“Are you in?”

This is the question posed to voters on President Obama’s re-election campaign website.  The President was the first to announce his candidacy for re-election in 2012, and with this announcement, the election campaign bells are starting to toll in America.

“Voters beware!” I can almost hear them saying.  “Spin season has begun.”

Amid the slogans and overused clichés, however, there is one aspect of elections that I look forward to, and that is, the speeches.

Many years ago, on a sunny afternoon in Mafikeng, South Africa, I listened to a recording of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech.  I was fifteen and knew very little about Kennedy, or America, at the time.

And so, my fellow Americans, he said,

Ask not what your country can do for you

Ask what you can do for your country.

What great expectations!  It was my first introduction to powerful speech writing, and it prompted me to find every other speech by Kennedy I could find.

Great speeches are few and far between.  But, the good ones are history’s gift.  They ignite the dreams that linger beyond the peripheries of our awareness, and animate the story of our heritage in the words of the people who lived through it.

There has been a lot of buzz this year about the art of speech making and writing.  Colin Firth won an Oscar for this portrayal of King George VI’s struggle with public speaking in the Oscar winning film, The King’s Speech(the movie won the Oscar for best screenplay).  Dennis Glover’s latest book,The Art of Great Speeches, published recently by Cambridge University Press, explores how the art of words has swayed millions and bent the will of history.

Perhaps my favorite scene in The King’s Speech was when Prince Albert, who had become King George VI, delivered a speech via radio as England was swept into the tectonic wave of World War II.

For the second time in the lives of most of us

We are

At war

He says.  The words beat rhythmically against my eardrums, as if from a poem.   The speech is a remarkable example of the largely under recognized art of speech writing.  Woven together, the King’s words assume a utilitarian role that is broader than pure art.  They soothe, if not heal.  They fill the void created in a society that is lurching in the grips of war, where a broader sense of meaning has been lost due to the paralyzing tragedy of the present.

After watching the film, I listened to the original audio transcript of the speech in the BBC’s online archives. His voice is singular and steady, as he deconstructs the argument for declaring war, and distills, through the chaos, a sense of purpose for his people.

I was in my senior year of college in Philadelphia when Obama, the relatively unknown Senatorial candidate from Illinois, delivered his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention.  As he tore down the stereotypical barriers between red states and blue states, and spoke about the shared dream between his black Kenyan and white American grandparents, a faint notion lingered in my mind.   He reached out beyond the audience at the convention and connected with my Democrat, and yes, Republican friends who sat next to me.  He connected with my friends in South Africa who watched his speech from Johannesburg.  His common American dream, borne from many parts, was theirs too.

He connected, I realized, with me.

“Yes we can!” chanted the sea of multi-ethnic faces that greeted Obama in Chicago on election night in 2008.  It was a remarkable phrase, a call to action that beat rhythmically against my eardrums like a line from a poem.  It was a rare example of the art, and utility, of speech.  Years from now, I imagine it will bend the will of another 15 year old girl, listening from a remote corner of the world.

Twentieth century history is peppered with leaders who translated, for their people, the narrative of the times in which they lived.  Their speeches animate the story of our heritage in the words of the people who lived through it.  Through the tenor of their voices, we glimpse the color of their dreams.  Their words live beyond the spheres of politics and diplomacy, and weave the fabric of our narrative, like poetry spoken out loud.

To this comparison, I imagine King George VI might have said, with a quiet hesitance, “I am humbled, though that was not the original intention.”

Nonetheless, I thank him for the gift.

I’ve known you for so long that I can’t remember the first time we met.  We went to the same school in Cape Town.  But, the day I got into a fight with Ravi Pandya in the fourth grade, at the annual rugby match against Pemberley Academy, is the first distinct recollection I have of your presence in my life.   You were in the ninth grade.

