Conversations with Shobha
I adore my Parsi secretary Shobha (not her real name). I mean, Parsis in general seem to be through-the-looking-glass Jews, what with being a visually distinct (if you know what to look for) diaspora minority with a strict mate-within-the-tribe ethic, an emphasis on education and verbal skills, and a local reputation for benign neuroticism. But I also just adore the way she frets over comma placement and runs to the OED the way others take smoking breaks.
True, she spends more time with her Reader's Digest crossword puzzle than on her work, but she's so valuable as a sort of halfway house on the route to Indian culture, that I can't complain. Shobha is very, very Westernized. I've never seen her wear a sari or salwar kameez, and she speaks elegant, gorgeous English as a result of 1950's-era finishing schools (she has a bona fide certificate in elocution).
Communicating with Mumbaikars, for me, has been akin to climbing a mountain to arrive at an echo point across a ravine. You shout something, you wait, and then it comes back to you, amusingly distorted. It's novel and fun...for about ten minutes. But it's not actual connection with another human being, and it quickly gets dull, then frustrating, then you start to think about following your words off that cliff.
With Shobha -- and here the analogy quickly becomes utterly useless -- it's as if she's a transceiver. You're not just hurling words hopelessly against a wall of rock; you're broadcasting across the mountain and hoping that her acting as a cultural understanding booster will reduce "noise" in the system, render your signal intelligible and result in a similar reply. Ok, so it's more like SETI, then. With about a similar success rate so far.
No, no. In an environment in which K and I have lots of acquaintances, "contacts," and even friend-like folk with whom we regularly do stuff, all without any genuine simpatico "click" happening, Shobha often provides my only meaningful non-K conversation of the day. Which is why it's so damn funny/despair-inducing when those talks inadvertently reveal just how wide the chasm really is.
Some of it is just charming, like when she recently happened upon a poster in a catalog that she found wildly inventive, daringly original, and hysterically funny. Its caption? "You don't have to be crazy to work here...but it helps!"
(No idiot, I've since been plundering my store of jokes that were old before the first matzah was shipped to the Catskills. And I'm killing, absolutely killing. It's not so much that I'm trying to ingratiate, I just don't want to miss the opportunity: when else could I ever tell these?)
Some of it is both charming, and makes you think.
Example #1
Shobha is crazy about all things animal, and is partial to internet sites with cute pet content. Thus, I alerted her to the "cats that look like Hitler" site (under "Etc." in my sidebar), and she spent a lunch hour happily going through it. As I was washing out my coffee cup, she asked,
"Do you think we ought to submit a picture of Jade?"
Jade, our (really Shobha's) office cat, is a tortoiseshell without a hint of moustache, and really looks not even a little like Hitler.
I looked at Shobha quizzically but didn't say anything. One always wants to proceed cautiously along these trails; one wrong step, and it's over the edge with you.
"No, you're right," Shobha sighed, "she's too pretty."
And I'm left thinking: is it really possible Shobha doesn't know who Hitler is?
I'm thinking it is. I mean, my staff thinks it's unbelievable that I didn't know who Shivaji was, and still can't always pick him out of a mural successfully. (Could you? Be honest, now.) If you attended high school and elocution classes in the deep south of Kerala state and then went to work in an office, would you necessarily have encountered information about a war that was really only ever relevant for Delhi and Burma, as far as you were concerned?
I know, intellectually, that India is huge. It's huge enough to have its own cultural gravitational field, in the sense that it's the only place I've ever been, other than the U.S., where people will walk up to you on the street and assume you speak their language and find it hard to discard that belief in the face of obvious evidence that you don't (and, yes, they think that speaking more slowly and loudly will help -- that turns out to be universal). But I'm thinking it's even bigger than that, big enough so that no information gets in, and none escapes, either. We speak of the "black hole of Calcutta," but, believe me, I'm starting to see that the "black hole of India" is also apt.
Example #2
Shobha brought me a cup of farsan one afternoon, a snack that looks like cat food but turns out to taste like really good Chex mix. I begged off after taking just a few kibbles, and disappeared into my office. A few minutes later I came back to grab a refill.
"It's awfully more-ish," I said, and then realized I'd committed British.
"Are you familiar with that expression, Shobha? Do people use it here?"
