Who We Are, Where We Come From

*Photo by flickr/*
*Raveendra Jayashantha*

By Anjali Enjeti

When my father immigrated to the United States from India in 1971, many of his relatives followed in his diasporic footsteps. By 2006, the year his mother, my Avva, passed away, our only family members left on the subcontinent were his sister, his eldest brother, and their spouses. Today only a single aunt and uncle of mine remain. All of my first cousins immigrated to either Australia, Singapore, Europe, or the United States. Even though I have never lived in India myself, with each relative’s migration I felt more untethered to a country I had grown to love as much as my own.

When I learned the piece of furniture that once held Avva’s neatly folded saris was up for grabs, I leapt at the chance to bring it back to Georgia. It arrived several months later, after a harrowing and outrageously expensive journey, in a state of utter disrepair. Part of the base had broken off, so it stood at a slant like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, threatening to topple over at any moment.

After its restoration, I discovered something on its floor I hadn’t noticed before—a fading white six-pointed star. Simple, yet elegant. Perfectly centered. A square border surrounded it like a picture frame. It was a muggulu, a design Avva created out of flour.

She would never have called herself an artist, but Avva created this art in the mornings in the courtyard and in the pooja room at her home. I can still picture her squatting in her sari, a stream of powder flowing from between her index finger and thumb. She did this in long swift strokes like the conductor of an orchestra. Stars, swirls, dots, and flowers blanketed the ground.

After her death, the developers who purchased my grandparents’ house converted it to condominiums. The canvas for her artwork became the foundation for a newer, more modern Hyderabad known as the Silicon Valley of India. The sari chest is all that remains of my grandparents’ home, and my childhood memories of Avva’s artwork.

Over the years, I’ve contemplated how to preserve the muggulu best. Should an artist friend restore it with a fresh supply of rice flour? Should my daughter trace it with white acrylic paint for a more permanent solution? How do I recreate something vital to my heritage, to my identity, so that it will always stay with me?

•••

Who am I? I am a woman of color. I am brown. Mixed race. Indian, Austrian, Puerto Rican. I represent multiple souths—South Asia, southern India, and the Deep South in the United States. I am an immigrant’s daughter. Claiming each of these identities has shaped and refined my perspective of the world. It has helped me to find and immerse myself in a community that nurtures all of these parts of me. And the act of claiming my identity has empowered me to engage on a sociopolitical level, to grow my empathy, to reflect on the ways I fall short in the liberation of others. And to learn how to rectify this.

The claiming of identity and the evolution of a point of view sow the seeds for social change. For if we are lucky, if we follow the idea of the self far enough, it can end at a community that prioritizes compassion and justice in order to build a kinder, more equitable, more humane world.

In the summer of 2019, two friends and I decided we needed to work harder to keep members of the South Asian American community in Georgia more politically engaged year-round. The problem, as we saw it, was that our South Asian friends tended to come together for various Democratic campaigns, but as soon as the election passed, we lost touch, dispersed, and disengaged with politics until the next election season ramped up.

The three of us decided to start the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats.

Like any movement, ours began small. In August 2019, about a dozen people showed up to our first meeting at an Indian restaurant. Six months later we packed 150 people into a room for a 2020 Election Kickoff event featuring Georgia’s former House minority leader Stacey Abrams, three U.S. Senate candidates (Sarah Riggs Amico, Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, and Jon Ossoff), and state senator Sheikh Rahman.

Today we are over four hundred strong.

Our members have roots in several different countries, faiths, languages, and regions. We are immigrants and U.S.-born. We are learning how to be better allies and accomplices to other communities more marginalized than our own. We are interrogating our anti-Blackness. And we are mobilizing together to help flip Georgia blue.

