An Injustice to Geography

A country can become confused with the room in which one first suffered it.

This is one of the quieter tyrannies of childhood: that an entire civilization—its streets, dialects, gods, cuisine, weather systems, railways, arguments, cinemas, monuments, coastlines, and impossible populations—may be reduced, in the private imagination, to a particular drawing room with bad air in it.

The country becomes the family. The family becomes the country. And suddenly a subcontinent is made to wear the face of an uncle, the silence of a mother, the authority of a father, the endlessly recycled grievance of people who have confused proximity with entitlement.

It is an extraordinary injustice to geography.

India, after all, has survived empires, invasions, famines, reformers, saints, film stars, bureaucracies, prophets, industrialists, and the kind of cousin who considers a personal boundary an act of sedition. It is unlikely to be exhausted by one’s domestic mythology.

And yet this is precisely what happens. The first India one knows may be a narrow India: familial, supervisory, ceremonial, emotionally overfurnished. It is a place in which every adult remains, somehow, somebody’s child; where a journey may be interpreted as a statement, a silence as an insult, a preference as a betrayal, and a private plan as a matter requiring the attention of a committee.

In such a climate, even affection arrives with paperwork.

But there is another India.

India need not be abandoned because a particular family system made it difficult to breathe. Nor must it be embraced through patriotic amnesia, as though pain becomes invalid merely because the landscape is magnificent. The mature position is more interesting than either: one can love a country without consenting to its private distortions. One can claim inheritance without accepting captivity. One can be Indian without becoming absorbable.