It wasn’t until recently I started looking at Rithal (the village my father was born and grew up in) and my family there with fondness. I had always rejected it and looked at it in an almost disdainful way. I always considered the village primitive and less than. A lot of factors come into play as to why I felt that way about that side of my family but it all boils down to how I felt about myself, how I felt about being brown, how I felt about being Indian. How I hated the tropes associated with being Indian that caused me to reject the color of my skin, my ethnicity, my race. What essentially is/was me. I lost myself in everything that’s the exact opposite of what my Indian “heritage” consisted of. I refused to speak Hindi with my parents and made a point to only speak in English. Sometimes I still get mad at myself for thinking/behaving this way but at the same time, I was just a child living amongst predominantly non-Indian people. I just wanted to assimilate.
Yet, some of my earliest memories from my childhood were being in Rithal. Sleeping on the roof in hammock beds made of rope + wood on warm summer nights, going to the fields behind my dad’s place to cut down and eat raw sugar cane, protecting our food from thieving monkeys while eating outside, pumping water from the well to bathe with a bucket and a cup, burning cow dung to keep us warm at night. It was a simple way to live that I would scoff at, clouded by negative constructs I created in my head. But now I look at those memories with such joy. Simple as they may be, it was such a pure way of living. Maybe even the purest.
How far my dad has come, how far he brought his family, how proud I am of him, how proud I am to be from Rithal.
Ram Ram.
Yet, some of my earliest memories from my childhood were being in Rithal. Sleeping on the roof in hammock beds made of rope + wood on warm summer nights, going to the fields behind my dad’s place to cut down and eat raw sugar cane, protecting our food from thieving monkeys while eating outside, pumping water from the well to bathe with a bucket and a cup, burning cow dung to keep us warm at night. It was a simple way to live that I would scoff at, clouded by negative constructs I created in my head. But now I look at those memories with such joy. Simple as they may be, it was such a pure way of living. Maybe even the purest.
How far my dad has come, how far he brought his family, how proud I am of him, how proud I am to be from Rithal.
Ram Ram.