lucknow & the ethics of curiosity
in which I think about what I want to know about India, why, and whether there is a point
I share monthly-ish stories about people and places across India and the US, and I’d love to write to you.
Friends,
I’m recently back from a visit to Lucknow, the city where I spent the first year of my life. Lucknow is the capital of Uttar Pradesh, a BJP stronghold in northern India that could be the world’s fifth most populous country. Before the British raj, Lucknow was the seat of the Persian Awadh dynasty, with a lush tradition of Urdu poetry, Hindustani music, and grand architecture like the Rumi Darwaza. Today, it is a Tier-II city in a rickety run-walk into modernity, a mix of crumbling Nawabi buildings, whitewashed mansions, and glass malls bordering dense, ancient markets.
Lucknow and India, in general, have always had a magnetic pull for me unlike anywhere in the world. I am curious both about things people find important—the implications of Hindu nationalism, the struggling economy, the place of women—and those they find frivolous, like the genealogy of a roadside barber or the fake Nike sweatshirts in circulation. In this mail drop, I think about the place of my curiosity. What are its upshots? When is it harmful, neutral, or beneficial? Is it a force I can summon at will?
Love and happy holidays,
Mishti
I can’t see the sun at dawn on Nanu’s roof. The air is thick with ash from corn stubble, blue flames to Shiva, and hot coals under purple yams. Dust blooms behind the hoofs of a cow. In this city of three million, state of two hundred million, and country of one thousand million, everyone wants to mark the air.
Life hums thick on the ground, too, within a few steps of our gate. In the park, the press-wala (‘ironing guy’) in crumpled scrubs pumps water with his son. A dog shits under a mansion flying a BJP flag. Down the street, in a crumbling plaza where the shops have no doors, a skinny girl pops gum and points customers to a fake L’Oreal salon. The tailor has abandoned his clothesmound, made of a pile of fake branded Western wear, beaded salwars, and onesies for beloved babus. He eats lunch behind the marble mandir where his brother sells eggs and his nephews stomp daffodils into the mud.
I take a picture. Nanu rolls his eyes. “उसे यह सब कचरा बहुत पसंद है,” he tells no one in particular.
(“She loves all this trash.”)
The data dump of my phone—endless pages of scrolling newsfeeds—is deadening. The data dump of Lucknow, though, feels alive and electric. I take it in huge gulps, eyes peeled wide.
“What’s with this fascination with Lucknow?” my mom asked while I was writing this. “It’s as if someone was obsessed with Secaucus.”
I think Lucknow is curious and incredible. My parents, grandpa, and most Lucknow residents think I’m curious for thinking so. The dissonance made me think about what I want to know, why I want to know it, and whether there is a point to it all.
Part of my curiosity about Lucknow is inward-looking, which is the easiest kind to justify (know thyself et cetera). I lived until I was one in my grandparents’ white flat in Indiranagar, a small Lucknow neighborhood near my parents’ first office at the State Bank of India. After we moved to New Jersey, I spent roughly alternate summers in Lucknow until I was ten. My territory, the local block, was small but endlessly stimulating: I delighted in the stray cows, constant festivals, and the bike vendors who cycled by yelling ‘tomato man! potato man!’ depending on the season.
I didn’t return to Lucknow until I was twenty, after a decade of summers in New Jersey playing club and school tennis. By the time I came back, the badminton court my parents etched outside our gate had been paved by tire marks and the neighbors’ homes had grown into mansions built on corruption. The barbed wire that my dad had wound around the water tank remained, though the monkeys were gone. Nani had been long cremated, her ashes scattered onto the Ganges.
Now I try to visit annually, motivated partly by the fear that when Nanu is gone, I will lose both our family history and my place in Lucknow. I shadow his ascetic routine of prayer, food, TV, and calls from his kids, often with a voice recorder in my pocket. We spend a lot of time drinking chai on the porch, reading about Modi and the Kardashians in the Lucknow Times, and watching politicians scream at each other on TV. I sweep through his cabinets for family photos or notebooks with my grandma’s handwriting, which I bubble-wrap and carry home. Nanu is patient but sometimes frustrated by my questions. “Haven’t I told you this story already?” he asks, or “who cares about all these old papers?”
But much of my curiosity about Lucknow—and India, or anywhere I travel—peers outwards.
In Lucknow’s markets, I’m taken by the density of action. Bhoothnath, minutes from my house, is an unmarked maze, with a neon sign for Rama Sarees two turns away from a shoe store a Punjabi dadi has manned for fifty years. In Hazratganj, workers use ink receipts at the khadi ashram, Ram Asrey dips moongdal halwa in ghee, and the city’s best kachoriwala sits cross-legged and throws dough discs into an oil vat across the room. In Aminabad, one of Lucknow’s oldest Nawabi markets, Prakash’s Mashoor Kulfi opens into a chikankari clothes market and panwalas sit inside human-sized lockers. Each street follows a theme, from wedding cards to books that include the horoscopes of Western icons like Henry Ford.