On that day, a thick mass of pregnant clouds floated low and heavy above us, painting the horizon in swathes of ominous grey, bearing a harbinger of impending rain.  Pemberley and our school, Rotterdam, were fierce rivals in most of the Cape Town inter-school competitions and the rugby match was a long-standing annual tradition.  Pemberley ran us off the field in the previous year’s game.  That day, afternoon classes and other co-curricular activities had been cancelled and the whole school converged on the rugby field.

The rugby field was located in the middle of the Athletes’ track, at the center of the school’s campus.  Next to it stood a tall, white bell tower.  Mounted in the belfry at the top of the tower was the school bell. Our daily class schedules were punctuated by its hourly chime.  In the fourth grade, and at four feet tall, I loved to stand underneath the tower, look up at the bell, and twirl around as fast as possible until I got dizzy.  It was a game I played.  After being defeated and falling to the floor in a cross-eyed stupor, I used to look back up at it, and it would stare piously back at me, watching over the rest of the campus, like a priest over his congregation.  It was our own Big Ben, that bell tower, beautiful and aloof.

We meandered towards the field after lunch and found our places on one of the bleachers that gazed on the track.   We were in good spirits, triumphant about our temporary escape from Algebra that afternoon and excited to avenge Pemberley for the humiliation suffered in the previous year’s game.  My classmates were spread out across the bottom two rows.  Sitting at one end of the bottom row was our third grade teacher, a tall and thin Scottish woman named Miss Sylvester.  Miss Sylvester’s name was particularly challenging for the first graders, who often rushed through the letters and blurted out “Miss Sleevester”.

After school hours, Miss Sylvester coached the high school ballet team, called the Rotterdam Lilacs.  She demanded complete devotion to ballet from her students, both in and outside the studio.  Any member of the Lilacs caught around campus in less than perfect posture would get a stern “head up” or “back straight” reprimand from her if she walked by.  Under her strict watch, the Lilacs were a force to be reckoned with at the Western Cape regional ballet competitions.  Her stern attention to posture, however, often spilled into the classroom.  This proved to be particularly problematic for my classmates and I, because with every punishment for wrongdoing, we got a complementary scolding for how we happened to be sitting, standing, kneeling, walking or running, at the time when the crime was committed.

If you were to ask Miss Sylvester, she’d tell you that my dispute with Ravi occurred due to a Mars bar, mid-way through the first half of the game.  But really, it started earlier that day when I shared my lunch with Paul Thembo.  Paul didn’t have his lunch that day.  He told everyone it was because he forgot his lunch at home.  But I heard Miss Sylvester telling one of the other teachers that Paul’s mother was not well and had been taken to the hospital the previous night.  So when Paul came over to my desk during lunch, looked at my sandwich, and said, “Whatcha eating?” I told him it was a ham and cheese sandwich, and gave him half (an offer which he cheerfully accepted).

Towards the end of lunch, as we were packing up to head over to the match, Ravi came to my desk and shouted loud enough for the whole class to hear:

“Anjali has a boyyyfriend!”

I felt my face burn up with rage as all my blood rushed to it.  “What did you just say?”

The day before this incident, Ravi had stolen a pencil from one of the other girls in the class, and broke it when she asked him to give it back to her.  Miss Sylvester sent him to stand in the corner for the rest of the afternoon, but I heard him snickering as he walked by my desk to the location of his incarceration.  I decided that he clearly would strike again, and when he did, I would not let him get away with it.

He stuck his face right up against mine.  “I said, you have a BOYfriend.”

The battle lines were drawn.  All verbal slingshots were summoned and stretched taut as we glared at each other.  “I do not”, I said, very quietly, “and you better take that back or else …”

“Or else what?  Admit it, Paul is your boyfriend.”

He carried on, loud enough so the whole class could hear.  “Anjali and Paul, sittin’ in a tree …”

“I told you Ravi!  You better shut up or else!”

