered with icons and symbols. Over the years, the temple society has added ancillary buildings behind and to the side of the temple. They have housing for priests and guests, a fenced yard for peacocks, a cafeteria, classrooms, a library and bookstore, and a community hall. When the temple was built, Pearland was a little town past Houston’s outer suburbs. The land around the temple was just open fields. Now Pearland has become a true ex-urb of Houston and a trailer park sits across from the temple. It’s odd to come upon the temple out there, to see all the software engineers in their Camry’s sharing the two-lane country roads with pick-up trucks. Something about that temple makes it dear to my heart. The odd setting suits me. I love the peacocks, the temple food, and the books. The temple itself is clean and efficient. The priests are skilled at performing sacraments. And I have memories of past visits with aunts, uncles, my brother and sister-in-law, and my parents.

So after we met up with Melissa, all four of us went into the temple. I asked the priest in the main building to do a blessing. He gave us some fruit to eat as prasad. I donated money and asked the volunteer cashier if they had any special ceremonies going. She pointed us to one of the corner temples, which we walked to. Priests were chanting and making offerings to a goddess. They bathed her in milk and honey. They rang bells. About twenty people were gathered sitting in two rows. I could not recognize the deity, so I asked a man sitting next to me who this goddess was.

He said her name. It was a long, multi-syllabic South Indian name. I believe it was Kannika Parameshwari, but I’m not sure.

“Is she an incarnation of Kali or Durga or another goddess?” I asked. “What is the story?”

“Are you Hindu?” he asked glancing at the two white people with me. I said yes.

“Actually, you see, there was a young woman. When the Muslims invaded, the Muslim king saw her. He looked at her and desired her. The young woman knew this. And according to the old Hindu laws, even for man to look at a woman in this way is the equivalent of marrying. But she would not consent to such a thing and she threw herself into a fire. Today is the anniversary of the day when she sacrificed herself,” he said.

We remained for a few more minutes and listened to the chants. We had never planned to sit for an entire puja, so we left. I was embarrassed that the ceremony commemorated such a troubling story. It starts with war, occupation, and religious oppression. Then it moves on to the possibility of rape or forced marriage. There’s a reductive, patriarchal notion of the male gaze. That a man’s gaze defines all social relations. And it ends with an act that has a terrible history in India and an even worse present – bride burning. Why would I want to expose BabyG to this religion?

Many liberal people in the United States look at Hinduism as this open, accepting religion with non-violence at its core. Many Hindus have portrayed Hinduism in just that way. Hindus believe in many incarnations of a single, unknowable divine energy, including women and trees and animals and half-animal-half-humans. Buddha came out of Hinduism. So did Gandhi. So on and so forth. But Hinduism, like every single other religion, has a sordid history of racisms, sexisms, caste-isms, and classisms. You could argue that oppression is a constituitive element of Hinduism, that you cannot divide the bad parts out or sheild your kids from them. Our little trip to the Meenakshi temple is a case in point for that view.

On the other hand, as Amartya Sen documented in The Argumentative Indian and explained in my interview with him, the South Asian tradition from antiquity to present has a remarkable diversity of thought and belief. Within Hinduism, there have been debates about agnosticism and atheism since Vedic times. Radical efforts to end caste injustice date back to the birth of Buddhism and Jainism. There’s the Bhakti movement with figures like Mirabhai and Narsinh Mehta who created a discourse of gender and caste egalitarianism in their lyrical poetry. There’s Gandhi and Ambedekar. Why not count Kancha Ilaiah, Gayatri Spivak and Amartya Sen as part of the tradition?

I don’t think abandoning history and tradition is the way. I don't want to hide my baby's background from her and tell myself that's progress. I want her to feel that she can enter into the deep Indian traditions without regarding them as other. We can teach her to "read against the grain" or to understand the tradition as a spirited exchange of ideas. By ideas I don't mean dry logic or abstruse philosophy only, but all ideas, including those informed by nonrational experience. May the debates encompassed within our stories, songs, poetry, slokas, mantras, and iconography help her negotiate life.

A Blessing for You and Your Newborns

For Ruben and Angela, and for Ruby Graciela and Lucia Simone who were born 19 Feb 07

May they mash you up in their gummy mouths.
May they render you into a pulsing goop,
a thing that shares only a DNA signature
with the person that you were.
Make it new, they will say in their secret languages.
May they hold back their first smiles.
You will peer into their faces at dawn.
You will try swinging around to catch them
laughing at you like torturers.
May they hold back
and yank you down with their first smiles
like undercurrents in the warm sea.

When Viresh Forgot English

In 1979, when I was about two, my family moved from Chicago to Mobile, Alabama. At the time, very few Indians lived there. When I was older, my parents and their Indian friends would tell me, “If you saw an Indian family in Bel Air Mall, you would approach them and invite them over for dinner. That’s how our community came together. How else?” When my family arrived, I was told, there were fewer than twenty families in all. Indians came to Mobile for the jobs – professors at the University of South Alabama, engineers at Union Carbide and International Paper, and the convenience store and motel owners along interstate 10. We were Indians from different parts of India: Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Bengal, and so on. In a way, our small group reflected Nehru and Gandhi’s nationalist dreams more than anything you would find in India itself. We had Hindus, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, and Muslims among us. Our secularism was of the Indian kind in that each religious holiday was celebrated rather than American-style, which is to attempt a complete separation of religion.

What really astonishes me about my memories of those early days of Indian life in Mobile was the communion across caste and class lines. I remember frequently going over to a motel for dinner. The motel owners, like most Indian motel owners in the United States, were Gujarati. My family is Gujarati as well. But we are Nagar Brahmins and they were Patels. My parents both had M.D.’s and faculty positions at the University of South Alabama. The Patels operated a run-down motel on the side of a highway. Our family room window looked out on a big, green lawn. Their family room was separated from the receptionist desk by a beaded curtain and looked out on a parking lot. Our caste has historically practiced professions like medicine, law, writing, teaching, government administration, and diplomacy. Patels were farmers. Yet, on what felt like the furthest edge of the Indian diaspora, our shared language and food mattered much more than all the differences.

As the Indian community grew in Mobile, we did what Indians do best. We started to segregate ourselves. We did not have the numbers to have a Bengali Society and a Telegu Society, but there were enough Gujaratis to form a group. A group? Our group? Their group? My family spent more time with the South Indian professionals than with the “Motel Patels” in the Gujarati circle. I remember the stories we would tell each other about Patels. They have a deal with the pimps and prostitute, charge them by the hour. They have good training from life in India for hiding the extra money from the IRS. If they are losing money, they burn down the motel for the insurance. They can go anywhere in the country and have a free motel room to stay in. Did you know that the last motel before you reach the North Pole is owned by a Patel? I remember one Sunday at a weekly Gujarati class. My brother and I were looking down from a second floor window when a tiny car – maybe it was a Volkswagon Beetle – pulled up. We watched as eight Patels spilled out of its doors. "How did they all fit in there?" I asked. Someone said, “I’ve seen ten Patels fit into a car no bigger than that one.” At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I think these “Patel stories” served to draw a line between us and them. They transmuted the old caste boundaries from India into a new set of distinctions.

