Don’t Look Back

A “re-pat” throws in the towel on India, and loses a bit of himself in the process.

Opening one’s eyes to India demands an act of willful distortion. There’s so much more to

Photo: Dhruv Dhawan.

look away from than to look at. Or, fine, let’s call it a toss-up. Still, the problem—what to permit into one’s consciousness, and what not—is acute and omnipresent. For a resident, it solidifies into a fact of life. And so the decision to live here, for those who take it, is a decision as much about which observations will be allowed to calcify in one’s mind as about the lifestyle pros and cons.

Time enough for memory to fade, along the pleasant haze that comes with distance, has tipped the balance for some NRIs back in India’s favour. India Ink, The New York Times’ page on India, appears to have coined a great word for these people: “re-pats”.

Not every such repatriation takes. Sumedh Mungee, a Mumbai native, left for the USA 13 years ago for the usual reasons, returned to India two years ago for reasons that are quickly becoming usual, and has left again for reasons he attempts to explain in “Why I Left India (Again)”. Mungee is articulate, thoughtful, and fooling himself.

His post has already drawn many reactions, including one from Chetan Bhagat (who notes that he has “never really reacted to a piece written by someone else before”). Clearly it’s hit an already well-jangled nerve.

Of course it’s all true. The traffic, the domestic help, the filth: these minor nuisances are all real, and can’t be hand-waved away.

But much of the criticism Mungee receives is directed at a few sentences in which he explains his rationale for his decisions. Or, rather, that’s what it looks like he’s doing. Instead he gives us an inadequate substitute. He explains other people’s rationale for his decisions, and attempts to get away without committing to them himself. His hands are clean, see.

For instance, on giving loans to his driver: “It only encourages them to ask for more; besides, they’re all liars.”

It’s an ingenious device. But it’s a lie, like lipstick on a mirror. As far as I can tell, Mungee has invented a new use for the performative speech act: saying something to inoculate oneself against it. I’ve said it; and by saying it I’ve proven I can articulate it; and now that it’s out there in the open, it is, naturally, repugnant to me; ergo, I don’t believe it.

Since I put the foregoing in italics, I don’t have to own up to any of it. See how easy?

We all have an arsenal of tactical approaches that serve the purpose. One such technique is irony. Use it too much and it’s corrupting; we can’t finally tell what we believe. Another is sarcasm, which only works if we understand the malign intent. Mungee uses an approach so subtle it’s merely typographical. He puts these few sentences in italics precisely to establish confusion about who says, who thinks, and who believes these things.

That’s, of course, the point. Mungee saw himself absorbing these beliefs, and, finding that outcome unacceptable, chose to run from them. Looking away is a habit we all develop. But looking away from looking away, and feeling better off for it, takes a certain kind of hubris possessed only by the well-to-do.

Let’s admit that the offensive object—filth, misery, decay—is the least of what we’re ignoring. Those are, by Mungee’s exchange rate, a dime a dozen. It’s our willingness to accept these putative sorrows and injustices that we’re really trying not to look at. Knocking on windows at a traffic signal and ignoring that knocking may be equally, mutually dehumanising. But accepting our own willingness to ignore is a punishment we impose on ourselves.

Once we recognise that the problem stops not at our door but inside our heads, then in America or Europe the difference becomes simply a matter of degree. The fact that we do a better job in the US of keeping the people we exploit well out of sight—sometimes on another continent, like Foxconn assembly workers, and sometimes invisible beneath our noses, like non-unionised menial labour—doesn’t solve the problem. It just makes it easier to forget.

Could the putative ex-re-pat have picked a worse moment to bask in first-world comforts? Occupy Wall Street and related protests have started to pick apart the cherished American myth of shared prosperity, especially among those who share Mungee’s in-between status. (One such protestor’s self-aware sign reads: “I’m an immigrant. I’m here to take your job. But you don’t have one.”)

That’s one reason why I stick with India: to force myself to keep looking.