I recently met someone and they said, You’ve lived in the US for 4 years and still don’t have an American accent! when they heard me speak. I’m sure plenty others have noticed but it was the first time somebody said it directly to me. I know folks who’ve been here for decades and still retain their original accents, that’s one of the easier (and more natural) things one can not shed off and still get by in this country.
I wrote A Tropical Sunday three years ago.* Three years thence I can admit without shame that I wasn’t an enthusiastic co-passenger in my father’s car when we went grocery shopping or to the fish market on Sundays, though I often enjoyed the actual shopping. Everything else in there is true though, pretty much. I carry a lot of that with me still, a lot of it my body carries. So my apartment AC is set to 77°F or 25°C, and the weekend is the one time I simply have to get out to bathe in sun’s heat.
When I tell people that I love the summer and a 90 degree weather, I add in qualifying by-notes such as It’s just my body though that loves the heat, my friends aren’t like that. I also love driving with my windows down when it’s mid-summer, with my body almost at the verge of breaking a sweat. It’s not a personal torture-device for penance or middle-class rejection of comfort (I thought through all possibilities), it just gives me the feeling post a good workout, or the perpetual sweat-stained life when I was younger and in college. It paints a mirage of an active day and healthy metabolism, all attributes from a good past.
Today I had my windows rolled down on my way to Costco. With free flowing hair, cool pockets of scalp here and there from my shower last night and the uneven coconut oil shine, a slightly warm almost sweat-stained back and a dewy oily face, it felt like a true authentic Sunday from back home. Sans my dad’s car, and honestly it’s so much better this way. Except this kind of a Sunday doesn’t exist back home anymore either. It’s way too hot there for my body and I was sweating profusely the entire time I was there last month. My body seems to be stuck in the tropics from a few years ago, everything and everyone else has moved on including my mind.
I guess this is part of being an NRI?
This was a good weekend for me. Puneeth and I were chilling on our rooftop Saturday evening and I told him that. “You know you still got some time to ruin it.”
You don’t know my potential, Puneeth.
I do, actually.
Okay yeah you’re right, you do.
Everyone who indulges in as much bs as I do needs a friend like him to call us out.
* I don’t even read similar writeups anymore, it’s almost too much saccharine for me to take, too rosy a picture to paint, and I’m constantly suspicious of all the skipped detail.
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