The Patel story that really grabbed hold of my imagination was about the time Viresh Patel forgot English. I do not remember Viresh very well. I think his family had moved away before I turned eight. What I remember are people’s descriptions of him. Even though he grew up in the States like the rest of us, he had a thick accent. He was said to have curly hair that stuck out in all directions. And, apparently, his parents took him back to Gujarat for a long summer and when he returned, he had forgotten English. His family’s home in India was that rural. That backward. No one spoke English to him there. But how can you forget English? I would ask. How is it really possible? Did he have trouble for a week, or was it like someone starting from scratch, learning the alphabet and reading, Jack and Jill ran up the hill? In my young mind, this story struck some chord inside that resonated with my anxieties. My fear was more that I was not really Indian enough and Mobile would never let be anything else. I knew I would never forget English. That’s all I had, English. Gujarati was a swamp to me. A bog. The story of when Viresh forgot English seemed to speak to our tenuous place in Mobile. Our non-place. I have written on this blog about being treated like the substitute nigger at my all-white school, but for the most part we were just off the map, outside of all rhetoric and discourse, beyond all communal ties and prejudice. Sometimes it seemed like we could say or believe anything about ourselves, and it would be true. At other times, I felt outside of all the groups – the Patels, the educated Indians, and even my family. Maybe it was this alienation that Viresh’s loss of language resonated with.

I know that BabyG, as a half-Indian and half-American-whatever, will face even more nuanced questions that I did. Sometimes I don’t feel that responsible for shaping her social milieu, so much as helping her sort through it whatever it is. Other times, I think we have to live in a city like Houston, where you can pick and choose the cultures your children are exposed to. Part of me wants to take her, when she’s about six, to India long enough that she forgets English.

The Problem with Dolls

The video below is about a high school student who repeated the famous experiment where black children are given a choice to either pick a white doll or a black doll. (Thanks Cake for passing it on to me.)

Maybe the experiment isn't that well constructed. Maybe it's an oversimplification to think that nothing has changed since 1956. Maybe the sample of little children isn't representative of most black kids in America. Maybe the self-hatred is being passed on by black parents to their own children, a process of internalizing a history of racism even though the colored only signs are long gone. But I got a little teary while watching the video.

MaGreen's stepmother gave BabyG a doll for Christmas, a dark-skinned doll with black hair. It's the second brown doll she's gotten. The first one came before MaGreen gave birth and I wrote about that right when we started this blog. I had the same response this time as before. I resented the doll and I resented the giver. Those brown dolls make me feel hyper-aware of my own skin color. I would rather not feel that way. I'd rather feel like my background and culture are an integral part of my life, that they will be for BabyG too, but without this dred feeling of otherness. Maybe those dolls trigger some small bit of racialized self-hatred left inside of me? I know that Helen's intentions were good, just as they were when she gave me Barack Obama's book. MaGreen says her stepmother has given little brown dolls to all her friends' babies, white and black and brown and whatever else. Her own kind of activism.

The problem with dolls is that they give children (and adults) a chance to openly reveal their deep sense of identity. Sometimes I would rather have those deep feelings stay buried so we can pretend our way American-style to a better future. I prefer the doll that MaGreen's dad gave BabyG. It doesn't look human. Going non-human's the only way to escape race and sexuality. That's the closest I have to a solution - we should ban all humanish dolls. At least then high school students won't be able to make such troubling documentaries.

The Audacity of Hope

For Christmas, we all went up to Utah. The last time I had gone to Utah, I had seen MaGreen’s step-mother Helen nearly die. I spent a week babysitting BabyG while MaGreen talked with her father and sat with her step-mother in the intensive care unit. After a life of substance abuse, her liver was so scarred that her blood was backing up and bursting through some of her veins. When she wasn’t vomiting blood and being rushed into surgery, she was delirious and demented. It seemed so unlikely that she would live. The doctors performed a procedure called TIPS, which I wrote about, and she “recovered.” After a month, she was living at home and on the phone she seemed more clear headed than I had ever known her to be.

Even in the relatively short time I have known Helen, I have learned to check myself when I feel hopeful about her. Paradoxically, I feel sadder when she is clear headed. You realize what has been lost, the extraordinarily kind and perceptive person who has been lost. Talking to Helen when the “real” her emerges only reminds you of the inevitability of her decline. I know this sadness is harder for MaGreen since Helen raised her from a pretty early age.

We got digital photos of Helen by email from my parents when they were passing through Salt Lake City. She looked so much better that it surprised me. Her skin was no longer yellow but back to its Queen Elizabeth white whiteness. For several months, Helen had cogent conversations on the phone with me about the latest Britney Spears story or the weather. Sometimes a terrible and wondrous hope flickered through my mind. Maybe she will last, maybe she will stay sober, maybe she could qualify for a transplant.

When we got to Utah for the holidays, we immediately realized that Helen’s mental state had declined again. Some relatives had warned us, but you can never know for sure until you see a person face-to-face. Helen didn’t exactly recognize us. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. She didn’t always remember our wedding. She didn’t remember dancing with me during the reception. She often thought MaGreen was Caroline Kennedy. She thought MaGreen’s dad was four different people, three of whom were living in the basement and trying to impersonate her real husband. She would walk through each room of her own house collecting objects and piling them up because they were hers. “How did this remote get here, this is my remote.” She would leave the house when no one was looking, walk through the snow in her slippers, and ask her neighbors to take her to the home she lived in before. She seemed more like an Alzheimer’s patient than anything else and my cynical, anti-hope side was clucking its tongue triumphantly.

For Christmas, Helen gave me a copy of Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope. I had wanted the book. I had told MaGreen that I wanted a copy on the flight over from Texas. How could Helen have known that in the few days preceeding our trip, I had started to become infatuated with Barack Obama? The gift was a reminder that even this demented person who couldn’t remember who I am still had the “real” Helen inside of her, the person who is so perceptive she knows their desires better than they know themselves.

I read most of the book between car trips to Myton, Roosevelt, Vernal, Neola, Heber, and Salt Lake City. Obama departs from the style of his first book, which was a memoir. He only makes passing references to his personal and family history. It’s also not a statement of his policy goals. The book is more an analysis of rhetoric, a call for richer public discourse. Sometimes while I was reading, I wanted to cry, and to jump up and down. Obama is so eloquent and intelligent. He puts into clear prose the kind of arguments I have only come across in heady, theoretical books like Zygmunt Bauman’s In Search of Politics. He is such an impossible figure. It’s simplistic to call his background exotic. His genotype, his phenotype, his life story, his identity, and his rhetoric – together they are like some kind of manufactured narrative that magically reconciles all of the festering histories we never even acknowledge in the US. He seems to be the beautiful person I have always felt inside of myself, but who was battered down when I was a child by little unknowing kids regurgitating the latent hatred in our society, the beautiful person I myself won’t allow to show because I am too angry and timid and petty.

Having received this gift from Helen of all people, I felt the audaciousness of the audacity of hope, which is to say I felt ridiculous and naïve and vulnerable. Here I was carrying this book with a mixed-race liberal on the cover through rural Utah. MaGreen may as well have been Caroline Kennedy and I Rajiv Gandhi back from the grave. What would that make BabyG? I do not want to be so cynical about Helen’s chances to recover. I do not want to be so cynical to think that this nation could really come to accept a person like Barack Obama as its leader, which would be akin to a deep reconciliation inside of me.

On Chanting

I have chanted my whole life. It has taken me too long to admit that to myself. That I have always chanted. That I can't escape it. It has taken becoming a father.