Ravi would not have made the allegation so boldly in front of everyone if Paul was there.  Although Paul was the warmest, and by all accounts, friendliest kid in the class, he was also the tallest and was known, through previous altercations with opposing teams on the football field, to not shy away from a fight if provoked.  Shortly after I had given him my sandwich, Paul was summoned to the reception.  Paul’s dad, Mr. Thembo, had come to pick him early to go visit his mom in the hospital.  I knew that Ravi had singled me out because the other person affected by his accusation was not in the room.  I was alone.

In anticipation of events such as this one, I had been equipped with the conventional adult wisdom on how to handle fourth grade fights.  Turn the other cheek, take the high road and, my favorite, be a wit, not a wretch.  Wit, however, was not of much use in the situation I found myself in.  I grabbed the collar of Ravi’s shirt at the exact unfortunate moment when Miss Sylvester walked back into the classroom.

“Alright, that’s enough!” she said as she separated us.

Ravi pointed at me.  “She started it!”

“I did no such thing!”

“I said that’s enough!  Now, I don’t care who started it, but if I see you two misbehaving again, you will be sent to the library immediately, where you can spend the rest of the afternoon while everyone else watches the game.  Is that clear?”

“Yes ma’am”, Ravi said.

I remained silent and stared at Ravi, still fuming.  Miss Sylvester looked at me.  “Anjali!  Is that clear?”

I pulled my eyes away from him and nodded with a “yes ma’am”, softly.

Miss Sylvester’s threat was effective.  I did not want to miss the rugby game, definitely not because of Ravi, so I decided I would deal with him later.  This strategy worked, until mid-way through the first half, when we were granted permission to eat the snacks we had bought from the school shop.  Usually, snacks during class hours were prohibited, but we were granted an exception for the game.  The primary school teachers were gathered under a sleepy oak tree that spread out leisurely by the bleachers.  Once we had all settled in and were absorbed with our snacks and the game, Miss Sylvester walked over to join them.

Ravi was sitting behind me, in the row above mine.  I was removing the wrapper from a Mars bar I had bought from the shop when he reached down over the row I was sitting in and snatched it from my hands.  When I turned around, he took a generous first bite of it, with a sardonic grin painted across his face for full measure.

It happened very quickly.  I forgot the most important piece of adult wisdom regarding fights: Defending yourself is one thing, but don’t ever start one.  Gone too was the memory of Miss Sylvester’s ominous threat of being exiled to the library for the rest of the afternoon.  I got up, stepped on the bleacher, and reached to grab his right arm, in which he held my chocolate.

“Give it back!”

He didn’t let go.  I started to lose my grip because he kept moving his arm further away from me.  I jumped on the second row of the bleacher and landed on Ravi as the struggle intensified.  We continued to wrestle until I felt someone pulled me off Ravi and hold me back.  I kept demanding that he give back my chocolate.  I thought Miss Sylvester was holding me back, but when I turned around, I saw that it was you.

“He stole my chocolate Adam!  He started this!”  My fingers pointed like daggers towards Ravi and I was furiously stamping my feet on the ground. Some of the other kids seated around us pitched in, picked sides, or stayed neutral, resulting in a cacophony of varying parts of the truth.

“Anjali started it!”

“It’s Ravi’s fault.“

“Are we all in trouble?”

“Oh man, we’ll all be sent to the library now!”

“You’re all in trouble, especially you two”, you said, looking at Ravi and me.  “You’ve made a scene, and Miss Sylvester will be here any minute, so sit down.  All of you sit down!”  I stepped back down to the first row and sat down.

“Ma’am, she started it!” Ravi said, as soon as Miss Sylvester reached us.

“Quiet!  Not a word from either of you.”  She looked at you.  “Adam, what happened?”

“No idea ma’am.  I saw them fighting and had just separated them when you got here.  Anjali has a bad cut on her leg.  Ravi looks fine.”

After you said those words was when I first felt the warm sensation of blood on my left leg.  I looked down to see blood oozing out of a gash, three inches long, below my knee.  My skin was scraped off and I saw raw flesh for the first time.  I still have a scar on my leg from that wound.

