Nishi Chawla (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Nishi Chawla

Surrogate Existence

 

I walk through the mirrored corridors of another life,
where voices curl like silk around wine glasses,
where laughter is measured in stock options,
and the air hums with the low vibration of belonging
but not mine.

In this land of high ceilings and polished floors,
I orbit gatherings where names drop heavy as gold coins,
where success is a tongue fluent in acquisitions,
where the past is a nostalgia perfumed,
never a wound reopened.

They speak of India as a saffron-hued postcard,
a memory contained, curated,
a motherland that never smudges their hands
with ink of lost dialects, sweat from factory floors.
I listen,
but my India is still loud with street vendors,
damp with monsoon heat,
spiced with the sharp tang of longing.

Here, I live a life borrowed from another's design,
stitched into conversations that do not unravel,
nodding in circles where nothing is ever truly asked,
where migration is a story wrapped in silk,
not in the coarse fabric of sacrifice.

I walk through borrowed landscapes,
where the sun spills over manicured lawns,
where the wind hums through glass towers
that rise like ambitions never mine.

At dinner tables heavy with crystal and quiet laughter,
they speak in measured tones of hedge funds,
art auctions, private schools where their children
learn a history they will never question.

I sip from my glass, nodding at the right moments,
a well-rehearsed presence in a room
where accents curl around familiarity,
where no one asks about what was left behind,
only what was gained.

Outside, the streets throb with another rhythm
hands lifting crates at dawn, feet shuffling in
queues for papers that promise permanence,
tongues unspooling stories in languages
that never touch these walls.

Somewhere, an old woman in Queens folds samosas at dawn,
her hands remembering the fields she left behind.
Somewhere, a man waits at a bus stop in Edison,
his calloused fingers clutching a paycheck too light.
Somewhere, my real life waits,
outside these rooms with their glass walls,
outside this surrogate existence
that fits,
but never holds.

Here, in this America,
I inhabit the spaces between belonging and displacement,
an echo of a self I once knew,
a guest in a life I do not fully own.

 

 

The Gilded Ghetto

 

The streets here are wide, patient, still.
Lawns roll out like manicured carpets,
Each house a measured silence,
A tableau of wealth without the dust of inheritance.

Inside, I sit hunched over my laptop,
summoning poetry or the ghosts of history
Gandhi and Kasturba in a dimly lit ashram,
Tagore’s ink spilling onto letters meant for revolution.
The past feels sharper than the present,
more urgent than the quiet hum of suburban ease.

NPR murmurs in the background,
a distant world unraveling in measured voices
wars I will never witness, futures I cannot shape,
a planet heating beyond repair.

By evening, I surrender to the glow of world cinema,
priding myself on being an 'international soul,'
even as my own world shrinks into familiar faces,
into the safe, curated sameness of exile.

Somewhere, voices rise in the comfort of shared origins
Bollywood gossip between sips of Darjeeling,
children perfecting Sanskrit shlokas
between SAT prep and piano scales.

I know their names, their stories,
the migration maps of their families,
the weight of their gold, the shape of their ambitions.
But beyond this orbit, the world is distant,
a blur behind the tinted windows of our SUVs.

At gatherings, I measure my words like fine spice,
nod at the right critiques, disown the fervor
Modi’s name drifts in the air, and I feign distance,
a careful intellectual, never Hindu enough,
never nationalist, never crude.

To belong here is to soften the edges,
to let faith dissolve into dinner-party discourse,
to pretend that roots can be trimmed
without the tree remembering.

At the grocery store, I nod at familiar faces
women in silk kurtas deliberating over organic okra,
men in pressed slacks discussing tech stocks,
cashiers who speak only in pleasantries,
never in questions.

I have lived here for thirty years,
yet I know fewer than twenty Caucasians,
no black friends, no neighbors whose ancestors
were not once immigrants like me.

I watch the oligarchs shape this country,
their hands deep in laws, in markets, in silence.
Their wealth builds walls, their power bends truth
No different from the politicians I left behind,
the ones who carved up India with folded palms,
who spoke of progress but hoarded the spoils.
Here, they wear suits instead of khadi,
smile through screens instead of rally cries,
but greed, I have learned, has no homeland.

Would it be different in New Delhi?
There, the streets breathe in layers
the whine of auto-rickshaws, hue of roasting corn,
vendors pushing their carts through gated lanes
where the rich live apart but never alone.

Even in privilege, Delhi brushes the raw edge of life,
the servant's child playing barefoot by the marble steps,
the old bookseller at the corner,
his fingers tracing faded pages of forgotten poets.

Here, in this polished quiet,
I am insulated, untouched.
The only hands that reach me
are those of my own kind.

 

The Return

 

At the airport, they know me before I speak.
The sharp tilt of their heads, the flicker in their gaze,
a recognition wrapped in distance.
Not a visitor, not a local, something in between.

At dinners, cousins speak of start-ups and stock options,
maids glide in with silver trays,
and someone asks how much my house in America costs.
They measure my answers like fabric at a tailor’s,
weighing worth against departure.

The old neighborhood waits, unchanged but hollow.
I do not want to step inside my parents’ house,
to inhale the stale stench of memory,
to walk past the armchair my father sat in,
the kitchen where my mother’s bangles clinked
against steel bowls of kneaded dough.

I do not want to hear the echoes of my own voice,
the child who recited poetry to empty rooms,
the girl who once traced futures on fogged-up windows,
who thought the world would unfurl beyond these gates.

My own house, bought in another time,
is just another shell, another locked door.
A driver, paid by the hour, dusts the furniture,
waters the plants I do not recognize.
Neighbors ask why I don’t stay there,
why I rent hotels instead of returning home.

But home is a place where the past waits in ambush,
where walls press too close with the weight of knowing.
I walk through markets instead,
through streets that pulse with the smell of fried dough,
with the brash voices of vendors hawking plastic gods.

I walk through crumbling forts, tombs veined with time,
Palaces where the wind carries whispers of forgotten reigns.
My fingers press against sandstone and marble,
as if touch alone can pull history into my skin,
can make this land stay within me, unbroken, whole.

At temple steps worn smooth by centuries of bare feet,
at rivers thick with the weight of prayers and ashes,
I let India seep into me, not through family, nor blood,
but through stone, water, earth,
something older, something that does not ask me to belong.

Here, no one cares where I live,
what passport I carry,
what I have left behind.
Here, I am just another body moving through the crowd,
and for a moment, it is enough.

 

 

Dr. Nishi Chawla is an academic and a noted writer with ten plays, two novels, and seven poetry collections to her name. She has written and directed four award-winning art house films, with three streaming on Amazon Prime. A former tenured Professor of English at Delhi University, she holds a Ph.D. from George Washington University and a postdoc from Johns Hopkins. Her plays have been staged off-Broadway, and she is among the few Indian poets invited to the US Library of Congress’s The Poet and the Poem program. Her latest film, The Peace Activists, explores Gandhi, MLK, and Thoreau.

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Setu, April 2025