Despite the risk posed by Covid-19, in the fall leading up to the 2020 presidential election, we worked ourselves to the bone for the Biden-Harris campaign and all down-ticket Democrats. We made thousands of calls, sent thousands of texts, and wrote 7,000 postcards on behalf of Democratic candidates. We hosted virtual forums with candidates. We educated South Asian voters about the voting process and trained to be poll workers and poll monitors. Our labor has paid off. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nearly doubled their voter turnout in Georgia from 2016. Approximately three-quarters of AAPI voters voted for Biden. Georgia’s sixteen electoral college votes will go to the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992.

What I am most proud of, though, are the South Asians in Georgia, many of whom had little to no experience with political activism until this election, who found a community in They See Blue Georgia and threw themselves into this work.

This, to me, is the heart of how identity shapes activism. It is the process of engaging people in our communities who have traditionally and intentionally been excluded from political discourse.

It is a movement about solidarity, camaraderie, coalition building, and lifting one another up. It’s about how our shared identity can propel us to become agents of social change, whether this takes the form of running for office, volunteering on a campaign, registering voters, or protesting.

It is who we are and where we come from.

•••

I consult a neighbor before I begin. “It will stay longer if you make the rice flour wet,” she says. “Turn it into liquid. Then you can paint with your finger.”

I watch a few YouTube videos to psyche myself up. I am no artist. I pour some rice flour into a bowl and add water, equal parts. With a fork, I swish the mixture, scraping it from the sides. Eventually it thins evenly. I attempt to paint a design on my countertop with my fingertip, as my neighbor suggested, but my finger makes for a clumsy brush. Instead I roll a sheet of paper into a funnel, pour the wet flour into it, and bend the tip to trap the mixture so it doesn’t escape before I’m ready. I practice again, this time forming half of a sloppy circle. Still, it’s progress.

I’m no match for my grandmother’s dexterous hand. Many years ago, she offered to teach me muggulu when I visited her home. I declined. What I produce now will not measure up. It will fail to honor her legacy. But this no longer matters. She would want me to try.

I sit cross-legged at the base of the sari chest, the door propped wide open, and take a deep breath. When I first unfold the tip of the funnel, the flour mixture rushes out too quickly. I wipe away the excess with a wet paper towel and begin again, squinting to locate my Avva’s neat outline. I position my hand over the design, and this time when the flour-ink flows, I’m ready. Curves and angles appear that I hadn’t noticed until I reunited them into one.

The image that emerges takes me by surprise. The faint pattern I had assumed these past nine years was a six-pointed star transforms into an eight-petalled jasmine flower, the same sweet-smelling blossoms my grandmother used to string into garlands at her home almost every morning. I would never have recognized her design for what it was if I hadn’t tried to restore it to its original state.

When I finish with the rice flour, I set aside the funnel and lean back to take it in. Some of the lines are shaky, too thick or too thin. Certainly, it is imperfect.

But in its very own way, it is beautiful.

•••

ANJALI ENJETI is a former attorney, journalist, teacher, and author based near Atlanta. Her books Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and the novel, The Parted Earth were published earlier this year. Her other writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, and elsewhere. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She teaches in the MFA program at Reinhardt University and lives with her family near Atlanta.

The Safety Net

basketballhoop — By andrewmalone/ Flickr

By Anjali Enjeti

A seam near our garage door bisects the cement driveway—our family’s foundation for hula-hoop challenges and colorful chalk artwork. At the end of a slight downward slope, roughly fifty feet away, our portable basketball hoop projects a tall shadow.

We purchased it a little over a year ago, and although I have never formally played basketball, every evening after dinner, I abandon piles of dinner dishes that need loading and pots that need scrubbing, to shoot hoops in our driveway.

Lining my bare feet along the crevice, in between moss and stray bits of pine straw, I dribble two, three, four times in a thumping rhythm that shores up my concentration. With unwarranted bravado—I’m competent, but not good—I coax the preteen posse congregating on my porch to try to do what I’m about to do.