“There’s a wooden splinter in the wound, she must have cut herself on the edge of the bleacher”, Miss Sylvester said.  She sat down on the ground and inspected my leg in her lap.  “She needs to go to the nurse immediately.”

“I’ll take her ma’am”, you said.

Miss Sylvester hesitated.  “I’ll take her”, you said again, “you should probably stay here with the rest of the class.”

The rest of the class sat quietly across the first two rows, peering over each other as they vied to see the wound.  The blood on my leg had probably given them a clue that something serious had happened.

“Alright.  But her leg needs to be wrapped, I’ll see if I can get something from the first aid kit.  Stay here.”  She ran to the bleachers where the rugby players’ equipment and first aid kit were kept, and returned with a piece of gauze and safety pin.

“Hold her leg Adam, right below her knee, I need you to keep it still while I wrap this.”  She wrapped the gauze around the wound slowly and pinned the end of it gingerly with the safety pin.  “There, that should hold it for now.  Take her straight to the nurse, no stops on the way.  This needs to be looked at right away.”

You nodded.  “Here, grab my arm”, you said to me.  I put my arm around yours and stood up.  A gush of pain ran swiftly through my left leg.  My left knee gave way under a reflex, and I quickly realized I would need to carry my weight on my right leg alone.

“Ouuuuuch!” I bent over in pain.  The taste of salty water in my mouth told me I was crying.

“It’s okay, I gotcha”.  You took my arm, put it around your shoulder and grabbed my waist to hold me up.  “Alright Anjali.  You’re going to have to use your right leg more than the left one, but I’ll hold you.  I won’t let you fall, I promise.  Okay?”  I nodded, wiping away the tears from my face with my left arm.  As we started to make our way off the field, the referee blew his whistle for half time.

The nurse’s office was located on the first floor in the Sciences building, about a half mile away from the field, at the end of a road lined with weeping willows on each side.  Voices from the rugby field floated in the wind towards us, loudly at first, but they slowly petered, until we only heard sounds of group laughter, cheers or applause and the whispers of the willows surrounded us.

“Why did you fight with Ravi?” you asked, after we had been in silence for a while.  My left foot tapped the ground lightly  as I hopped on it, like a caricature of the Rotterdam Lilacs.

Amid the shock of seeing the wound on my leg, I had forgotten about what had happened with Ravi.   “He stole my chocolate.  And he’s telling the whole class that Paul is my boyfriend, which is not true.”  My stomach turned as I realized that, in addition to the hefty dose of humiliation already served that day, Ravi had seen me cry in front of the whole class.

“That’s unlike you Anjali”, you said.  “Since when do you let boys like Ravi get you mad like that?”

“Since boys like Ravi started bullying everyone in the class, that’s when.  And besides, what would you know about what’s unlike me?”

“Sure I would, I’ve only known you since you were born, so yeah, I’d say I know a thing or two about what is unlike you.”  You paused, looked at me with a slight frown, and then lightly jabbed my waist with your arm.  “What’s going on?  What’re you mad at me for?”

“Nothing.”  We carried on for a few moments in silence.

“Listen”, you said.  “I know we haven’t been hanging out that much anymore since I started high school.  It’s just that, high school is different, and …”

“Yeah, I know.  High school is different, and you wouldn’t want all your grown up friends to think you have friends in the middle school, cos that would be lame.”

“That’s not true.  We still play tag on the weekends.”

“Only when you’re not off somewhere playing guitar by yourself or rugby with your high school friends.   You don’t play with us anymore.”

You rolled your eyes, “Don’t be such a girl.  Just because I don’t play tag with you doesn’t mean we’re not friends.  I’m here with you right now, aren’t I?  It’s just that, things are different now.”  And then, after a pause, “You won’t understand.”

“Why, because I’m a girl?  That sounds like something Ravi would say you know.”

