“Of course!” she says with a big smile and an ironic head tilt that I have come to love, “It has to be the Taj Mahal on the cover.”
I smile back. Making fun of clichéd representations of Indian Culture in America is kind of our thing and the Indian store is a gold mine, there was no way the image of the Taj Mahal plastered across a bag of rice was going to escape our attention.
“It doesn’t even represent Indian culture, it’s more of a Muslim thing.”
I really don’t want to say anything. Everything is going so well. Moments pass and the tightness in my temple compels me to bring it up ‘in a nice way.’
Maybe it’ll be one of those simple ‘oh I didn’t think of it like that’ conversations, that’ll make us closer.
It isn’t.
I say, “The culture of Indian Muslims is Indian culture.”
She says, “Yes but the Mughals were invaders.”
I say, “Shahjahan (the guy who built the Taj Mahal) was ¾ Rajput with five generations of his family in India.”
She says, “They didn’t think of themselves as Indians.”
I say, “In the 17th century the idea of India wasn’t invented yet.”
She says, “If a Temple or the Bhagvad Gita was chosen as a symbol of India, people would have screamed their heads off.”
I say, “The Taj Mahal is neither a Masjid nor the Quran. It is simply a mausoleum that happens to be made by a Muslim person for a Muslim person.”
She says, “It represents only one facet of Indian culture, not all.”
I say, “What does?”
She says, “We should make a new monument that represents all of India’s cultures.”
I ask, “What it would look like?”
She says, “How should I know?”
There is a pause. I tell her that her views form a part of a bigger trope. Of how everything that isn’t Hindu and upper caste can only be Indian with an asterisk. About how even the architect of our constitution is reduced to a ‘Dalit icon’.
She nods along. I think I’m making head way.
“Does all of that make sense? Do you agree?” I ask to double check.
“I agree,” she says and then looks up at me with spite in her eyes and says “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”
I say that I am making an argument and she is free to argue back. She says she is tired. She says these things don’t matter to her.
I tell her that not caring is her privilege.
She says she tells off her parents every time they start ranting about how much they hate Muslims.
I tell her that that her assumptions about what is Indian and what isn’t are problematic and are manufactured and marshalled to marginalize and sometimes murder minorities.
She tells me she is tired. That we are too different. That she is tired of apologizing for being Hindu. There is a pause. A part of me wants to apologize and another part is disgusted with the first. I let the silence remain. I will not break it. And chalk it up as another casualty in this war that I don’t have the guts to fight. A part of me is heartbroken and another part is proud to have made some sacrifice, however inadequate.