My family is from India and I was taught to chant Om. I think that when most Americans think of chanting Om, it is something bizarre. Laughable. Woodstock hippies chant Om. Even for those who are into yoga, I think chanting Om must feel exotic. But my exposure to chanting was from a very early age. First my dad gave my brother and me instruction in Prana Yama, or breathing techniques. Then when the Hindus in Mobile, Alabama, where I grew up, got a group meeting going every month, I learned more about chanting from Dr. Virupaksha Kothandapani. We called him Dr. Pani for short.

Dr. Pani taught us that there are four parts to expressing Om. The first is an aa sound. Then the oh sound. Then mmm. And finally silence. He explained the cosmological significance of each segment. He explained that the four parts blend together. He discussed the way your lips should move. How the sound comes from the depths of your body. How your chin might vibrate. How there are really two parts to the silence. The first part where there is no breadth and the second part when you take in breadth. We discussed whether you should keep your eyes open or closed or half opened. I took him so seriously. The way only a child can. If Dr. Pani knew how seriously I took him, I think he would have had second thoughts about those lessons.

At the beginning of each meeting, the whole group – about one hundred people – would chant Om together ten times. People said that chanting Om together relaxed them. That it made them momentarily forget their problems. It got them ready to discuss scriptures. One month, at the beginning of the meeting, during the chanting, on about the fifth or sixth Om, a tremendous and indescribably feeling washed over my entire body. My whole sense of self and being got subsumed in this totally overwhelming joyousness. I started crying. Part of me wanted to jump up and explain what had happened. But I thought that people would think I was a fool or seeking attention. It was 1986. Eight-year-old Indian-American boys didn't declare they had experienced satchitananda in 1986.

X

For a long time, when I chanted I tried to recover the intensity that I felt when I was eight. And without success. I had to portage around what was going on in my mind too often. By the time I was sixteen, when I closed my eyes the image of some girl I was infatuated with was likely to fill my mind. When I was taught Hinduism, the central lesson was a verse from the Gita that goes like this, Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana, Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani. It roughly means that you should act according to your duties, but you should not be attached to the fruit of your actions. Attachments spiral into animal like behavior and suffering. So any attachment – as in lust for the red-headed goth who I saw in the hallway everyday between first and second periods – was not an appropriate beginning to start chanting from. So I stopped chanting.

A few years later, when I was a sophomore in college, I was a volunteer DJ for the college radio station. So I had access to the station's library of recordings. I would pick out five albums a week and listen to them in my room. I was desperately trying to figure out my taste in music. I came across a CD in a hardcover booklet. It was called Deep in the Heart of Tuva: Cowboy Music from the Wild East. The recordings were of Tuvan chanting, which is a kind of multi-tonal throat singing. One person sings in such a way that they produce at least two clear notes – a really high top note modulated into a melody above a guttural base note. It sounds kind of like an air-conditioning unit or a jet engine or a vacuum cleaner. I didn't come up with those comparisons actually. They were in the liner notes. I think the whole packaging – the title of the album, the booklet, the liner notes – tried to help Americans appreciate something very bizarre. I'm not criticizing the album or the packaging. But I think the album meant something else to me because it brought me back to chanting, back to what I had done before.

The thing about Tuvan chanting is that the singers aren't monks. They are mostly nomadic people. Shepherds. They don't chant to rid themselves of lust. They chant with the passion of men and women who live in the world. They chant for their animals, their yaks and their sheep. They chant for their lovers and their children. They chant to evoke spirits, demons, and ancestors. That wordly, celebratory, bodily aspect to the Tuvan chanting blew open a big door for me. It was one way back into the spirituality I grew up with, not the scriptural discourse of being unattached, but something else.

My dorm room was next to Michael Kraskin's. He was encouraging me to collaborate with him as a cellist and as a composer. We were sound designing a performance that David Terry was putting together, which has subsequently become the subject of episode 44 of their podcast, Catalogue of Ships. I spent so much time on music that I nearly failed a really important organic chemistry exam. If I wasn't working out a new section of the score with Mike or at one of David's insane rehearsals, I was in my room by myself practicing the cello, listening to the Tuvan chants, or chanting myself. I had a little tape recorder and I would record my chants. I kept trying to hear the multiple tones that I knew were already there. If I could hear the different tones, I thought I could tease them out. It felt crazy. But Dr. Pani had already taught me the basics when I was eight. I mean I wasn't Tuvan chanting back then, but the shaping of the lips, the contouring of the mouth, and the diaphragmatic breathing he taught me were exactly the right preparations for Tuvan chant.

I count those performances with Michael for David's play as a major accomplishment in my life. I played the cello as I had never done before. I even brought some chanting in. I was studying to be a physician, but I thought maybe I should be an artist.

A few weeks later, on a weeknight, sometime after midnight, I sat down on the floor in my dorm room to chant softly. Then I stopped and focused on my breathing. Then I started to feel an energy work its way up my spine. When it reached my head, I lost sense of time. Unlike when I was eight, there wasn't a whole room of people to worry about. By the time my ecstatic experience ended, I could barely walk. I was frightened. It seemed like I had experienced what the Hindu scriptures described as an endpoint, but I did not want to go back to that place and lose myself there, or deceive myself into thinking I was all of a sudden enlightened.

I gave up Tuvan chanting. I gave up meditating. I stopped collaborating with Michael and David. And I got the highest score on the next organic chemistry exam. I completely annihilated the curve.

X

Over the following years, the Tuvan chanting would creep back. I went to medical school. I quit medical school. I lived in Chicago. I lived in New York. I moved to Houston. I would chant for my friends. Then I would try to stop again. When I first met MaGreen, there was this party we were both at. It was poolside at a fancy apartment complex. We went swimming and there was a waterfall you could sit underneath. I just had the urge there to chant in accompaniment to the water with MaGreen and some other new friends there listening. It felt right. But then people asked me to do it again and again like it was a party trick. And that saddened me. So I swore off chanting again.

MaGreen understood that the chanting was sacred to me, which I appreciated. She understands the quivering line between the sacred and the silly. However, she's a bit tone deaf. She really values the lyrics in music and the overall effect of music. But she doesn't sing or play an instrument. We can't make music together. That's something I have had to silently forgive her for.

So when MaGreen went into labor and started to moan in a chant-like way, I was really surprised. That was about a year ago. On my birthday. Our daugher BabyG was born on my twenty-eight birthday. We had gotten to the hospital at midnight. We thought MaGreen was in full-blown labor, but when the midwife drove in she told us to try to sleep because active labor hadn't started yet. I slept until six am. I woke up to MaGreen's moaning. It was a high-pitched moan with an even higher tone ringing above the main note like a lone fire truck hurdling through the night sounding its sirens. Not to clear traffic but to align all the elements in the universe to focus all the forces from above and below calling them to the cause. Outside the hospital, the city was waking up. Jets howled, the buried pipes and cables whirred, lawnmowers, compressors, and heaters groaned, whined, and growled. The highway was one long wail. But MaGreen outmoaned it all, the whole city. Her moan was beyond any of my chanting. It was beyond any of the recordings of Tuvans I had heard. Her moan emanated from the walls and floor as if her moan never wasn’t there. It was not accidental like a leafblower’s whistle, like an air-conditioning unit's dueling drones. It was a sound beyond profit, beyond time-use and opportunity costs and comparative advantage, beyond concrete spilling over steel. She moaned with singular purpose. She started crying for air because she moaned it all out of her. Then she moaned some more.