One of them carries on in his conversation without so much of a glance. One takes an approving bite of a banana chocolate chip muffin that I’d just pulled from the oven. Another picks at his cuticles. A fourth, my twelve year-old daughter, flashes hopeful eyes. She’s used to my routine basketball antics: Let’s see if I can make a basket with my eyes closed. Let’s see if I can make a basket while standing backwards. Let’s see if I can make a basket left-handed.

But this particular shot, where I position myself a full three car lengths from the hoop, is not usually a successful one for me. Despite this, I call it my lucky shot. And, when the ball whooshes through the net, I feel like a champion. Like David must have felt when he felled Goliath.

I dribble several more times while facing my orange-rimmed nemesis. Some more kids have gathered near my mailbox on bikes and scooters. They’re focusing on me. I haven’t made this shot in a long time, and now I regret calling so much attention to myself.

As I launch the flesh of rubber from my fingertips, I know, right away that it’s going in. The net swoosh of a clean shot makes the victory even sweeter. A chorus of hoots and hollers erupts and I high-five my way back into my house. But I know better. The kids aren’t so much as praising my athletic skills as they are hoping my inflated ego will generate a second round of muffins for their consumption.

•••

Sometimes when I’m playing—hoisting my five-year-old into the air closer to the rim, or showing my nine-year-old how to cradle the ball in her hands—a neighbor passing by our home will slow down at the foot of my driveway to compliment my athleticism. “I wish I had your energy,” he or she might say. “I wish I could keep up physically with my own kids.”

I smile, shrug my shoulders, and offer a neutral, somewhat muted comment in return: “I’m getting older. It’s getting harder.” But truthfully, I’m not sure what to say. Because how I appear on the outside is so far removed for how I actually feel.

I spend much of my day in pain—significant, sometimes excruciating, pain. And I have lived with this pain for so long, I can barely remember what it feels like to function without aching, throbbing, or piercing sensations.

I suffer from coccydynia, a condition where my coccyx or tailbone becomes inflamed. Roughly fifty percent of all coccydynia cases are the result of an injury or pregnancy. The other half of all cases, including my own, have no known cause. Sitting and lying on my back causes my pain, but once it’s inflamed, I am in pain every single second of the day. On good days, my pain resembles a moderate rug burn. On bad days, it’s like I’m sitting on a dagger. And there are often more bad days than good.

I’ve seen countless doctors, tried a gazillion drugs, practiced yoga, and endured physical therapy, chiropractics, herbs, and acupuncture. Some treatments help, some of the time, but any relief is temporary. And there is no known cure.

I avoid movie theaters, car rides, restaurants, churches, amusement parks—any place where I would need to sit for extended periods of time. I don’t ride bikes, nor do I ever eat dinner at the large, wooden table in my kitchen—I stand at the counter for every meal. An hour kayaking, one of my new hobbies, will translate into days of agony. I collapse into bed every night with an ice pack wedged against my lower back. Patches of frostbite have permanently stained my skin. They look like angry, gray amoebas.

It’s taken me eighteen years of pain to stop pretending I am strong. To understand that for all of its virtues, the pretense of strength has a downside. It weaves a tale of happy endings and heroics, which trick its sufferer into believing they are more invincible than they really are.

Nearly half a lifetime of pain has forced me to answer this one question: What, for crying out loud, is wrong with being weak?

Weakness isn’t a pity party—it’s base in a game of tag. It’s crying on the phone to a loved one, because you don’t know if you can take the pain much longer. (Even though you know you will, and must.) It grants permission for the enthusiastic pronunciation of the f-word, desperate texts to friends in the middle of the night. It is the recognition that you are drowning, and that you need someone to throw you a fucking life preserve. Sometimes, that person has to be me.

I dread appointments with my array of highly qualified health care professionals. “How bad is the pain today?” they begin, flipping through my chart.

On a pain scale of zero to ten, zero meaning no pain, ten meaning extreme pain, my answer is rarely below five. And in the pause, between their question and my answer, I can’t help but link my entire existence to merciless, numerical increments.

