Since I want to cover some ideas regarding the Indian identity etc, as I understand them through my personal experiences, I will be writing this post in two or three parts.

So I was huffing up a hill during my daily run, and suddenly, for no particular reason, I remembered a snapshot from my childhood: of sitting on a charpoy with a Sikh, as I was straining at my still limited fund of second or third grade CBSE Hindi to understand his Punjabi inflected speech. You see, in what was then a lower middle class Hyderabadi neighborhood in my childhood, home owners, including my parents, usually let out a part of their house to strangers to supplement their incomes with rents. And this transitory sardarji (how I wish I remembered his name) was a tenant in a single room in the house across the gali - a warren of rooms that was not discriminatory towards who stayed in them as long as they could pay.

My father, who had picked up Hindi in the course of working as a foreman in construction and subsequently in his secretarial study, was quite curious about, and perhaps sympathetic to, this saradarji, who was obviously quite far from his native grounds. So I was encouraged to converse with him; I suppose to improve my Hindi. I don't remember what I might have said to him, and what he might have replied. I even don't recall his facial features, other than that he was powerfully built (for a while I think he was the "gurkha" or night watchman for our half empty colony, which then lay at the fringe of a sleepy city), and very “fair”. (Yes, at a young age a skin color chart is injected into the Indian child)

Soon after he left that house, I think, to take up the job of trucker, leaving in my head these amorphous memories of a man with a steel bangle, long hair, and a beard; who lounged on a charpoy in the open during Sunday afternoons; who ate thick rotis* ; and who perhaps was lonely enough to attempt to communicate with a nerdy boy who couldn’t understand him.

*Rotis/ chapattis/ pulkas played a part in defining my identity vis-à-vis those of my cousins who were (and are) more deeply wedded to their regional & caste markers; they held that rotis were essentially foreign (even Turka, i.e., Muslim) food for South Indians ate rice in their meals, and by incorporating them into our meals, our family had become ‘contaminated’ in some sense. It didn’t help that the Telugu I and my sister grew up speaking had many elements of the the Telengana and Hyderabadi dialect. No wonder, in the recent state elections, a Telengana secessionist party won a considerable number of seats to the AP assembly, on a plank of overcoming "costal" dominance, and creating a seperate state a la Jharkhand or Uttaranchal.