April 5, 2012
History suggests that the paths of math and life have been intertwined for at least 4000 years now. But how close is mathematics to real life? For anyone who has sat through his first lesson in Algebra will tell you that an ‘x’ has just one value that is defined by an equation, in all events except if it reaches an mathematical identity. But in questions of identity in real life, mathematics gives in. For identities in real life aren’t two exact same phrases equated together.
Identities in real life can be as disparate as the mind can perceive. And when one is faced with questions concerning identities, with one’s life as the equation that defines its parameters, the identity can easily reach a solution when some calls out that he is “Russian” or “Chinese.” Identities can be solved in real life, with a definite value for ‘x.’
But then, what if the equation is harder? What if there are multiple identities to a person. For to call myself Pakistani would be only half-true. I might share the features, the descent and I might follow the customs and traditions as anyone from Sub-continential India. But then I lead a life with as much of west in it as the east. So do I call myself “Indian” or “American?” For neither would be all true. With my life as the equation, pointing towards two values for an ‘x’ when it can have just one, which do I choose? Am I east or am I west?
As I sit by my grandmother and sift through the photographs of her youth, she talks to me about how she wore her mother’s Sari and jewelry at her wedding and how her mother used to make her fresh lassi with two teaspoons of shakkar before she’d go to school, and it all makes me wonder if my descent delineates my answer for me. Maybe consigning to being Indian would be the easier way to go, for there is so much of it in me. Turning through the pages of Sujata Bhatt’s poetry, I read parts of it out loud, embarking on a roller-coaster ride through an India of the soul; from the bindiya on the forehead of the young Indian girl dressed in shimmering turquoise, to the lithe movements of Kathak she dances to, the culture starts to open before me like cloves of garlic, as ‘their round smell rises’ in heaps of mesmeric images; the farmers working in fields that stretch lush and throbbing green, and the poet who sits in the very middle of that green. The mountainous north where the sun sparkles and beams in the seductive shapelessness of blue water, and the fisherman who sits by that water, walking five miles from his home. And his home where the aroma of vanilla and spice pulses through the air as a billion flavors coalesce. Maybe the answer is resorting to being called Indian.
But that would be incomplete in its very essence, for I am not that poet, nor that fisherman, nor that girl. For much as I belong to and love the culture I’ve been blessed to call mine, I am a child of post-colonial Vietnam and all it entails. Answering the phone, I speak in English as much as I speak in Urdu, maybe more. Walking into the eastern wedding in the plethora of color, I do wear a button down shirt and a tie just as often as I wear a Shalwar Kameez. Going through my collection of books, I read more English literature than Urdu. My culture speaks of conservatism, but my thought process is extremely liberal. So even with all of India that makes me who I am, there is a second side of me that goes unrepresented when I confine myself to being called “Indian.” There is a second dimension, perhaps more dominant than the Indian in me, which stipulates itself to my basal being.
So which do I choose?
But then when I think about it, a look at the bigger picture brings another approach to mind. When I so remarkably bring two cultures to the table, do I even have to choose?
And so I have my answer. Math and life might go hand in hand to sum up purchases or evaluate insurance payments, but there comes a point where they diverge, and life takes a path where mathematics becomes obsolete. For I choose to discredit that along that divergent path, ‘x’ has to signify just one value. I choose to discredit that I have to make a choice. I choose to introduce harmony rather than contention between the identities. I choose to take it all and refuse to make my pick. I don’t have to be east or west. I gladly choose to be a conjunction of the best of both.