I waited in the queue at the cashier with my groceries. I noticed that the cashier and his assistant, who was bagging groceries, looked at me a couple of times while they were helping other customers ahead of me in the line. I smiled at each of them when they looked at me, but they didn’t smile back. They looked at me again and in my nervousness I smiled again. As I approached the register and started fumbling with inserting my credit card into the reader, I realized they spoke to each other in Hindi or Urdu. I took it as a matter of fact first, but then I did a double-take because I understood what they were saying though the content of their conversation didn’t really register. My expression softened, and I looked from one to the other. I think they spoke in their native tongue to see if I understood. Then the cashier, the older man, asked me in Hindi how I was. I answered back in Hindi and said I understood the language they were speaking. Pointing to the younger grocery bagger, the cashier told me that he was telling him that I look like one of theirs. Actually, in literal translation what he said would mean, ‘she looks ours.’ “Apni lagti hai.” He then added that in return he told the younger guy, ‘no, she looks gori (white) to me.’ I am quite sure he was simply joking because no one has ever mistaken me as being white. I am often mistaken as being Jamaican or from another country with darker skinned people. Then the cashier asked me if I was from India and from which part? I told him yes and that I was from Punjab. He said he is from Lahore. I exclaimed and said, ‘oh that is Punjab!’ He said, yes it is, and that he speaks Punjabi, and right then to prove his point he did!
When India was partitioned in 1947 under the British rule, the Punjab province was divided between India and the newly formed Pakistan. Thus there are two Punjabs today, both speak Punjabi. In fact, both my mother and father grew up in West Punjab, which is now in Pakistan. Unmarried at the time of Partition, they were forced to flee from their homes, along with their families, to Delhi due to the devastating Hindu-Muslim riots that took place during the Partition.
When I asked the younger guy where he was from, he said Afghanistan, and all I could say was wow! Ambassadors of three countries from the same region of the world, not always friendly towards each other, had come together at a cash register in a supermarket in America! I looked deeply into the eyes of this young man because I saw a benevolent smile in there. I was very struck with his answer also because only a few minutes ago, when driving to Publix, I was listening to NPR BBC radio, and I heard that there was a grenade attack on one of the last standing Gurdwaras in Afghanistan that killed two Sikhs and injured some more people. This is part of a recent spate of attacks on Sikhs in gurdwaras and on the streets in Afghanistan. Many people have been killed in recent years, therefore they have been trying to leave that country in large numbers.
Elements of hate and division are present in every country in the world, but just now when I looked into the eyes of this young Afghan smiling at me because I belonged to the same part of the world as him and we understood each other’s language, I didn’t see any hatred or sign of hostility. I am confident that if I had told him that I too come from a Sikh family, he would have still embraced me just as warmly as he did believing that I belonged to his tribe and part of the world where he is from.
This is what puzzles me about us humans. While we crave community and tribe so much that we engage in a warm conversation with complete strangers at a supermarket in America thinking and believing we are kin, why do we despise the ‘other’ amongst us when we find them in our own country and in our neighborhoods? Don’t we all belong to the same human tribe above everything else? And to all life on this planet?
The small exchange I had at the supermarket on Saturday is not likely to change world politics, but it affected me and I came home excited about the prospect of a world where we can relate and belong.
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