I used to think chanting was something I would pass on to my child. But when I remember Lila's and my birthday, how MaGreen moaned, I think that maybe sound is not arbitrary. When I listen to BabyG chant herself to sleep in the car seat, I think maybe sound isn't just an artifact of particles or waves or wavicles. Maybe the phenomenological experience of sound isn't just an accident of evolution, a footnote of survival and selection, of frontal lobe development. And maybe chanting isn't just a culture or a tradition, or even a higher order physiology. Maybe to think I should pass chanting on to BabyG is like thinking I should write the moon and the stars into my will.

On Redemption and Race-Mixing

The company that hosts our website provides us with information about who visits our website. When we began blogging, we had about 100 "unique visitors" per month and now, a year later, we have over 3,500 per month. I don't know how this statistic is calculated, but I assume that around 3,500 individuals take a look at the Green Parenting blog and some portion of this number regularly reads our posts. Our host also lists the sites that link to ours. This week I noticed 200 visits from littlegeneva.com. I went to see what wonderful people decided to promote our blog. A tiny little confederate flag – the flag of the slave-holding states during the American Civil War – popped up next to the url. I knew I was about to see something interesting.

The basic argument propounded on littlegeneva.com is that the Bible tells Christians to marry within their race and that America's greatness depends on racial purity. The post with the link to Green Parenting was called "Reject Race, Reject America" and the title of the link was "Race-Mixers and Pagans," which went to my post about how MaGreen and I have different religious backgrounds. The post included a picture of Amba Ma, a Hindu goddess, with the face of Jesus spliced on it. I am pleased that my post seems to have really hit the mark for littlegeneva. Not only are we "race-mixers," but we are also pagans. We seem to epitomize exactly what he loathes.

I've shared this discovery with some of my friends and co-workers. They ask, "Aren't you worried?" As a matter of fact, I'm not worried by the link to our blog. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Racial insults and threats were not quite a daily occurrence, but they were common. At the nearly all-white school I attended, St. Paul's Episcopal, my classmates refused to touch me my first year there. I was an untouchable. The substitute nigger. They often called me by names including mix-breed. I always wanted to say, "I'm not a mix-breed. My family can trace back its Nagar Brahmin ancestors for fourteen generations. You're the mix-breeds. You don't even know where your families come from." I never actually said that. What I did do was trounce the rest of the students every year and in every single class including Bible Study. When I made a perfect score and they barely passed, I would clench my fist and relish my academic superiority, which did not help matters.

And yet, I never got beat up. I knew what lines not to cross and when I was in real danger. I spent time with all kinds of white people in Alabama. My Boy Scout friends and I had this game whenever we were out in the country where we would rate pick-up trucks for the number of Confederate flags displayed, the number of guns in the rack, and other such features. I remember one afternoon at Camp Maubila, the regional Boy Scout campgrounds, spent trying to teach some very poor white boys from Bayou La Batre how to spell words like "socks" and "shoes." The same day at dinner, the boy behind me in the cafeteria line grumbled, "hurry up sand nigger." So I grew up very much in my skin. I often wished I was white. Up until we left Alabama, I felt that I was ugly and undesirable. My pen and my intellect were my refuge.

Years later, when I visited India, my identity as a victimized person of color was turned inside out. I really was the pure-bred Brahmin. I was the light-skinned person benefiting from the privileges that my family there took for granted. I identified with the people my family and my ancestors looked down on and, arguably, exploited. Simultaneously occupying a privileged, high-caste position and the subaltern position of the substitute nigger has given me double vision. That doubleness feeds my empathy for the exploiter and the exploited; my questioning of gender norms; my passion for ecological balance; my impatience for economic injustice; and my deep connection with MaGreen, who grew up in very different circumstances from me but came out with the same basic perspective on the world.

I thought about writing a comment on the littlegeneva blog. But how am I to engage with someone who bases his beliefs on obscure quotes from the Old Testament? It saddens me that bloggers can create amazing communities, but the worldviews of these communities can be so dramatically different there is no potential for fruitful exchange. Littlegeneva sees the browning of America. He so energetically documents the sea change taking place here. It makes him deeply angry, as if he is being attacked. He thinks the British, European, White, Christian customs that were planted in America's fresh soil will be vanquished. I wish he could see what I have seen. Then he would know that if those customs can be redeemed from their awful pasts, it will be by the mix-breeds like my daughter.

Let My Daughter See the Stars

I lived on the edge of a salt desert in a city called Dhrangadhra. The house had two rooms and a kitchen. All my roommates were social workers and engineers. They worked from ten in the morning until nine at night. I wrote reports about their work. Summaries of how many homes they helped rebuild after an earthquake. I told them I was a poet and they treated me that way. When my stomach could not hold food, they brought me yoghurt. They showed me the way along the shepherds’ paths to the temple of Sitala Ma. I was invited to dinner on a concrete rooftop.

I was told the name Dhrangadhra comes from the Sanskrit for stoney ground. When I say the name – Dhrangadhra – it feels like I’m rolling stones in my mouth. The local industry was the carving of statues. I saw women heaving rock out of the ground with pick axes. I saw men hammering out goddesses in the middle of the street.

In this city, on the edge of the salt desert, water flowed through the pipes once a day for half an hour. I was told we were lucky to have that much water. The year before water was driven in by truck. Every evening at about eight, the power went out. The whole city blacked out. At first, I had the generator outside the office fired up so I could keep typing up reports. Ultimately, I planned on the darkness. I left the office and walked to the house with two rooms. Though night had fallen, the social workers and engineers were still in the field. I waited alone for the black outs to come. And when they came, the earth disappeared beneath me and the stars emerged.

I had seen the stars – as in all of them – only once before. In rural Alabama, a field in the woods, just where you wouldn’t expect a brown boy to be. In Dhrangadhra, on the edge of a salt dessert, where the water flows through the pipes once per day for half an hour, where the lights black out at eight in the evening, I saw all the stars every night. That’s when I realized the gravity of the theft of the night sky.

I do not speak of stars metaphorically. When I speak of the stars, I do not mean an archaic worldview. I do not mean to evoke magic (although I am partial to the possibility of mysteries). I do not mean to bash science. My ancestors were skeptics and rationalists. When I speak of stars, I mean the stars themselves. Fusion. Plasma. Heat. Light. That throbbing area of methodical inquiry. I mean the spectacle of the universe, seeing it from our little corner. Considering. To put your self in perspective is the beginning of wisdom, well-being, poetry, ecological awareness, and the will to struggle. Seeing the stars is neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving this kind of perspective. But it sure helps. The most elegant poetry about stars I have read was written by our most eloquent voices for justice. Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardinal, Nazim Hikmet. Is this an accident?

Now I live under the perpetual glow of street lights. The sky in Houston is a giant emblem of our own opacity. Development as blindness. Dhrangadhra is so strange to me now. I’m afraid I might have made it up or read about it in a book. I have started this essay many times. I should have finished it years ago. But now I am a father. There is a new sense of urgency in me when I look up at the grand blankness of our nights.

On the Legacy of Bismillah Khan

Bismillah Khan died Monday at the age of 91. Khan was the renowned master of the shehnai, an instrument that sounds a bit like an oboe. I’ve never mourned the death of a musician before.