“No.  Because you’re nine”, you said, smiling and shuffling my hair with your right hand.  “Don’t worry kid, one day you will understand.  Maybe, instead of Tag, I can teach you how to play the guitar, how does that sound?”

“You’d do that?”

“Sure I would.”

I momentarily forgot about my emotional outburst.  Guitar lessons, I reasoned, were worth the sacrifice of a few Tag games.

Before long, we reached the Sciences building.  I could no longer put any weight on my left leg, and hopped up the flight of stairs to the first floor where the nurse’s office was located.  She had a look and told me I needed stitches, a prognosis which I received in complete dread.  I had never gotten stitches before and heard that they hurt.

“Don’t worry”, you said.  “My mum had to get stitches last month; she cut herself while working in the garden.  She said it didn’t hurt.  They’ll put medicine on your leg so you won’t feel it too much.”  I kept my leg still while the first piece of suture material penetrated the wound.  A sharp pinch reverberated through my leg.  I flinched and turned my head away.

“Hey Anjali.” You pulled up a chair and sat next to the examining table.  “Did I tell you about the Antelopes we saw the other day?”

“Antelopes?” I turned back and looked at you, my eyes wide in disbelief.  “No way!  Not in these parts!”

“Yeah, we did!  There were two of them, standing between the trees right off of Route 4.  We saw them on the way home, after my dad picked me up from school last Friday.  And actually, I was the one who saw them first.”  This last part you declared proudly.

“It was raining heavily, hailing even, and it was really hard to see them through the trees, but I was able to.  They must have been grazing somewhere nearby and got close to the road.”

I heard stories from my dad about rare antelope sightings in the forests off of Route 4.  Route 4 was one of the province’s major highways ran through a forest of mostly eucalyptus trees that sprawled across hundreds of acres in the Western Cape.   I had never, at that point, seen an Antelope and was spellbound.

“Did you stop to take a closer look at them?”

“Yeah, I told my dad to stop the car.  He didn’t believe me at first, but I convinced him to stop and go back.  We did a u turn, stopped on the side of the road and got out of the car to get closer to the trees.  I got soaked in the rain, but I didn’t care.  They were still standing exactly where I’d seen them, about 20 meters away from the first row of trees right off the road.  There was an older one and a young one, a doe I think.  The older one had horns.”

“Did you see their eyes?  My dad told me they have beautiful eyes.”

“I did, but we were too far away to get a close look.  They were too busy grazing to notice us.”

“What happened then?”

“We watched them graze.  The older one finished first, and started to tug at the younger one, maybe telling it to finish eating already”, you said with a smile.  “After a while, they sauntered off, away from the road, and we watched them until they disappeared into the forest.”

I was silent.  “Wow”, I said after a moment, in barely a whisper.

“I know.  Pretty cool, right?”

“Yeah.”

The nurse told me that the stitches were done.  I had forgotten all about them, and hadn’t felt any pain.

“See?” you said, smiling.  “Told you it wouldn’t hurt.”

Although the wound had been stitched, she told me to avoid putting pressure on my left leg for the rest of the day.  She saw no reason to keep me and determined that I was well enough to be discharged and sent back to the game, so I hopped back down the stairs to the ground floor.

“Miss Sylvester has probably called your parents”, you said.

“Yeah, I know.”   After a pause, I added, “I think Ravi singled me out today because I am the only other Indian kid in the class, aside from him.”

“Don’t let Ravi get to you”, you said.  “Sooner or later he’ll either grow out of it, or realize that picking on people is no way to earn respect.  Besides, he’s already in a lot of trouble.”

“I’m not afraid of him you know”, I said, “even though I’m a girl and all, he doesn’t scare me.”

You laughed and shuffled my hair, “I know kid, that’s what I’m worried about.  Now”, you put my right arm over your shoulder again and grabbed my waist for support. “Let’s head back.”

We walked out of the building and started to make our way back through the willows to the rugby field.  I thought about the Antelopes.  “Hey Adam”, I said.  “Do Antelopes shed their horns?”

