Make No Mistake

I know that Poppat Jamal’s sale is not much of a sale. I know where you’ve to go to get paints for a good price. I know which doctors are good in the neighborhood, which ones just stuff you up with antibiotics. I know exactly how much tamarind it takes to make rasam for four people. I know the shortcuts to get to my nephew’s school in peak traffic.
I wish I didn’t, though. Really.
I got to know most of those things through older folks in our families and neighborhood, and while they are, really, advising us so that we don’t get hurt, I sometimes wish we did.
I wish we went to the crappiest restaurant in town and ate the worst dosais, that I bought dresses whose colors ran from the fabric like our maid’s daughter with her suitor, that we made some wrong choices in life.
Happy (or unhappy) accidents, I believe, are what life is made up of. When I botched up a recipe for mushroom sabji, I came up with (our popular, if I may say so myself) mushroom sandwich. As a result of eating of what could arguably qualify as the worst Indian restaurant in Boston, I had to take the following day off work, and finished reading a book that (nearly) changed the way I thought about life.
Several older people in my father's generation had to struggle early on in life, and learned things the hard way. Most of them want their children to have none of that uncertainty, that anxiousness, that feeling of not knowing if they have done well by their children.
But without all that, I often wonder, what is left for one to experience? I want to explore, to find things for myself. Needless to say, doing it anyways while already knowing the best option is sort of like reading an Agatha Christie novel after knowing who did it.
I’m sure tomes have been written about this, but India was traditionally a risk-averse nation, and we like to arrange everything just so in our lives. When my father took up a job in the (God forbid!) private sector, his father was horrified. All his other sons and sons-in-law were in the government sector. How did he produce such a maverick, he often wondered.
I think that the emphasis has, for a long time, been on the “what,” rather than the “how.” This principle might have tricked down to every single aspect of desi life, including getting a ration card, attaining ultimate enlightenment, and even reaching, literally, a destination.
Things are slowly changing now, as young couples, and older ones, realize the value of "life" itself, and not merely what lies beyond it.
Success is, after all, the journey, not a destination.
This may be the American in me talking, but herein might lie the answer to the question we were so often asked: What will you miss most about the United States?
So, this new year, I hope to make many, many mistakes, and learn from (most of) them.