My parents had a large collection of audio cassette tapes. When I grew up in Alabama, Indian culture was hard to come by. Back then, we had to drive five hours to reach the nearest Indian grocery store. There was no Netflix or satellite TV. You could not download Indian music from iTunes. People brought back music and video recordings from India, which were then systematically copied and shared. In our family room, there was a cabinet full of these pirated tapes with hand-written labels. My parents had a habit of writing the labels in Gujarati, a language they did not teach me to read. During the languid hours of my childhood – I’m astonished by how much free time I had – I popped the tapes into my Walkman one by one. Usually I was frustrated by them. Most of the recordings were of Hindi film songs or folk songs I couldn’t understand. The Bismillah Khan tape, however, didn’t have lyrics. Just the shehnai.

I listened to that one tape over and over. On one bus trip I took, I tucked myself into a cloth seat and played the tape into my headphones at least three times in a row. The recording was of an hour long performance. Everybody on the bus was a musician. It was an orchestra trip. My friend wanted to know what I was listening to, but when I passed the headphones to him he shook his head. “This isn’t very good,” he said. For my friend, Khan’s music couldn’t stand up to Mozart or Mahler. I realized that he couldn’t hear the subtlety I heard. And that made the listening experience even richer for me. I relished Bismillah Khan’s music all the more because my friend could not understand it. The music gave me a way to draw a line around my Indian identity, which felt so unstable and fragile. Khan’s music itself was tenuous and yet epic. A Himalayan brook flowing into the Ganges.

I later learned that Bismillah Khan was a devout Muslim and that he also worshipped the Hindu goddess Saraswati. He often played in the Hindu temples of Varanasi. His most famous performance was at the Red Fort in Delhi on the eve of Indian independence. My parents played his music before any puja. His recordings were played at our wedding. During a century of horrendous communal bloodshed in India, no one represented the history of dialogue between Muslims and Hindus like he did.

Ultimately Khan's music took on two significant meanings for me. He was the end of my self-loathing as an Indian American and the beginning of my pride and love for my family’s culture. He was also the fluidity and flexibility that gives me strength to step outside narrow definitions of that same Indian culture, the strength to immerse myself in other American cultures without losing my roots. I really want to pass those two, seemingly opposing states of mind on to my daughter.

Raksha Bandan – A Tradition Worth Rethinking

When I was a kid, around this time every year, my female cousins would send my brother and me little string bracelets called rakhi. Then my parents would send them a little gift on our behalf. I wore my rakhi with pride. When I was very young, I remember the rakhi as a fairly simple piece of string, maybe with a little foil embellishment. As the years went by and Indian stores popped up in the US, the rakhi became these fantastically gaudy, multicolored creations. The point of the tradition, however, is not the beauty of the rakhi itself, but the bond between brothers and sisters that it symbolizes. Since I didn't have any sisters, the rakhi symbolized my bond with my cousin-sisters who lived all over the US, in India, and even Australia. Because my family is diasporized, I think those little pieces of string took on even more importance than in the days of yore.

Now that my brother and I have our own kids, it's time for us to continue this excellent tradition, right? I actually refuse to carry on with Raksha Bandan on the same terms. Treating cousin-sisters thousands of miles away as if they were my sisters was an adaptation. I think it's time for another adaptation, another rethinking of this very old custom. My problem is that the discourse around the rakhi is patriarchal. The sister gives the bracelet to her brother as a sign of appreciation for his protection. For example, this description of the meaning of Raksha Bandan, which I found on raksha-bandhan.com, is typical:

Rakhi or Raksha is a sacred thread embellished with sister's love and affection [sic] for her brother. On the day of Raksha Bandhan sisters tie Rakhi on their brother's wrist and express their love for him. By accepting a Rakhi from a sister a brother gladly takes on the responsibility of protecting her sister. In Indian tradition the frail thread of Rakhi is considered stronger than iron chains as it binds brothers and sisters in an inseparable bond of love and trust.

This narrative of taking on "the responsibility of protecting the sister" reflects a whole worldview where only by virtue of a man's status can a woman have any security or rights. A worldview in which honor is associated with cloistered women who are subservient to men from cradle to grave, where women do all the cooking, housework, childcare, eldercare, and if they do any paid labor it is informal, and where men can move about more freely and have the right (and obligation) to do the paid labor. My family does not live in that world. It hasn't for two generations now. My mother, my wife, and my sister-in-law all have careers. They have rights independent of my relationship with them. I hope that our familial bonds are based on love.

Why should BabyG send her male cousin, Akshay, a rakhi and not get one back from him? Why shouldn't BabyG and her female cousin, Asha, exchange rakhi too? We should expand Raksha Bandan. It should signify all sisterly and brotherly bonds. They can all protect and love one another. If we cut the patriarchy from the tradition, the tradition is not weakened. It can open up and bring more meaning to our lives.

Miscegenation Smiscegenation – Are There Gods for Mix-breeds?

Before Miah and I married, a number of people in my family had said to me, “Look, when you are young and you fall in love, your differences do not seem to matter. But when you get older and life’s troubles come your way, when death is nearer, people go back to the religion they were raised with. So you should think twice about marrying a Christian.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Miah wasn’t raised as a church-going Christian. I care more about the Bible than she does. If someone takes our kid to church, it’s going to be me.”

But I decided to act on my family's concerns and I asked Miah to sit down with me to talk about religion. I dug up an old pamphlet someone gave me in college that explained basic Hindu beliefs and we read it together. It was written by Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, who I imagined, by virtue of the number of letters in his name, to be as authentic a guru as is possible. The pamphlet claimed that all Hindus – every single one of the billion Hindus – believe in these principles paraphrased below:

1) One Supreme Being, both immanent and transcendent, Creator and Unmanifest Reality, pervades the universe and can take innumerable forms. By worshipping these forms, we can have communion with the Supreme Being.

2) The soul reincarnates, progressing, and developing toward union with the divine universe.

3) Karma is the law of cause and effect by which individual navigates his/her own destiny by his/her thoughts, words, and deeds. Dharma is the set of duties that guide us along the moral path.

4) Spiritually awakened gurus help devotees with personal discipline, good conduct, purification, self-inquiry, and meditation.

5) All life is sacred and should be loved and revered, leading to ahinsa or the practice of non-violence.

6) The universe undergoes endless cycles of creation, preservation, and dissolution.

7) No religion teaches the only way to salvation above all others.

When Miah and I finished reading the list, we talked about whether we agreed with each principle or not. It turned out I was skeptical of almost all of them. I was taught all these principles as a child and they shaped who I am, and they continue to shape me, as do the sacraments, songs, mantras, and books that I was exposed to. But now, as an adult, I question these principles. Since there is a four-thousand-year-old history of atheism and agnosticism within the Hindu tradition, I do not see myself as an ex-Hindu, a jack-Hindu, or a lapsed Hindu.

The weird thing was that Miah agreed with almost all of the principles. According to the pamphlet, she’s more of a Hindu than I am. So there! If our baby believes in reincarnation, it’s going to be because of Miah not me. To top things off, while writing this entry I found out that Sivaya Subramuniyaswami was a white, American man born in Oakland, California! There is no pure, stable Hinduism (or Christianity) that we can fail to raise our daughter in.



