CHINESE TAKEAWAY. I’ll have some civility, please

“Why are you teaching your sweet son how to play poker? He’s too young!”

There are a number of possible responses to this. Among others — “you’re never too young to learn essential life skills”; “mind your own business”; or even “I wish I could, old-timer, but I’m terrible at it too”.

What we did do, was laugh, and explain that what our son was talking about so excitedly was his experience of the interactive games menu on the previous night’s flight. The questioner was an elderly Chinese taxi driver in Singapore, who promptly laughed as well, stopped judging us as parents, and asked me whether it was Pai Gow or Texas hold’em. I admitted I didn’t know the difference. He proceeded to explain.

It was an instructive ride. Not in terms of poker knowledge — I’m still what my son would call a ‘noob’— but in insight gained. We all audit the conversations of others. Equally, we judge them. Who better than a cab driver to do both those things? But to admit to eavesdropping, and then to offer an opinion, on a matter as fraught as your own parenting, while your child is in earshot: that takes some cultural conditioning.

Maybe it’s just balls.

India and China are both well-endowed, of course. The “where do you live, what do you do, and why don’t you have another baby” interrogation repeats itself over here as well, with the bonus of “where are you from”. Privacy? Ha.

Being Indian, you learn to roll with it. You deal with it even when it sneaks across national boundaries. Indians abroad are no less inquisitive than our Chinese diasporic cabbie in Singapore. It helped, of course, that the gent in question was older. His avuncular concern was disarming enough for us to excuse his forthrightness.

Concern is part of a larger ecosystem of caring that Indians claim to share in and recognise. Subcontinental prying is counterbalanced, we tell ourselves, by genuine interest.

Warmth, too, is part and parcel of healthy curiosity. Warmth is something we know and do. Us Indians, the way we see ourselves — we’re warm enough to need fire-retardant underwear.

It helps that we are new in this part of the world, of course. No matter how similar the culture seems, its specifics are hidden behind a Chinese veil. So many things that I might damn a desi for, go unchallenged here. In time, a proficiency in Chinese may well expose me to depths of insult I’m happy not to plumb right now. But so far, my ignorance is the perfect shield.

That the questioning and prying — thus far — has been mostly friendly, is also a factor. I’ve lost count of the number of photos I’ve posed for with people in parks, subway stations, even weddings. They approach me, smile, hold up their phones. They seem unreasonably happy every time. Many of them are tourists, of course, from other, smaller, less blasé parts of China. That I’m a minor celebrity in some corner of a foreign land still tickles me. (I prefer not to think they’re laughing themselves sick back home.)

As reports filter in of people being beaten up in the streets in India because of the colour of their skin, the safety I take for granted over here, even though I stand out like a beacon of otherness in an otherwise uniform landscape of Han Chinese, is cause for thanks.

I live in a bubble, of course. Beijing is the pampered capital, and Shunyi, my corner of it, is a place of particular privilege. Such warts as there are have been banished by, among other devices, the great firewall and the attendant lack of information. There is a studied, careful distancing from the hinterland.

Who knows how foreigners fare in those distant places?

Who knows how the non-Han Chinese manage?

But I can only report on what I’ve seen.

Warmth and its sibling, concern, are both easy to detect and lovely to encounter. We’ve known both over here.

And when this country’s oblivious to us, well, we’re fine with that too.

I met a subcontinental family on the subway the other day. They’re religiously observant as well. Yes, laughed the dad, they occasionally get asked for photographs. They’ve been here for years. They are happy. I asked him what he likes best. “ Koi kuchh nahin poochhta (nobody bothers us).”

He’s not Sikh, in case you’re wondering.

It’s a measure of our world and our moment, to treasure living in a place because it leaves you alone.

I’m not sure how I’ll be received when I go to the US this summer. Why pick out the US? Neither the UK nor Europe is covering itself with glory currently. And at home, in Bharat?

Things that people wouldn’t have dreamt of saying even a year ago are now commonplace. In the old days, an adverse opinion or comment would be preceded by “bura nahin maanna”— literally, “don’t mind, but…”

No matter how sphincter-clenchingly stupid the next sentence was, at least you had the chance to brace yourself. Now, not so much.

I’d like to believe that warmth and concern still inform our curiosity about the lives of others. But it would seem that the urge to judge has leapfrogged what should always come before.

Perhaps warmth and concern were only ever judgement’s nods to civility.

I’d take some civility right now. I find it extremely underrated.

Avtar Singh was formerly managing editor of The Indian Quarterly and editor of Time Out Delhi, and is the author of Necropolis; blink@thehindu.co.in

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