By Aleya Hussain Jung
Memories, some sharp, some mildly amusing and others like a soothing balm, assaulted me, reminded me and humbled me when asked to write a guest column for this newspaper. I juggled with a few ideas, mostly South Asian centric, ranging from immigration issues, politics in the United States to the quintessential immigrant experience. I started to get bothered by this. Here I was, a New York resident, a naturalized 
citizen, living the larger part of my 49 years, very far away from a country that we still insist on calling “great” and no story to tell. Is it because my transformation is complete? Am I fully American? Will writing these thoughts expose me to be a coconut that I think I am not? I have questions; maybe enough of them will produce an answer. So what constitutes an immigrant experience? The double shifts? Pumping gas in the winter and cursing in bambaiyaa as one’s toes and ears lose feeling (among other body parts)? Selling perfumes on the street on 14th. Street Union Square, again in the winter? Guarding a sea lion at an aquarium in Boston, or boarding with 6 other guys? Sending money home? Talking for long hours to Bombay from 42nd street via illegal phone connections for $10 dollars a pop? Or having illegal cable TV to catch Bollywood shows? We have all gone through some of the above, but what really is an immigrant experience, it couldn’t be this, right? Is it the food then? The preparations that we still crave for, that somehow does not have the same flavor when made here, in jest we attribute this to water, saying it is so much cleaner here, as our taste buds are calibrated to the filth that we come from-especially the street food. We have two Indian grocery stores and a halal meat shop close to where we live. As an experiment I visited Apna bazar on four consecutive Saturdays and I observed the same faces buying the same amount of groceries, I mean, how can we eat so much? The frozen rotis are stacked so high in their carts and on occasions I have seen them rolling in the overcrowded parking lot. Food is definitely our link to the country of our birth; we over indulge, sometimes to fill the loneliness, the emptiness that comes when uprooted from our Desh. But what about the odour associated with Indian cooking? I detest it! It permeates very room in our house, I disappear when my wife cooks, even in the dead of winter we open all our windows, we have sourced different fragrances from all over the world to eradicate or mask the smell, and we have various perfumes and deodorants in our medicine cabinet, I love Indian food, still have to come to terms with the cooking smell, I guess I will eventually… Am I fully American? Is it the colour then? For North America despite numbers suggesting otherwise is still perceived as a White Man’s country, at least in the eyes of the immigrants. My father-in-law still calls the African American a “Negro”, to him American means white, his grandchildren, my sons, have given up correcting him. I have been called a light skinned “N” word once, by a white man during a traffic altercation, it did not result in a physical fight (thankfully) as the man realized I would be a willing participant. Other than that one incident, I have been pretty lucky and accepted into most non-Indian circles, but we have all heard stories, some horrible, especially after 9/11, very close to where we lived in Queens, there were several incidents of Sikhs being assaulted, Muslim cab drivers being abused and assaulted, their crime, they looked like or belonged to a small religious group that ended thousands of innocent lives. I have never been discriminated on the basis of my colour… Am I fully American? Is it our identity then? Our need to proclaim our background. I legally added Hussain my rarely used middle name within a year of living in America. I have been to a few dandiya celebrations in New Jersey and I have never seen more Indians that look like Indians. In Bombay one is dressed in the snazziest Phoren threads. We all have many stories that have shaped our lives that have given us a sense of belonging. We leave our countries for various reasons; some to better our children’s lives, some due to religious persecution, some because they just love everything western. People like me leave… well just because, like we did everything else in Bombay… just because! No plan, no skills, no dreams, it just seemed right. And now it has been proven right. Am I fully American? Yes! I am fully American! Like I am fully Indian. But above all in America I became fully Aleya, in my mind a citizen of the world.
