Give Us this Day our Tandoori Chicken

I spent the last week in Germany. Each night as I stepped into my hotel room I immediately switched on either CNN or the BBC, comforted by the sounds and cadences of spoken English after spending my days in a mostly German-speaking environment.

Apart from the usual news, there were accounts of the latest breed of terrorists. They need no bombs, they are small and undetectable and they are constantly on the move. Their bodies are their weapons and they seem not to fear death as they strike terror into the hearts of all while humans are forced to contemplate their mortality. This transient, migratory group, travels across the globe and until now was not truly considered a global threat. Not since Hitchcock’s The Birds, have birds created so much terror.

There are the first soldiers, the casualties; dead swans in Germany, ducks and swans fished out of rivers and lakes across Europe, farmed poultry testing positive in Nigeria and India and most telling of all a dead bird found on the border of Austria and Switzerland, an airborne terrorist, fulfilling its suicide mission by advancing the H5N1 virus into yet another country. There is bird flu popping up in Europe, sweeping across Africa and advancing in India. A ticker running at the bottom of the CNN screen informs me that a bird flu pandemic could kill 140 million people worldwide.

Migratory birds are perhaps the largest and most diverse Diaspora in the world. I identify with them even as the thought of feathers and beaks temporarily fills me with dread. Just as my last name and the color of my skin makes some take note, feel a strange unease when they see me board a plane and sit down next to them.

Until now the West was only paranoid about brown-skinned people flying around in airplanes. Now the whole world trembles as it contemplates the spread of disease by the most innocuous of creatures. Birds—beautiful swans, cute (and delicious) chickens, adorable sparrows—all objects of terror. How do you trap these terrorists, make them stop spreading disease? You might as well try to stop the wind.

It is not enough that I must give up spicy buffalo wings and tandoori chicken but also that I now must look with fear at a seagull that sits on a ledge as I park my car. I sit in my car, dreading emerging into frigid Boston air and look at the bird. It perches across from where I am parked. It opens its mouth and makes that awful, loud, graceless squawk that seems so out-of-place inland. At the shore the same sound seems lighter, more beautiful somehow. What is natural and right in one place can seem so wrong in another.

We look at each other, square off for a long moment and then it flies away. I’ve won Round One on behalf of Humans but have no illusions about the subsequent rounds.

Americans are paranoid about the Hispanic hordes and shiver at the sight of all bearded brown and turbaned males— Arabs indistinguishable from Indians (especially Sikhs) and Pakistanis. Fear of brownness. Europe is generally paranoid about Muslims and anyone who looks different, each person suspect, especially as the cartoon wars escalate. Just as I suspect every bird I see now, whether flying free in the sky or goose-pimpled and separated into breasts and wings in sealed plastic containers at the grocery store.

I realize I am not just part of one Diaspora. I am not just Indian. I am part of many groups and each group carries it’s own stereotypes. I am also Muslim. But I am a woman. Therefore, I must be oppressed—or perhaps a rebel since I don’t wear a hijab, am married to a non-Muslim and enjoy a fine glass of wine. People search for a convenient slot. Reality is too obscure, too unquantifiable, too unknowable.

I am part of the larger Diaspora of Brownness. They look at me. Am I Arab? Which continent am I from? Let’s start with that. Which country? “Malayasia? Thailand? Iran?” asks the man—each word like a tiny gun-shot-- in the little convenience store in Bonn where I bought two cans of Diet Coke. He is Indian, from Punjab and he too feels the need for a cubbyhole in which I can reside. Indian, Muslim, Woman, Brown. These are just three identities. For some people this is enough to know me. For all they want to know about me, perhaps all they should know about me. All that is comfortable to know about me.

Do they make judgments about how dangerous I am? Is there a matrix that the Homeland Security man uses as he scans my passport photo and stares me squarely in the face? Does my female persona cancel out the high-danger marks I get for having a Muslim name and brown skin? Does my Indian birthplace place me lower on a terror list than someone born in Karachi or Kabul? Is this all my own paranoia?

I cross man-made boundaries as I fly across from Frankfurt to Boston. I see no difference in the parcels of land glimpsed through the clouds below. Green melds into brown effortlessly. But I know they are there, these immutable lines, these demarcations that divide our earth, that seem only real when my feet are planted on solid ground.

And so do birds fly from continent to continent. They follow the climate, seeking out what their bodies need for some time, before making their way back again. They are relentless travelers, these members of the feathered Diaspora. I empathize even as I fear them. Is that an eternal and universal dilemma in this new world of ours? Empathy and fear—two sides of one coin.