I'm not saying my family members are flat wrong. Marriages across religions often don't work. I've seen it happen – closet Christians, Moslems, and Hindus suddenly demanding that their partner and their children adopt a particular set of religious views. All I am saying is that I think Miah, I, and our baby will be fine regarding gods, goddesses, and the monistic all-pervasive manifest and unmanifest that each of us may or may not believe in.

technoratti tags: religion, miscegenation, green, christianity, hinduism

We Marched for More Than Reform

We marched on April 10, 2006 in Houston, Texas. The protest, which was one of many across the US, was organized in opposition to a House bill that would make undocumented people felons and in support of a just reform of immigration policies. Miah left from home with the baby and drove straight to the starting point, Guadalupe Plaza. I left from work with two colleagues by Metro Rail. At the last stop, we met up with two more people, one of whom had her baby with her in a stroller, and then walked towards the plaza. A contingent of the Free Radicals band joined us so we walked and danced to the accompaniment of drums and saxophone. We nearly got to I-10 when we saw the thousands weaving their way under the highway. The march had already begun.





A man on stilts dressed like Uncle Sam was at the front. Behind him was a man in a wheelchair holding a sign that read “WWII Vet.” There were a series of banners that led the way. Most of them were in Spanish. I learned Spanish informally so these translations are rough, but I think the signs said, “We are workers, not criminals” and “110% Native American.” A group of four men with feathered headgear, bare chests, and what I would call a dhoti danced in a Native American style. Miah and our baby were near the head of the march, so we all joined up and walked together. We were in the middle of a Central American contingent. We shouted out in unison, “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido” and “Si Se Puede.”

“Thank you for supporting us,” a man said to me smiling.

“Thank you,” I said. What I wanted to say was that immigration laws don’t just affect Latinos. I’m not supporting his people. He’s supporting my people. I have a family friend who was detained for three months without ever being formally charged with any crime after September 11. My participation was not strictly out of goodwill for unnamed others. I didn’t march out of liberal pity. I marched because I’m angry. I marched for the uncle I never knew. I was sad that the 50,000+ were almost entirely Latino, even as I was grateful that this one community stood up for all the others – Arab, South Asian, Asian, European, and African.

My spirits rose wildly once I started to realize how many people were there. Houston is too flat, I thought. It was hard to see an end to the people. Then I realized there was no end. I wanted to be in a helicopter for a moment so that I could grasp the enormity of the march. The route was a bit isolated. There weren’t very many people watching us. We couldn’t wave our signs for spectators. We passed by the city jails. I hope the prisoners heard us. Policemen watched us coldly from a balcony. I know that even though their faces were even, in their minds they knew, and we knew, that no amount of force could contain us and that the legislation the House passed was already dead. We shouted slogans for each other, to galvanize our solidarity. People started to improvise chants and make jokes to each other. I felt brotherhood and sisterhood. The march was long. It gave us time to become familiar with people who had been strangers.



“USA, USA, USA!” people shouted as they waved American flags. It was astonishing to see how this act, which I usually perceive as jingoistic war-mongering, took on a subversive meaning. The freedom of movement and universal citizenship – this is perhaps the most important struggle during our times. I was marching for Palestinian migrants in Kuwait. I was marching for Burmese migrants in Bangladesh. For the Algerians in Paris. For the Biharis in Bombay. For the Sudanese in Cairo. For the Bolivians in Buenos Aires.

One young woman stared me down as she shouted “USA, USA, USA” until I started shouting it with her. I felt good about it. The US constitution simultaneously initiated the Human Rights movement and codified chattel slavery. America contains both – liberation and domination. On April 10, when I shouted “USA, USA” it was for the liberatory force.

Miah carried our baby in a sling and even breastfed her as we marched. Then we put her in the stroller and she slept even as the chanting went on around. The march ended at Allen’s landing, where the first anglo immigrants started settling Houston. We picked a spot under a tree. Other families followed suit and pretty soon there was a calm little pocket of babies giggling, sleeping, and crawling amid the bustling mass. Our baby may not have known where she was, but I hope that the vibration of hope and people power settled somewhere deep inside her marrow.

On the Legacy of Vasumati Desai

My maternal grandmother, Vasumati Desai, died Wednesday March 22, 2006 at the age of 88. I simply called her Ma. She was living with my uncle, Yogesh “Hiru” Desai, and his family in Baltimore. Maryland. When he returned from work that Wednesday afternoon, he tried to wake her up from what seemed to be an unusually long nap. Ma was already gone. Her expression was calm. There was no sign that her last moments were painful. Hiru mama told me that her eyes were half closed and that she held a tissue in her hand as if she had just wiped her nose. My dad, who was there shortly after Hiru mama found her, added that Ma’s face was turned towards the window. Ma’s heart had weakened in the past few years and her heart beat had been unsteady. She could still walk and largely took care of her own needs. Nobody expected that particular day would be her last. She probably had a sudden, massive heart attack or stroke.

Ma was born on February 19, 1918 in Porbandar, an old city on the coast of the Arabian sea. Incidentally, Ma shared her birthplace with none other than Mohandes Gandhi. The Mahatma was born in Porbandar several decades before my grandmother. Unlike Gandhi, Ma never led a struggle for national liberation. She did not turn her life into an international movement for justice. Richard Attenborough did not and will never make a three-hour film on her life. On the grand scale of History, she was an ordinary person. A mother, a schoolteacher, a good citizen. However, I feel a deep urge to set down in writing – for posterity! – some of my knowledge and memories about her.

Ma’s parents (my great-grandparents) were Chaganlal and Champak Bakshi. Ma once told me that her father's held himself as stiffly as a cane. He was a school headmaster. I imagine that he was an immaculately kept and crisply dressed man. Their home life, however, was not disciplinary or harsh. They had progressive ideas for their time. The men, women, and children ate their meals together. They supported the education of their daughters and they found a husband for Ma who would do the same. She completed a masters degree in English after her marriage to my grandfather.

There were some unusual things about Ma that I attribute to her upbringing. For example, all her children addressed her by her first name – Vasumati. This is unusual in any culture, I think, but it is especially unusual in ours. She was also uncommonly observant of people. She tried to understand people’s psychology and their motivations. The word she used was swabow, which she translated as a person’s nature. “Swa” means self. It also appears in Gandhi’s two favorite words, swaGreenDaddy (self-rule) and swadesh (made by one’s own country). Ma’s strangest habit of all was to tell people that she loved them. I’ve never known another Indian of her generation to say “I love you.”

Ma lived in Bombay until my grandfather, who we called Nanaji, died in 1992. Unlike the other children in my school, I could not just go to “grandma’s house” for the weekend. Visiting her meant two days of plane flights from Mobile, Alabama through Atlanta then London to Bombay. In those days, we packed our bags full of VCRs, telephones, watches, and other gadgets, because India still maintained customs and tariffs to protect its own post-colonial economy. Nobody talked about globalization back then. We could only make the voyage every four years or so. We could only stay for one month and had to split that time between all our relatives. Those visits, however brief and far between, were formative for me. For the rest of my life, Ma and Nanaji’s home in Goregam, a neighborhood of Bombay, will be the real and authentic India to me. The refrigerator that gave you a jolt when you reached for the handle, the firm beds hung with mosquito nets, the midnight honking and bustle from the street, and the open gutter. When I think of Ma’s house, I feel an overwhelming mix of awe, pride, and shame that I believe most Indians feel about India, but that first generation Indian-Americans experience in our own acute way.

