17/4/2018

Today I walked from the train station to my house while reading the last 30-ish pages of 'Cracking India', pulling my trusty little cabin bag along behind me, and relying on that magic power developed in childhood of being able to navigate around drifting crowds without lifting my eyes long enough to break the soft momentum of story.

Cracking India is a novel about the Partition of India told through the eyes of a young girl, weaving all the tragedies of growing up into the tragedies of people torn apart by conflict. It's incredible, and I wasn't going to look up from it for the world (except as I crossed Parker's Piece because the wind was too strong to keep the book's pages open). I'd started the novel on the way to Austria, on a 4.56 am train to Stansted. I read it by the lake in Traun, surrounded by daisies and sunlight. I read it in the Linz airport, on the plane, on the platform at Stansted with my feet propped on my suitcase. And then I was interrupted.

I was in the middle of Ranna's story about the massacre of his village, when I heard an 'excuse me,' and looked up and realised my bag had slipped onto the seat beside me.

'Sorry,' I said, and moved it, and a man sat down, and (inevitably- why do people always ask this) asked me where I was from. Actually he asked me if I was from China, and I said 'No, from Singapore.'

'Ah - but you look a bit Chinese.'

So I explained that my Dad's ancestors are from China, while my Mum is English, at which he smiled and said 'Your Father is from China - so you are from China. Like me, my father is from Kashmir, so I am Kashmiri. In Pakistan - but I am Kashmiri.'

Kashmir - my mind strayed again to Ranna's story. I wondered if the violence of his country's past has any bearing on how he consciously lives and thinks. Still, I was intrigued by how he identified heritage, and suggested that since Dad wasn't born in China, and neither was I, that claiming Chinese heritage was a little far-fetched, especially since Singapore is its own entity. His insistence on patrilineal heritage reminded me a little of Apollo's argument about paternity/maternity in the Oresteia, in which he suggests a mother is little more than a plant pot:

Not the true parent is the woman’s womb
That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed
New-sown: the male is parent; she for him
As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ
Of life, unless the god its promise blight.

I asked him why he called himself Kashmiri and not Pakistani, and he said there's a difference - 'they are too clever' he said, grinning. I asked him if he met someone from Pakistani in Kashmir, and didn't hear them speak, would he know they were Pakistani, he answered with a confident 'Yes- their face, everything. They are different.'

Different - I wonder what makes someone one thing and another person another. Whilst in Austria, I was struck by how I found a strange resemblance between myself and one of the women there from Afghanistan. Having never really found a physical representative of my particular mix of races in media/magazines, it was surprising to 'see myself' in someone who was meant to be entirely different - face, language, upbringing, life situation. But I realised in Austria that yes, there are lots of differences between me and an Afghan woman, just as there are many differences between me and a Kashmiri man, and many differences between me and my sister and brother. And yet there are points of overlap - a love for cardamom and popcorn, the choice to sit in the sun. Similarities in the 'small things', although who is to say they are smaller than the arbitrary place of our birth?

My train pulled up soon after that, and I read more, and then walked home, finishing the last page (to my great satisfaction) right outside the door of my house.