Ma and Masi Together

Part of my ongoing exploration of South Asian literature, this mixed media artwork was inspired by Anita Desai's Winterscape, a masterpiece on cross-cultural minefields.

Sometimes,  I have the students in my Cross-Cultural Perspectives class read this story. It is a perfect case study of the infamous pronouncement of Kipling, "The East is east and the West is west and never the twain shall meet". In a span of 20+ pages, Desai lays out every cultural trope: our culture/their culture, our norm/their deviance, to name a few. Just when we assume that we know where the story is going, Desai being a master storyteller that she is, pulls the rug gently from under our feet. In the small act of taking a photo of Ma and Masi watching the snow together, she makes Beth cross a cultural border and, gives her a glimmer of understanding of how her Indian husband came to be raised by one sister while born to the other. It is an understanding that comes not from rational processing but from something deep, almost mystical. Beth's impulsive act to get it on the camera may have been as much to capture the moment as to remind herself that she understood.

Without Borders

 Since the beginning of this year, I have been working on and off on creating artwork based on South Asian literature. Early in the year, I did this piece on Shakuntalam, Kalidasa's classical love story. This new piece, Without Borders, inspired by Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, is very post-modern. I was trying to respond to Melange team's November challenge "Home" and the idea came when I spent one whole Saturday morning hunting for documents to apply for Indian visa. I felt much like Ashima, a borderless nomad, straddling a 10,000 miles wide Asian Indian boat. The power of Lahiri's book lies in the fact that global themes of dislocation, loss, and the longing for roots are explored inside the particulars of one Bengali woman's immigrant experience. This point was most poignantly brought to me when my Brazilian born aerobic instructor asked me if I had read the book. Ashima, derived from the sanskrit word asima, means "without boundaries". The book may have well been about Miguela, Ivana, Habiba or even one Indira.