“No, they don’t”, you said.

“So they’re not like deer then.  Like Reindeer for example, Reindeer shed their horns.”

“That’s right, Reindeer shed their horns.  But Antelopes are still a type of deer nonetheless.  They just happen to be the type of deer that do not shed their horns.”

“Do you think we’ll ever see Reindeer in these parts?”

You shook your head.  “I don’t think so.  Reindeer don’t come from Africa”, you said, and added with a smile “If the story about Santa originated in Africa, he’d probably have Antelopes instead of Reindeer pulling his sleigh.”

“That would be weird”, I said, laughing. “I can’t imagine a sleigh being pulled by Antelopes.”

I thought about Paul, and wondered if his mother was doing better.  I remembered that, in a few moments, we would be surrounded by the urgent noises of the match.  The silence we walked in slowly dissipated.  In the distance, I heard the chime of the school bell.  The sound rode the tide of the wind and greeted us: fouuuur – peeeee – emmmmm. We petered at the edge of a beginning, while the whispering willows quietly carried our childhoods away from us.

“Adam”, I said, “What’s the Zulu word for Reindeer?”

You shrugged.  “Dunno.”  After a pause you said, “I’d have to ask my parents that question.  I’d imagine it’s difficult to find an African word for Reindeer.”

By then the poetry is written
and the wild rose of the world
blooms to last so short a time
before its petals fall.
The air is music
and its melody a spiral
until it widens
beyond the tip of time
and so is lost
to poetry and the rose –
belongs instead to vastness beyond form,
to universe that nothing can contain,
to unexplored space
which sends no answers back
to fill the vase unfilled
or spread in lines
upon another page –
that anyhow was never written
because the thought could not escape
the place in which it bloomed
before the rose had gone.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you–
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me–we two–you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me–who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records–Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white–
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me–
although you’re older–and white–
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

Under the grueling gaze of the early summer sun, my father lined up at a community center in South Delhi last month to vote.  He got there early, hoping to beat the chaos that usually accompanies the combination of bureaucracy and mass crowds.  Austere signage greeted him at the entrance, directing voters, by block, to their respective booths.  The day was hot.  The air, feeling too languid, did not move.

Typically, an April day in Delhi is windy.  Gusts rave angrily in the heat, carrying and disposing particles of sand capriciously throughout the city.  On this day though, the city had been granted a reprieve from the usual deluge.  The price of this favor, however, was that the air, vaporous and laden with smog and silt, turned the city into a perpetually polluted sauna.

It cooked and stuck like caustic syrup to his skin.

My father participated in the labyrinthine exercise of voting after a thirty year lapse spent in Zambia.  He left during the murky sunset of the 1970s. The decade had tested the limits of a generation’s belief in their democracy.

Lingering in the air were the relics of the central government’s Garibi Hatao program that failed to deliver on its promise to remove poverty and amounted to be more about campaign sloganeering rather than development.  Some condemned the emergency years while others defended some of its facets, arguing that democracy in India was a fool’s dream that stood in the way of development.

Elections, even the constitution, it seemed, could be bought.  National parties lost their following in favor of regional caste-based politics.

Then there was the legacy of colonialism.  The quest was not to win the west, but to be weary of it.  Trade barriers were thick and the bureaucracy of a quota-permit based system saturated the markets.  It was a young, large democracy, standing at the brink of repeating many of the mistakes it wished to write off.  Amid this, my parents moved, from one young republic to an even younger one.

Thirty years later, at the beginning of a new decade and century, he returned to Delhi, with a sense of belonging to two very different countries.  Living in India became an exercise in learning and relearning.

I called him the day after he voted to find out how it went.

“I couldn’t vote”, he said.  There was an echo on the line.

“What?  Why?”

“When I finally got to the front of the line they couldn’t find my name in the database.”

“Did you forget to take your registration card?”

