“Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya”
“From Darkness, lead me to Light”
-Hindu Prayer
A Summer breeze meanders through the streets of Pleven, bringing with it some semblance of relief. I am seated at one of the many benches that dot the Center, accompanied by the inhabitants of the city. In the evenings, the fountains are accompanied with colours, and the city’s inhabitants descend onto the Freedom Square, or join each other in conversation in one of the many mediocre restaurants that line the promenade. The promenade ends with at the statue of Vladimir Vazov, a General from an era away, and as he keeps his eternal watch over the city, the sun sets gently over the horizon. What is left behind after sunset is the congregation of the city’s inhabitants, doing things that civilians do in times of peace. There are other cities across Eastern Europe and Russia where this phenomenon of evening is a nightly ritual. Back in India, such is likely not the case, the sun sets on time over the equator, and most social gathering probably occurs in temples or festivals. I don’t remember. India is a distant memory, an abstraction composed of distance and time.
Like other doctors, my day is filled with paperwork, research, more paperwork, stacks of files litter my apartment, the thousand little things that I have to prove. For example, a high stack of papers is dedicated to providing intimate details of my own private life, all part of some “security check”, prior to making a final application due in a few months. The records themselves were hard to come by, their intrusion into my life was unwelcome, but as an Indian doctor, I have come to the same reconciliation that some indignities are just par for the course of life on Earth.
There is another stack of paperwork, familiar, like an old wound. It is a stack of rejection emails that I have received over the past few months. Most of them are rejections from positions for doctors, others are for academic positions, and there are a few which are rejections from journals. The journal rejections are straightforward, most of them say something about editorial changes they would like to see, others are rejections based on some tense negotiation over Article-Processing-Fees. In the world of medical academia, all communication is professional. There is a structure to the rejections, and these structures are based on some arbitrary objectivity that gives us the veneer of respectability.
This missive, written after deliberation is not about the veneers of respectability.
An interesting email reads:
”Dear Dr Shanker,
We are very grateful for your application. We are indeed very impressed by your academic and extracurricular achievements. However, we regret to inform you that we do not work with Indian citizens”
The email goes on, talking about some policy or the other, alternating between profuse apology and pathetic handwringing about how this is not a reflection of the organization’s racial equality values but more about logistics. There are other emails like this, which state quite clearly that unfortunately, I am a third country national and therefore ineligible for this position. These are variations of an old saying that I am often reminded of, “Dogs and Indians not allowed”, a saying that was drilled into us during lessons on Indian History and British rule in India. Of course, my British colleagues do not know the extent of colonial cruelty on the Indian sub-continent. I doubt that the altar boys of racial equity in Europe, prancing as they do the halls of the European Parliament know the extent of Indian participation in the First and Second World Wars, our soldiers lie in the vast fields of Flanders and France, and if, even after a hundred years, there is no mention of their service, I doubt there will be any recognition even now.
There are disparities in how doctors of color are perceived in most corners of the West. In many places, doctors of color are perceived for what they are, doctors. The white coat acts as a shield that says “we deserve equality, because we have earned it”. Indeed, even now, if I introduce myself as Dr Shanker, I am treated with courtesy. Apartments and offices can be rented to me, I can stand at a bus stand without having to justify my existence. The title is a shield over my ethnicity. A few months ago, this current sense of security was non-existent, I was only Mr Shanker, if that.
At this point, it is important to recognize that I do not seek sympathy. Sympathy or empathy are illusions of comfort to assuage a sense of guilt in the person expressing it. For the person towards whom the sympathy is directed, it is nothing more than a snare for the wind. For me, racism is not a new affront, indeed my father faced the same, his father before him and likely generations before him. It is our legacy, just as this profession of medicine is.
My first experience of racism was back in India when I read about Martin Luther King. I was back home from boarding school for the winter break, and I asked my father if he had ever faced racism. I must’ve been ten years old at the time.
“Every day”, he replied. General Surgeon, head of department, accomplished surgeon, student, son and loving father, he had faced racism in his own country. Those of us from the State of Bihar in India know this all too well. As I grew older, I faced the same discrimination at school, at work, and elsewhere. I was spared most of it because of my biracial heritage (biracial by Indian standards, strange as they are), my only reprieve even now is that at the very least, the racial discrimination I face is in large part because I am in a foreign country. It is in some ways a relief, because in India, I had faced racial insults, epithets, the occasional violence by people of my own country. In Eastern Europe, the racial epithets, violence and indignities are the same, but meted out by our hosts.
I had once had the rare opportunity to speak about race to a colleague. She was a researcher back then, and she had told me that she had never expected that I as an Indian could speak English so well. It was scant praise coming from her, I had spent countless hours teaching her to speak in English, and preparing her for the OET examinations. She was from a country which is now at war. During peacetime, an inconceivable dream, we spent hours improving her fluency over the English language. She was surprised to watch a video of my friends and I when we are at boarding school, all of us spoke English fluently. A colonizer’s language, but adopted by us for its function as a bridging language. Even today, I cannot speak my father tongue of Hindi, but I am too old to feel a sense of heartbreak.
My colleague was once invited to be a judge at an Indian medical conference. Organized by medical students in India, this was a prestigious conference. As a judge, she asked questions about the papers presented, and made some comments. Later, she called me and told me that it was a nerve-wracking experience. She couldn’t follow what the speakers were saying, and the presenters were nervous. She was puzzled at being called “ma’am”, a term of respect that is afforded not because of womanhood or hierarchy, but in recognition of someone’s accomplishments. I still use the term sir and ma’am, not because I am servile, but because I was raised with dignity and manners. She, raised in the Soviet atmosphere of Eastern Europe, thought that showing respect was a sign of servitude. It was her enlightened opinion, no doubt, that the British taught this to us as Indians and we should try to disabuse ourselves of this notion. Years later, when the war broke out, Indian students were forced off of evacuation trains, I could hear them pleading to the various armed and uniformed personnel, with tones of desperation. I could hear them pleading “Sir, please let us board the train”, as airstrikes continued around them. It was only later that I was informed of the assaults, the denial of entry into evacuation trains, and racist violence as they escaped the war into the European Union. My colleague reached the safe harbours of the European Union, something I doubt I would have if I was in her position. I wasn’t raised to plead, unfortunately and the long hours I spent being drilled and disciplined would have likely ended badly for me.
The Summer breeze settles around me, tousling my hair. I can hear the sounds of conversations in a city I have come to call home, for the lack of a better term. The sun is setting, it is peacetime, the familiar whine in my ears has disappeared. I think of the piles of rejection letters, the little indignities of facing a hostile world, but it disappears as the sun sets unevenly over Pleven.
Do we really care ? India is a wonderful country and good to have a life