When I first came to Canada some eighteen years ago and started doing road trips to the US, one thing that petrified me was missing an exit on the highway…and sometimes even when I did not miss the exit the equally petrifying problem was that the exit could be closed for road repairs or some other reason…
I remember a few months after coming to Canada making my first road trip to Pittsburgh to the Balaji temple there…coming back I missed the exit and landed up in a somewhat seedy looking town…with all the stories I had heard about shootings in the US before I came here, I was petrified driving around the town at dusk with bharya priyaa and two kidz in the car, searching for the route back…and then, one day coming back through Buffalo in the winter, I again missed an exit and experienced hell with freezing rain (different from the proverbial fires of hell, though just as fearful) trying to find my way to the Peace Bridge…
All that is now a thing of the past with the lovely Jenn perched between me and bharya priyaa, in the car, as we go driving in the US now…now, just in case some of you are wondering whether this is some ménage a trois that this ageing couple are getting into in their old age let me reassure you that Jenn is all satvic…she is my trusted GPS…
From the moment I switch on Jenn, I know I can trust her implicitly…in her lovely, reassuring voice she tells me ‘Keep to the right and exit ramp in one point five kilometres…’ and as I near the ramp and see that exit is closed for road repairs I do not panic anymore…I just calmly drive on pass the exit, and, the lovely Jenn waits for a few seconds after I have passed the exit and in a calm, measured voice almost like my mother talking to me after I missed a Math exam at school, ‘Recalculating…’ and like my mother again, in a few seconds, Jenn has found a solution, “Go seven point five kilometres and exit ramp left” she takes over and guides me back on to the correct route…and, if I decide that instead of going to a temple, as originally planned, I shall go to a mosque Jenn has no problems…I just need to tell her ‘find nearest mosque’ and all she says is ‘Recalculating’ and like ‘Open Sesame’ in the Alladin story, Jenn solves the problem…
Driving over eighteen hundred kilometres over the Easter break all around North Eastern US I never got the heebie-jeebies missing an exit…I remember how in the early days of my existence in the land of milk and honey (as it was then), the US, I would have to order ‘Triptiks’ from the automobile association and whoever was in the passenger seat would have to navigate…all that is gone now, bharya priyaa sleeps and/or puts on Mohammad Rafi’s songs on the iPod...all thanks to the lovely, Jenn, and, Jenn is one woman that bp (bharya priyaa) is not jealous about…
A large portion of my time over the Easter break was spent on the I90, aka, the New York State thruway which runs over 800 kilometres (somebody in the US please translate that into miles) from New York, NY to the Pennsylvania state line…talking of kilometres and miles, on this trip I got stuck because of a traffic accident and decided to phone our relative telling them that we would be late…when the relative at the other end asked me “How far are you from here ?” I, Canadian-conditioned that I am, said, “about a hundred and fifty kilometers away”…a somewhat quizzical silence at the other end…having lived in the USofA for over thirty five years, the only country that I know of that still uses ‘miles’ to measure distances, my relative could not figure out how far away I was, and, I, being quantitatively challenged, could not do the mental math to translate it into miles…realizing the problem I said, “about two hours away” and all was OK…
btw, the lovely Jenn can give her instructions in either miles or kilometres…you just have to tap her appropriate button…
Coming back to the I90 it is one of the more unexciting roadways I have travelled in my life…no buffaloes, autos or trucks as in the Motherland to keep you awake as you zip along…however, I now notice that all the service stations have Wi-Fi…so, I could regularly connect to the web through my iPod and catch up on the latest emails as I stopped at the service stations…cool, eh?
Sitting in Lakshmi’s aunt’s house waiting for bharya priyaa to get ready (the story of my life) I happened to notice a copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ lying around…Lakshmi’s aunt is an avid reader and also reviews books for several North American journals…started reading the book for ‘time pass’ as the Bombay train hawker would say…
‘Time pass’ turned into interest and absorption as I worked my way through the story and I was totally fascinated with the accuracy with with Jhumpa has captured the middle class immigrant ethic in that story…a sixty something man loses his wife of thirty some years when, totally unexpectedly, she does not come out of anaesthesia after a minor surgery…the suddenness of the event is caught so poignantly by Jhumpa…
And how that shakes up everyone’s life…how we take everyone who has been there for so long as granted…like most of us in that age group, the bereavement leaves the man stranded mid stream…the aloneness comes through and how his daughter struggles with her own feelings…what does she do with her mother's two hundred and eighteen saris, for example...the daughter wears only western clothes but she finds it difficult to throw the saris away...
We have all heard or read of such experiences through stories set in India and this is the first one I have read set in the immigrant ethos of North America that captures such an incident…and, then enters Meenakshi (Mrs Bagchi, no known relative of our Evergreen Hero) into our protagonist’s life…no, I won’t give away the ending…read the book to find out for yourself…
This was the first time I was reading Jhumpa (I saw the movie ‘Namesake’ but did not read the book)…I found so much of myself in Unaccustomed Earth…as I was driving up the Garden State Parkway I kept thinking of how I would respond if someone close to me were to suddenly die, and, what would be the response from my children…she made me get in touch with my feelings, and, that was good…
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