Dumb question, I know.  The process of elimination when troubleshooting any problem: ask the dumb questions first.

“Of course I did not forget my registration card!”

There it was: the anti-climatic end to a miniscule part in the grand stage production of the elections.  I was disappointed.

I read tweets about the election results before hearing about it on the news. This time, the habitual dance of polarizing politics did not succeed in seducing enough voters. This was perhaps most gratifying.

For now, it’s another five years with our erstwhile prime minister, ascribed to with adjectives like septuagenarian, too academic, frail, and quite forgettable on stage.  All true.  But I would argue that, perhaps, for the set of challenges that India faces, experience matters more than charisma, honesty more than an uncanny ability to flirt with the press.

In our parliamentary system, much of the art of Government making happens in private.  In the early hours after victory was declared, I imagined the important discussions floating among the arbors of Ten Janpath Road in New Delhi as a coalition government was formed anew.

I remembered one of my favorite British sitcoms, Yes Prime Minister and the character I was most fond of, Sir Humphrey Appleby. He was the archetype of a power player in Parliamentary politics, the man who was not Prime Minister but was instrumental in putting the Prime Minister in office.

I loved watching him articulately obfuscate and confound his opponents (even his own boss, the Prime Minister!) through technical jargon mixed with obscure Latin references.  His big speeches, delivered in the private chambers of British Government, were the highlight of every episode.  Humphrey’s best moments were when the press wasn’t in the room.

As I waited to learn about our new Government, I imagined Sir Humphrey would probably have likened Ten Janpath Road to the chronicles of Downing Street.

I watched Mr. Singh speak at a news conference after the results were announced.  He was speaking in his characteristic soft voice, barely audible above the din of the press, when I received the following text from my dad:

The UPA won handily.  They have a mandate.  I am happy.

I smiled.  Here was a good ending, even though he didn’t get to vote.  The last bit was my favorite part.

A thirty year trajectory, with two very different Gandhi women at both ends, one who vied for absolute power and the other who won it handily and then shied away from it.  I imagined how my father saw the complex journey from an emergency and the constitution of a republic in crisis to transparent elections with a clear victor and the gift of a mandate.  Mostly, I was pleased with this positive note in history’s narrative.

Meanwhile on TV, Mr. Singh finished his comments.  I could hear him only because the press in the room got quiet when he approached the microphone.  Not surprisingly, of all the speeches, his was the most brief.

“The public has expressed faith in Congress”, he said.

I replied as only Sir Humphrey could.

“Yes, Prime Minister”.

I ran my fingers over the passport cover, and slowly traced the golden emblem’s imprint.  I tried to piece together the inscription at the bottom, but didn’t get very far.  Three weeks of evening Hindi classes at home had prepared me for deciphering only consonants.  Vowels and punctuation were coming soon, I had been told.  So my dad translated.

Satyameva Jayate.  He ran his index finger over each word as he said it, so I could follow.

I was puzzled.  Was I supposed to know what that meant?  My parents spoke Hindi at home but I had never heard these two words before.

“It’s Sanskrit”, he explained.  “It means truth conquers all.”

“Sanskrit?  Am I supposed to learn Sanskrit too?”

He could sense the anxiety in my voice.  I hadn’t been having a grand time with the Hindi classes.  The addition of another unknown language to the list was cause for some consternation.

“Eventually”, he said, smiling.

“Oh, right then.”

Eventually.  The word for me, seven years old at the time, signified a point in the gargantuan future, so it didn’t bother me much.  After all, I had gotten my first, very own passport that day. It was brand new, with blank pages.  On the first page, in my own handwriting, was my signature below my photograph.  I had practiced it for days, even in the car during the five hour drive to the Indian Embassy.

I sensed that something important had been delegated to me, a new responsibility that I could not quite articulate. I had golden emblems on my mind.

“Sanskrit”, I thought, “can wait.”