If we’ve only recently started a treatment plan, I’m honest. “Seven,” I’ll announce, with a nod of the head. But if we’ve been working together for some time, with little to no progress, the shame of continued pain—the let down of failure—colors our encounter. I will throw my care provider a bone, graciously reducing the number, as if placing my aching body on some sort of reverse grading curve. I do this partly because I feel guilty about their sincere disappointment in the outcome of the treatment plan. As if I’m some kind of co-conspirator with my condition.

But I also do it because the way I characterize my pain is the only way left for me to control it. If a therapy fails to take even the edge off, the least I can do is choose its value. Because while my provider will spend only one hour a week considering its position on the pain scale, the number will continue to haunt me as I exit through the lobby, locate my car in the parking lot, and sit, motionless, in traffic. It will dominate my thoughts at three a.m., when I wake up to get a fresh frozen ice pack out of the freezer. It will share the same space in my psyche as my social security number.

If I am to achieve any kind of autonomy in agony, it’s in the when, why, and how I describe it. It’s my only option for a long-term coping mechanism. Because the pain consumes not just a singular moment in time, but years of milestones in the distant future. Will I be able to sit during my oldest daughter’s high school graduation? Will I be able to make that long plane trip to visit my favorite uncle in Australia? If I can barely endure this pain at age forty, how will I manage when I’m fifty, sixty, or seventy?

These are the questions that no acupuncturist, physical therapist, or rheumatologist will ever be able to answer. They don’t measure in precise integers on a scale, but hover in the spaces between them, in the infinite fractions and decimals that follow.

Which is okay, I think. Because ultimately, I have to believe, that my life and how I live it, is so much more than a numbers game.

•••

One cool, late summer evening, I rummage through the garage, kicking aside squirt guns and bottles of bubbles in search of my favorite basketball. I have spent much of the day pacing the floor in pain, pressing rotating ice packs into my flesh, chewing through an entire packet of gum while watching crappy reality television—doing anything and everything to distract myself from my colicky spine. I consider going upstairs to lie down, to submit to the merciful unconsciousness of sleep. But the seductive pull of the hoop calls to me from the driveway.

When I finally find my ball, wedged behind the recycling bin, I decide that today, I will conquer a different kind of shot. This time, I will position myself even further away from the hoop and hurl the ball, overhand, like the pitch of a baseball, with the hopes of hitting anywhere on the backboard.

Somehow, on this driveway in front of my home, my pain and I inhabit a level playing field. When I gaze out at the net, with its empty, jigsaw spaces, I conjure a power, a temporary confidence in my body. With the rough surface of the pavement supporting my bare feet, the fragrant scent of gardenias wafting throughout the front yard, I assume the home court advantage. And on this court, no one is keeping score.

Dribbling, I lull myself into concentration. The porch-dwelling preteens eye each other. They are placing nonverbal bets about my chance of success.

Palming the basketball, I take aim at the white square target on the backboard. My thumb pulses against the bumpy rubber casing. My arm reels back like a catapult. When it releases, my sight traces the ball’s arch into the atmosphere. But at its peak, I realize my shot is way off mark, destined only for wind.

I rest my hands on my hips while the collective groan of the neighborhood sounds in unison. My daughter jumps off the front porch to chase the ball into the next yard.

As she runs it back over, dribbling a few times around the driveway, I consider going back inside the house to lie on my side with my ice pack. Perhaps a hot cup of chamomile tea will help distract me a little from the pain.

“Hey,” my daughter calls from underneath the basket. I assume she’s going to take a shot herself.

But she doesn’t. “You’re not too far off,” she says, tossing the ball back toward me. “Why don’t you just try again?”

•••

ANJALI ENJETI, a recovering attorney, is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Queens University in Charlotte. She writes for ArtsATL, the only comprehensive arts news source in the Atlanta area. She lives with her family in suburban Atlanta.