About a year after Nanaji and Ma moved from Bombay to Ahmedebad, Nanaji died. A year after that, Ma moved to the United States. She was so lonely and isolated then. I think she experienced our comfortable American lifestyle as a golden prison. She stopped wearing a gigantic red bindi. Her wardrobe consisted of white saris. Ironically, after all those years with the electrocuting refrigerator, it was our kitchen that terrified her. It took us years to get her to operate a microwave. She skipped meals if no one was there to cook or warm up food for her. The woman who ran a Bombay household only a few years before was no more. She did not wail or cry in front of me, but her resignation was painful to see. But she survived this period and bit by bit emerged into a routine life of reading the Gita, watching television, waiting by the window, and hanging out once we got home from school or work.

For the next ten years or so, I spent a huge amount of time with Ma. I’m not sure I can say what I learned from her. We chatted in English usually. I extracted a type of family history by peppering her with questions. She was just such a kind, loving, unassuming, intelligent, observant, and quietly determined woman. She tried to reason with me if she disagreed with my choices – like when I quit medical school – but ultimately respected my final decisions. If we talked on the phone, she always ended with that courageous and somewhat awkward “I love you.”

Ma’s funeral was the first Hindu funeral that anyone in our immediate family had organized or even been to in America. She was taken directly to a funeral home from Hiru mama’s house. Her body was refrigerated, but not embalmed. The service was held just a day and a half after she died. A priest conducted a short sacrament during which he had Hiru mama fashion five balls out of flour and water. They symbolized the five elements of the universe – earth, air, fire, water, and ether – and were placed next to Ma’s body. The casket was a card board box that my mom wrapped with one of Ma’s saris. My mom and my aunt, Jagruti mami, also had to help the funeral directors dress Ma’s body in a sari. The funeral directors did put make-up on Ma’s body. They even put some lipstick on the lips which I thought was a bit funny. I think it was the first time those lips had ever worn lipstick. It was Ma's bare feet that caught my attention. Her big, wide feet. Toes all the same length because she wore sandals all her life and never shoes. I list all these details because I think the funeral was just as Ma would have liked it – unassuming, not wasteful, and dignified.

After the sacrament, I helped role the body out the building, across the parking lot, and into the crematorium. It was basically a large shed with a metal structure inside that kind of looked like an oversized pizza oven. Several funeral directors placed the box with Ma’s body inside onto a gurney and then into the furnace itself. They closed and bolted the door. Hiru mama pressed down two switches and there was a roaring sound. At that moment, most of the seventy or so people gathered there collectively lost composure and cried.

I didn’t cry then. At least, I don’t think I did. I actually felt lightness. Even joy. Ma’s death was enviable. Her last moments weren’t on a crash cart or in a hospital bed rigged with tubes. She did not live a fairy tale life, but she did live a full one. I did not have any regrets about our relationship. I listened to her until she was tired of talking. Ma never got to see or hold my daughter, but for the past year she said the same thing to me, whether on the phone or in person, every time we talked, as if she already had one foot on the other side and she knew what she wanted her last words to me to be. “Bless you and MaGreen and BabyG," she said, "Be happy. OK? I love you.”

Brown Man, Green Dad

Miah and I went to a fair for parents and expecting parents at the Houston United Way building. Our friend Jay was helping at a booth for a new Waldorf school. The La Leche League, the Women’s Health Specialists, two birthing centers, a Montessori school, photographers, chiropractors, a life insurance company, and the guy who rents big storks to put in the lawn were among those passing out brochures and trinkets. We snagged a free bandaid holder. Most tables only had hard candies to give away. One lady – I don’t remember what her booth was for – handed MaGreen a free doll. Then when I walked up, the lady said, “You might like this one instead” and gave MaGreen a different doll. We moved on to the next table, the Nativiti Birthing Center, which had pictures of bathtub births.

I forgot about the doll until MaGreen told me that the lady had exchanged a fair doll for a dark doll after seeing me. It’s a little brown man waving one arm. The letters OBW are sewn into his breast for “Official Baby Watcher.” When we passed that booth again, I looked more carefully at the other dolls. There was a whole box of the fair dolls out. I wondered if the lady had a special one or two dark dolls to pull out on need? I appreciated her awareness. She was clearly well intentioned. Maybe if my school teachers back in Mobile, Alabama had been that alert and if they had materials like brown dolls that validated my presence, things would have been better for me. MaGreen noticed later on that the white lady who gave us the brown doll had a brown man with her.

Actually, two groups at the fair had missions that focused on people of color. The community doula program trains Latinas to become doulas. And there was one booth for African-American women breast-feeding. Those booths weren’t very busy. Getting the dark doll for our expected little one, as nice as it was, ultimately made me especially aware of how “white” the whole fair was. You could count those who were obviously people of color on one hand. In my experience, this type of demographic is typical of progressive or environmental events. Even though groups want to reach out to ethnic and racial “minorities” – we actually constitute the majority here in Houston – the actual people who show up, well let’s just say it’s like vanilla ice cream sprinkled with chocolate chips.

One explanation is that there is a history of racism in progressive and environmental movements. For example, many conservationist policies take no consideration of the largely dark-skinned people who live amidst the world’s remaining wilderness. It’s as if they never existed. “Over population” can be code for “too many dark people.” Take a look at these two articles, Los Angelos Times and Common Dreams, about the recent failed attempts by nativists to take over the Sierra Club.

But there are all kinds of explanations. You know, maybe it’s that people of color have a different set of material concerns and we organize in ways that make sense to our different communities. Here are some examples:

Chipko Movement
Did you know that Indians, as in people from India, invented tree hugging? The Chipko movement was begun by women and men in Himalayan villages to stop commercial logging. Their embracing of trees led to inhabited wilderness initiatives. Bina Agarwal is a brilliant economist who has written extensively about this movement and its results.

African American Environmentalist Association
This organization seems to really be a one-man show. Here’s a link to an interview of the director and founder, Norris McDonald. Believe it or not, he’s an African-American Republican environmentalist.

Land Rights in New Mexico
The Hispanos of New Mexico are fighting for rights to land grants and water rights that were recognized by the Treaty of Hidalgo. And they are often at odds with the mostly white conservationists. Here's a link to a related activist site, La Jicarita News.

I’m curious what readers think. Issues of race/ethnicity, poverty, gender, rights, and the environment are all linked. Or “tangled up” might be the better phrase. It’s hard to get your mind around.

I'm pretty sure my daughter will have lighter skin than me and this new brown-skinned doll. She’ll be half Indian and half white. She’ll also be a relatively privileged child, like I was. I’m her father and I don’t want her to be among the unprivileged, those doomed to toxic food, toxic air, and too little fuel and water. But I don’t want her to be among the privileged either, because privilege can be its own type of suffering. I want to believe another world is possible.

Toxic Loss

Like GreenDaddy says, being pregnant has changed our perspective about things. So although I’ve known about the evil nature of toxic products since I was a kid, when I heard the Pacifica radio show about the way one woman eliminated toxins from her world, I was listening more carefully than usual. She noted a few studies – like women who spend most of their time in their homes have a much higher cancer rate than women who work outside the home, because of poor ventilation and the multitude of toxins present in the items we construct, furnish, & clean our homes with. The World Health Organization links cancer to industrialized nations, and in the US cancer rates are up by 49% since 1950 [http://www.globalstewards.org/toxics.htm].