I was born and had lived in Zambia when I became a seven year old Indian citizen.  This weighty identity was bestowed on me because of my heritage and not because I had done anything particularly special to have earned it.  My parents were born and raised in India and were Indian citizens.  It was therefore decided for me that I too would be an Indian citizen.  I initially protested.

“I’m a Zambian!  Shouldn’t I get a Zambian passport?”
“This is just for the time being.  Later on, if you want a Zambian passport, you can always get one.”

This somewhat placated me.  At least I had the option, later on, in the gargantuan future.

India, to me at that time, was foreign, yet familiar.  It was a packaged treat, filled with annual holidays spent in my grandmother’s house, with no school and daily walks with her to the market where I could get Mars bars, Polo mints, and what I imagined to be the entire inventory of Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.  All these were goods not easily procured in Zambia and held a high market value in my estimation.

So it happened that my earliest relationship with India was really quite simple: as long as the candy was abundant, the place was good in my books.

The passport turned out to be quite useful three years later when I was sent to Delhi for school.  I started at my new school the day before Independence Day.  On my first day, my new classmates participated in the school parade.  India was forty seven.  I was ten.

Over the next four years, as I adjusted to my new foreign yet familiar place, its complexities unraveled.  India, the packaged treat, slowly started to disappear and was replaced by an amalgamation of historical facts.

In books, I learned of the nation that was born at the same moment when it was broken, of the non-violent independence movement that culminated with the most violent and horrific human migration in history.

I discovered that the world’s largest democratic experiment was, at its outset, really an unlikely one and that it almost slipped away during the dark days of the emergency.

Among the diversity and rich cultural heritage was the cruel exclusion of the caste system.

These facts and others I stored away, in packaged phrases like that very first one: Satyameva Jayate.  I understood them only cognitively, devoid of emotion, as one would a twenty word factoid read in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  I ended up with an aloof education about multiple facts, without understanding the meaning of their utterance.

It was a luxurious and transient interlude from meaning that eventually liquefied and spilled into a fleeting memory.

The meaning crystallized in the years that immediately followed, through an existence spent mostly elsewhere from India.  It came in drips.  As the rudimentary structure of my own values started to form, facts were revisited, accompanied by a realization of the absurdities and paradoxes underlying them.

While the west cooed over India’s emergence, there was a reckoning of the legacy of poor agricultural and environmental policies.  Amid the sprouting of urban malls was the heartbreak of the farmer and the environment.  In the world’s largest democracy were the fractional, petty and utterly corrupt political norms.

Behind the incredible India ads was a growing sense of a society whose members, in a relentless pursuit of their own four-walled ends, forgot how to treat each other.

Mostly, amid an India growing in bursts, I discovered the litany of disappointments borne by the Indian citizen, in cycles of hope and utter desolation.

Satyameva Jayate.  Years later, in a passport filled with bureaucratic graffiti, has this phrase derived greater significance, or has it been marred with disillusion?

Truth conquers all.

Does it?  Or is this just a passing phrase that has no enduring meaning in our body politic, fleeting in the cacophony that tends to pervade in our allegedly thriving pluralism?

I remain ambivalent.

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He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the greater community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his union shows it was sound)
And our social psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both producers’ research and high-grade living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the installment plan
And had everything necessary to the modern man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into public opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our eugenicist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their  education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

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(We are): floating time capsules
carefully preserved between extremities
of truth, hidden dimensions
depths we dare not uncover.

(We are): residues of unstable matter
particles of incomplete moments,
floating through standing waves between
what could have been, and what will be.

(We are): that uncertainty principle,fighting inevitability
the restless nomad, displacing and replacing,
balancing re-calibrations of foreign and familiar,
accepting imperfections of our immeasurable being.

(We are): who we are
the inescapable self.

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I REASON, earth is short,
And anguish absolute.
And many hurt;
But what of that?

I reason, we could die:
The best vitality
Cannot excel decay;
But what of that?

I reason that in heaven
Somehow, it will be even,
Some new equation given;
But what of that?

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