No market corner is just a landmark—it is a residence, storefront, parking spot, restaurant, or even a barbershop. I asked people where they were from, how many generations had manned their store, how bad the rents were these days, where they went to relax. Where to find the best chaat, what films were good these days. What they thought of Modi and Yogi Adityanath, why Congress still hasn’t ditched the Gandhis, whether the rifts between Hindus and Muslims were really widening.
I called my parents and told them I wished I could earn a living chronicling these stories. They were puzzled that I took such interest in places they found so mundane.
“You’re getting caught up in nothing,” Papa said once. “Don’t act like a white person.”
Curiosity about things outside of ourselves can be destructive, neutral, or enriching.
In the first category is curiosity sparked by paternalism or disgust, like colonizers examining the colonized. This kind of curiosity comes in the form of questions that are really statements—more judgement than inquiry. I think of my Catholic school classmates asked me whether Hindus really worshipped thousands of gods or India really looked like Slumdog Millionaire. I think of myself, in turn, asking about people about things that deeply bother me, like eating animals. This kind of curiosity—questions veiled as moral shots fired—has caused centuries of emotional pain, looting, disease, and death.
Then there is the curiosity that is superficial, but overall neutral. This is what Papa calls “white person” curiosity. I feel it in the many Golden Triangle tourists who call India a sensory overload, which sounds interesting but scary—something that, according to Wikipedia, can cause irritability, fatigue, and isolationism. Sensory overloads are what you photograph from the railed-in windows of a safari car for your New York Times travelogue). People with neutral curiosity may have neutral—or even kind—intentions. They’re just trying to see a new world; they might not have the background knowledge or time to take a deeper dip. Locals don’t usually mind these tourists. They are intriguing, polite, and temporary, and their souvenir money powers many homes.
Both of the above tiers of curiosity have barriers, with the observer on one side and the observed on the other. I’d like to believe that there is a third kind, more founded in the Latin root of curiosity—curare, to care.
I believe in a deep curiosity that seeks to know the people and places that circumstance separates from us as well as we know ourselves. The underpinning thought is that, in the end, we are all the same. Maybe, here, the difference between looking out and looking in blurs.
The Upanishads say “अयं बन्धुरयं नेति गणना लघुचेतसां।उदारचरितानां तु वसुधैव कुटुम्बकं।।” –small men think “one is a relative; another a stranger.” For the enlightened, the whole world is a family.
When I am in India, I want to dive in. The senses are magnetic, not overloading. I seldom feel as attentive and live-wired as I do in Aminabad or a Bombay Uber, stories coursing through every open space. I want to understand myself and my substrate because that, to me, is what it means to live. (I’ve had that disposition for a while: I hated napping as a kid because I was afraid that I’d miss some spectacular story, and my college essay was about learning from strangers on the NJ transit, opening with “not all those who wander are lost.”)
Still, I think, my dad has a point. Curiosity that feels deep to me might seem banal to an onlooker, like the snack seller who asked Nanu’s cook Jyoti, after I left, what happened to the American with all the questions.
There always seems to be the threat of overconsumption, too, with an information overload crowding out any meaning. How many voice memos can I store of the snack seller, the panwala, or my Uber drivers? Is there a tipping point when, in the absence of periodic synthesis, the exercise defeats its own meaning—where, as my parents warn, if everything is important, nothing is?
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
I haven’t quite figured out my place between a well-intentioned tourist with “sensory overload” and someone who is part of a local ecosystem. There is a reason most of my photos are fast and blurry.
The other slippery thing about deep curiosity is whether it’s a privilege of time or something that anyone can summon regardless of circumstance. One morning, I went to the British Residency, a pre-independence war monument in Lucknow, with Jyoti and her kids. She was reluctant to come even though she told me she wanted to leave the neighborhood more often. (She’d have to wake the kids up early. She might fall behind in her work at our house. And what if her relatives from the village showed up unannounced?)
When we finally arrived, I read out all the explanatory signs as we walked us through the buildings, chasing green parrots with Jyoti’s daughter and learning what she knew about India’s freedom struggle from school.
“Did you like it?” I asked Jyoti when we left.
“Yes,” she nodded. “But it doesn’t matter much. Who has the time for such things?” It’s a refrain I hear from Nanu, too, who arguably does have time for such things.
I believe that every person and place has rich, beautiful stories. My questions come easily in India and abroad, or even in Paterson, Brighton Beach, or Astoria. But they were harder to extract in Princeton, when most of my mental energy is spent at my finance job, tabbing through screens of numbers behind closed doors.
Still, the stories are there to be found. I went to the liquor store behind Whole Earth and found a veiled Punjabi aunty who asked for my I.D. “Vidushi,” she read, and looked at me behind her rimmed eyeglasses. “Indian?”
When I answered in Hindi, she lit up. She asked where I was born. I asked her why she was playing Canto della terra. Boccelli was her favorite—she had wept when her son had piled up his savings to buy her a ticket to a live concert. After a shy pause, she asked for my number and wrote it carefully in her diary.
“I’ll call you sometime,” she promised.
This is so beautifully written!! I’m in love with your newsletters, I’m binge reading them (but taking my time with it as well, you write exquisitely) and i can’t get enough of it, thank you for sharing your experiences!!