"Oh, yes!" she said, "It's like...it's like...um, what is it? Tip of my tongue. Oh, right. 'There's something fishy in the state of Denmark.' Isn't it?"
Enmark...mark...ark...
True, she spends more time with her Reader's Digest crossword puzzle than on her work, but she's so valuable as a sort of halfway house on the route to Indian culture, that I can't complain. Shobha is very, very Westernized. I've never seen her wear a sari or salwar kameez, and she speaks elegant, gorgeous English as a result of 1950's-era finishing schools (she has a bona fide certificate in elocution).
Communicating with Mumbaikars, for me, has been akin to climbing a mountain to arrive at an echo point across a ravine. You shout something, you wait, and then it comes back to you, amusingly distorted. It's novel and fun...for about ten minutes. But it's not actual connection with another human being, and it quickly gets dull, then frustrating, then you start to think about following your words off that cliff.
With Shobha -- and here the analogy quickly becomes utterly useless -- it's as if she's a transceiver. You're not just hurling words hopelessly against a wall of rock; you're broadcasting across the mountain and hoping that her acting as a cultural understanding booster will reduce "noise" in the system, render your signal intelligible and result in a similar reply. Ok, so it's more like SETI, then. With about a similar success rate so far.
No, no. In an environment in which K and I have lots of acquaintances, "contacts," and even friend-like folk with whom we regularly do stuff, all without any genuine simpatico "click" happening, Shobha often provides my only meaningful non-K conversation of the day. Which is why it's so damn funny/despair-inducing when those talks inadvertently reveal just how wide the chasm really is.
Some of it is just charming, like when she recently happened upon a poster in a catalog that she found wildly inventive, daringly original, and hysterically funny. Its caption? "You don't have to be crazy to work here...but it helps!"
(No idiot, I've since been plundering my store of jokes that were old before the first matzah was shipped to the Catskills. And I'm killing, absolutely killing. It's not so much that I'm trying to ingratiate, I just don't want to miss the opportunity: when else could I ever tell these?)
Some of it is both charming, and makes you think.
Example #1
Shobha is crazy about all things animal, and is partial to internet sites with cute pet content. Thus, I alerted her to the "cats that look like Hitler" site (under "Etc." in my sidebar), and she spent a lunch hour happily going through it. As I was washing out my coffee cup, she asked,
"Do you think we ought to submit a picture of Jade?"
Jade, our (really Shobha's) office cat, is a tortoiseshell without a hint of moustache, and really looks not even a little like Hitler.
I looked at Shobha quizzically but didn't say anything. One always wants to proceed cautiously along these trails; one wrong step, and it's over the edge with you.
"No, you're right," Shobha sighed, "she's too pretty."
And I'm left thinking: is it really possible Shobha doesn't know who Hitler is?
I'm thinking it is. I mean, my staff thinks it's unbelievable that I didn't know who Shivaji was, and still can't always pick him out of a mural successfully. (Could you? Be honest, now.) If you attended high school and elocution classes in the deep south of Kerala state and then went to work in an office, would you necessarily have encountered information about a war that was really only ever relevant for Delhi and Burma, as far as you were concerned?
I know, intellectually, that India is huge. It's huge enough to have its own cultural gravitational field, in the sense that it's the only place I've ever been, other than the U.S., where people will walk up to you on the street and assume you speak their language and find it hard to discard that belief in the face of obvious evidence that you don't (and, yes, they think that speaking more slowly and loudly will help -- that turns out to be universal). But I'm thinking it's even bigger than that, big enough so that no information gets in, and none escapes, either. We speak of the "black hole of Calcutta," but, believe me, I'm starting to see that the "black hole of India" is also apt.
Example #2
Shobha brought me a cup of farsan one afternoon, a snack that looks like cat food but turns out to taste like really good Chex mix. I begged off after taking just a few kibbles, and disappeared into my office. A few minutes later I came back to grab a refill.
"It's awfully more-ish," I said, and then realized I'd committed British.
"Are you familiar with that expression, Shobha? Do people use it here?"
"Oh, yes!" she said, "It's like...it's like...um, what is it? Tip of my tongue. Oh, right. 'There's something fishy in the state of Denmark.' Isn't it?"
Enmark...mark...ark...
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