On being Caste-less

On moving to Kolkata, off and on we’ve been having construction workers at my parent’s apartment – a long overdue renovation. Come 4pm, Ma makes them tea. Needless to say, premium Assam tea – the only kind you’d find is a Tea Planter’s house – unadulterated by the demands of the profit driven market. Served in ceramic cups we use ourselves and it's quantity, ten times more that what they would get on the street stall below.

They relish it, although sometimes requesting for more sugar. Except for one of the tillers – an older man; he refuses. Now, street Hindi doesn’t have a vocabulary akin to ‘No, Thank-You’, so the lack of it doesn’t offend Ma. When he's around, they get tea from the shop below, in tiny plastic cups befitting in size to my childhood kitchen set.

The above doesn’t surprise Ma or me; nor does the fact that he wouldn’t drink water from our house, because doing so would be haraam. It doesn’t surprise me because I’ve previously heard of an incident from dad from when he was in school.

In the 1960s, Pa had a friend who frequently visited their modest one-room house in Calcutta’s China-Town. The boys cherished their friendship and studied together, but when offered something to eat, the friend would innocently tell my Grandma, “Aunty, aapke ghar me toh, paani pina bhi haraam hai” (Aunty, even drinking water in your house is forbidden for me).

This tea episode, also reminds me of other incidences...

Bungalows in the Tea Gardens of Assam can easily have an average of eight helps and with quite a particular servant hierarchy; shadowed perhaps only by the early twentieth century castles of Downton Abbey. My mother was new to it, and after a few incidences of house-keeping being paralyzed because if the sweeper didn’t show up, no one else did the cleaning, Ma learnt her lesson. She began shuffling their duties, their hierarchies now only on paper. So it was normal to see the pani-wala (kitchen help) mow the lawn and the gardener mop the floor. She could do this, because unlike a certain 'lady of the house' next door (and I’m sure many more), mom didn’t care if the sweeper entered her kitchen, or if the person chopping vegetables for our meal was in fact the sweeper.

When you grow up in India, you are automatically aware of such social equations.

Flashback again, to when I was about nine and just into residential school. One afternoon my girl friends were discussing each other’s caste – out of curiosity more than anything else. But the conversation wasn’t complete until they reiterated to each other (and to me) what the hierarchy of Caste System in the ‘old days’ was.  I don’t know how that discussion influenced them, but I remember being very aware of my sheer luck in being ethnically Chinese in Assam. Even though that discussion (probably) made no difference to how our friendships developed subsequently, that afternoon, I enjoyed the immunity of not having any label attached to me.

So what I’m getting to is, perhaps what provoked me to write this piece, is the realization that even with my family’s lack and sheer rejection of both, caste and religion, we are still not

immune to its inherent discrimination.

Luckily however, we are also fundamentally immune to being offended.