Saya Shamdasani - Priceless Mangos

 

I have lived in New York for my entire life. When I was younger, I used to watch a lot of television. I would watch these programs with these girls, and I became fascinated by one thing, and it was this girl who was eating these bags of chips. I later learned that these chips were Pirate’s Booty. [audience laughter] About a week later, I went to my friend’s house and her mom gave us the same bag of chips for snack. I was just so enamored by that, that I went home to my mom and I told her, “Mom, I want these chips for snack every single day when I come home from school.” She wrinkled her nose and she was like, “What about the Indian snacks I make for you every day?” And I am like, “No, can you please get me these?” She did it, because that is what moms do. And every single day, I had a bag of chips waiting for me when I came home from school. 

 

So, like I said, I grew up in New York City and I was always surrounded by a lot of white people. It obviously influenced how I did things. When my white friends came over, I would tell my mom and my dad, “Never speak in Hindi.” That was the one rule. I would always have these board games stacked up in a pile, and I would have the food that my friends were going to eat lined up and ready to go. Everyone had to act a certain way and smile. But when my Indian friends came over, it was more rough and messy. It was not perfect, but I did not want that. I wanted to be like the girls in school with their chips. I wanted to be like the girl in the TV show. I did not want rough-edged and messy. 

 

One day, my mom came home and she told us we were going to India for two weeks. I had been to India before, but it had been a couple of years since I had been in. My first thought when she told me was, “Ugh, I do not want to go to India. I do not want to be in the heat. I want to be here and I want to spend the time with my friends when I do not have school.” But I still packed my bags and I went. 

 

It is a long flight, and it is so chaotic. People are yelling from the back row about some food that their relative has in the front row, and then they have to squeeze through the aisles and pass it to them. It is all these hugs and greetings. When you land in the airport, everyone is speaking in Hindi. There are immigration fliers and there is baggage claim, and it is just this type of freeness that I never experienced anywhere else. 

 

My grandmother was waiting outside in the car, and she came and she enveloped my brother and me in a tight hug. She said goodbye to my brother, my mom and my dad, because I was going to be spending some time in her apartment and living with her. I remember pulling up to her apartment, and it was this yellow brick apartment, had seven little flats. Each flat had a balcony and it was really beautiful and small.

 

And as I lived there with her, the neighbors were a big part of her daily life. It felt so different from my life in New York. The only time we spoke to our neighbors was when my brother threw the basketball in their area, and then they came over and handed it back. [audience laughter] The only time we ever spoke. [audience laughter] So, I was living in the apartment. I was surrounded by my mom’s violet walls from when she was growing up. I was showering in her shower. She did not have a shower head, so I had this bucket and I would pour it over myself. 

 

I was eating food. My days consisted of walking in the markets and watching my mother bargain for an item. She would spend 20 minutes bargaining, bargaining over probably one dollar. It did not even become about whether or not the dollar was worth it or the item was worth it. It was just about who won the fight, who was the better bargainer. [audience laughter] Every time we went to a new store, I was just hoping she would fight a little harder and win that fight. [audience laughter] We would ride in rickshaws, and my hand would stick out the car window and I would feel the dust in between my fingers. 

 

I remember one time, my brother, my grandmother and I were leaving the apartment complex, and I was sitting in the front. That was so cool, because I never got to do that in New York. A bunch of boys were picking some mangoes at a tree nearby. They walked over to us, and one of the boys, my grandmother asked, “How much for a bundle of mangoes?” And the boy said some absurd number and my grandmother was like, “What are you going to do with all that money?” I think he said something really sketchy, because all of a sudden, my grandma takes her hand and slaps the boy across the face. [audience laughter] And that boy is rolling his eyes, and I am like, “Why is he not freaking out?”

 

I had seen the boy around our complex before, helping my grandma carry up groceries up the stairs, because they did not have an elevator. She had given him food before when she had leftovers. She did not have to look out for him, because she was his mother. She was there, because she wanted to be there, because there was a sense of community, this sense of togetherness, something I never experienced in America.

 

So, he just rolled his eyes and said, “Auntie, you know, this is what teenagers do.” She laughed it off, like, “We are going to talk about this later.” [audience laughter] We flash forward, and I am back in New York and hanging out with my Indian friends a little bit more. One day, we all go to a restaurant with our moms. We are loud, and we are happy and we are boisterous. We are sitting down and about to order our food, when all of a sudden, this man stands up and he bangs his fists on the table and says, “If you want to act uncivilized and loud like that, go back to your own country.”

 

I remember the entire restaurant being completely silent. This fork I had was digging into the palm of my hand, and I was sweating and my heart was slowing down. I watch as my mom stands up, and she walks over to that man and says, “Sir, we have as much of a right to be in this country as you. This country is as much our home as it is yours.” I never felt more proud to be Indian in that moment than I have in my entire life. I looked around me and saw my friends and their mothers nodding their heads, cheering her on. And in my head, I was like, “Yeah, Mom, you tell him.” [audience chuckle] 

 

It was this sense of, again, togetherness and community, something I had never experienced before. I knew people were there for me and they had my back in a way that I never had before. So, it is not like I went back to school and I was all of a sudden, this Indian girl who ate Indian food at lunch and listened to Indian music and wore Indian clothes and spoke in Hindi. But I began to realize that I did not have to pretend to be someone I was not. I began picking up pieces of myself that I had let fall.