Of course, there are thousands of causes for these higher rates. It is not just the products I choose to clean my house with. Or the plastics I fill it with. Or the plastics I wear. Or the pesticides on my food. Or the pollutants in the air. Or the 90% of synthetic chemical compounds in fragrances, personal products, cleaning products, and the air that have never even been measured for toxicity. My own geneology might work against me, or my sensitivity to products most people aren’t effected to. Like carrots. Carrots aren’t toxic to me, but they are toxic to some people, I’m sure.

But the point is, there are all these things, some of which I can control without much effort at all, effecting my life. Whereas before pregnancy I sort of shrugged off this information, and found it annoying, I’m feeling more revolutionary lately: I thought, well, we might as well try to do what we can to eliminate some of the risks. I quit drinking alcohol during pregnancy – why wouldn’t I quit hanging out in a house filled with petrochemicals? What harm will it do me not to buy milk in a jug? Or to give up my Windex for some old fashioned vinegar & water?

As it has turned out, I am still the girl that liked mixing Ajax and Laundry detergent to make ghost-paste. Another time, in childhood, my friend Scotty and I made a formula out of the forgotten chemicals in my father’s shed that not only killed stinging red ant populations for two and half minutes, exactly --- but if you used it to paint it would seep up through later layers of paint years down the road, so that even now, at least twenty layers of paint later, the brown letters we painted are still barely discernable on the whitish picket fence in the city park. And I reiterate: I am still this girl.

In terms of seeking out new solutions and supplies to clean my house, this is finally a good thing. I spent three or four hours on the internet, searching out different sorts of cleaning combinations that make different sorts of cleaning products. As it turns out, I am not the only person interested in “greening” my home. Hundreds of websites about eliminating toxic substances from your life exist. Hundreds more sites with recipes from people who just want to clean the house like “grandma” and don’t want to be reliant on buying cleaning products from the store. Between these two sorts of sites, I came up with my list. I think I’ll post the whole list on a separate post that details what we’ve found that works, and what we’ve found that doesn’t work.

For now, I’ll say I like knowing that I can clean my silver by leaving it in a sink filled with boiling hot water, a couple teaspoons of salt and baking soda, and a sheet of aluminum foil. The method is certainly faster than trying to rub all the nooks and crannies of the silver with silver polish. It makes me feel giddy and smart because its cheaper, its smarter, and its more fun than cleaning with products that give me headaches. I feel like I’m picking up knowledge my grandmothers’ knew, and that was if not stolen, hidden from me by the people who said my house isn’t clean if their product hasn’t touched it.

And most of all, I like knowing I’m doing this at the same time that I’ve taken a pretty simple step in making my house safe for our little girl. I’m grateful not have to worry about her crawling through a puddle of leaked bleach and dying of burn wounds or of eating toxic dishwashing detergent and dying of intestinal damage – two causes of baby and toddler deaths in American households more terribly common than you’d guess.

If she’s anything like I was, it’s good we’re getting rid of the toxic stuff. I’ll teach her [and any other little ones we have] to mix things that make useful products. I’ll dissuade her from putting Barkeepers’ Friend (a scouring powder sites say aren’t toxic) on her face, but I’m not against helping her search out and creating some sort of healthy, pasty natural “beauty product” she can use for pranks of her own. That’s awhile off, now, but I’m glad ahead of time.

Toxic Love

It does not take a rocket scientist to know bleach is toxic and dangerous. Or that nasty commercial mildew eater is. I mean, if you use a substance in your home that nauseates you, gives you a headache, or otherwise makes you want to leave said home for a couple of hours afterward for it to "air out" there's an eighty percent chance you're using something toxic and poisonous. And though you could continue to use toxic chemicals to clean your home for the rest of your life anyway, and though many of us do even though we know they're toxic, we don't have to.

This is not to say that I was not once the little girl who made a paste out of Ajax and dish soap, smeared it all over my face, and then tried to fool Arthur Young into thinking I was a minty-green faced ghost. Or that I didn’t understand my family friend Margot’s rage when she caught me coming home that day, or that I didn’t believe her horror when she said the Ajax was full of harsh chemicals. As a child, I believed adults weren’t lying about dangerous, poisonous things that could kill children, but I also believed that what they said was only true of most children in the world. I wasn’t most children. I was tough. I didn’t even get a rash when I put Ajax on my face and tried to convince Arthur Young that although I looked like little Miah Arnold, she was dead and I was her ghost. I was too tough to be effected by chemicals. Tougher than the rest of the world. Of course, I was also the type of kid who didn’t remember bad things, and so couldn’t recall how as a toddler I’d tossed back a jar of my aunt’s shellac, thinking it was milk, and actually would have become Miah Arnold’s ghost if not for the Duchesne County Hospital’s stomach pumper.

What I am trying to establish here is that I have had a long, intimate, and maybe even loving history with toxic chemicals. By the time I hit my mid-twenties, a statistically significant portion of my friends and acquaintances began developing weird allergies and sicknesses, my mother was increasingly bowled over by intense migraines, and for me, walking into the perfume section of a department store or the cleaning product section of a grocery store was liable to cause me a painful headache of my own. Did I choose to eschew these products ever afterwards? Of course not. I was resistant to the idea of eliminating toxins because:

Number One: It seemed wimpy in the same way smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol seemed cool. What kind of drip is afraid of a bottle of Windex? (Which, by the way, ought to be feared as it is particularly noxious according to countless sources as it contains butyl cellosolve, toxic to blood cells, kidneys, and livers. It's not listed on the label either. This irks me as I always imagined Windex as the most virginal of the cleaning products in terms of toxicity.)

Number Two: The whole comet smearing and other like episodes made me figure I was already too contaminated to save. I knew I couldn’t get out all the toxins, so I figured, why try?

Number Three: Some risks you take, even if they’re bad for your health, because their perks outweigh their downsides. Like smokers or drinkers (or breathers of the air in Houston, where we live) I figured so what if its bad for me. It’s too hard not to use them.

Number Four, which is really a subcategory of Number three: I don’t believe something is clean if it doesn’t have a brand name smell: windows like Windex, floors like Pine Sol, wood should be Lemon Pledgey…and I fully admit that if a bathroom doesn’t smell like its been the site of an industrial waste explosion, I don’t believe its clean. And if you think about this particular line of reasoning is illogical: I don’t believe something is clean unless it actively smells. Wouldn’t it be more logical to assume that something with no scent at all is cleaner than something I’ve wiped scent all over?

I should mention here that my transfiguration from badass-deer-ignoring-the-headlights into the crazy pregnant woman dumping all the chemicals in the house down the drain and declaring a moratorium on plastics was not immediate. As the conservatives would argue, it was part of a slippery slope most any liberal is in danger of falling into: a couple years ago we bit the financial bullet and started shopping at Whole Foods where we bought organic vegetables, free-range eggs, and hormone free milk. At some point, we joined a vegetable co-op to supplement this change. We toyed with and rejected (after watching SuperSizeMe) the idea of becoming vegans. We hovered at this stage a couple of years, through courtship and into marriage. And now we’re pregnant and we’ve taken enough small steps to consider taking a few larger ones, though, like GreenDaddy says, knowing which steps to take is proving tricky.