Kirin Makker and Sejal Shah

00:06 My name is Kirin makker.

00:09 I am 49 years old. Today's date is July 16th.

00:16 I am in Geneva, New York, on beautiful. Seneca lake on Holden. The Shoney territory.

00:23 My conversation partner is sejal Shah.

00:28 And my relationship with schedule is hard to describe. I, I want to call her sister sister friend. She has

00:44 I'm sejal Shah. I'm 48 and a half. Today is Friday, July 16th. 2021. I'm in Rochester. New York about 50 minutes from here in. This is all so cynical and my conversation partner is Kirin makker and we met in January 2020 and it felt like I've been waiting to meet her.

01:12 I don't know, at least 25 years.

01:19 So, I'm especially happy that we met before the pandemic.

01:31 And now the conversation just goes. Yes, okay.

01:41 I, I

01:43 I am I have a I'm thinking you wanted to meet 25 years ago. I feel like I wanted to meet when I was seven years old. Like I was you and I was 7 years old. I needed you then.

01:57 Do you know, let's let's talk a little bit about the things that we discovered that we share a little bit as a way of kind of explaining those those sister-friend. Maybe it would be useful to. We have a Google doc that started after I was interviewed on connections, which is the show on wxxi. So that was last June or July of 2020. And there was a collar that I was. I was interviewed about my book by Dave USA collection, which came out last year called. This is one way to dance. And in at there's an essay that used to be called. Where are you from? And it's about

02:45 How frustrating it is to be asked about sometimes and John from Hilton happened to be her name called in and said well, you know why I just I'm interested in, you know, people's cultures. And yeah, that's just it's just she couldn't understand it as a really as a kind of microaggression that people

03:10 I think it's really important that people give people the dignity to answer that question how they want and not necessarily feel like you have to say where your parents are from or give us a racial or ethnic breakdown to someone who's behind you at tops or Wegmans.

03:30 And yet at the fact that we were still having this conversation in 2020 to me was

03:39 You know, it was it was so incredibly frustrating. I talked to Karen right afterwards and it was like, that's a microaggression like how, how is that? Not actually listening listening to the interview like in Rite-Aid talking to Joan from Hilton telling her what I thought, you know, I think that experience being asked that question and being frustrated with people not accepting your answer. As I'm from Cleveland, or I'm from Texas from Rochester and I was born in Genesee Hospital Hospital exist anymore. And I think I may have told you I talk to my parents afterwards and they were like, there's what's wrong with that question. I said you guys are actually from India and Kenya so that's the pretty clear.

04:37 Question for you, but you know, I grew up in Rochester. Have never been to Kenya and didn't go to Indian till I was 19. So for me, it was actually a very irritating question. I don't think my brother took it the same way. He was born in Indiana with there for a few years. But I also just the expectation. And now for me as a former educator, still a writer and teacher at to me, it just shows the incredible lack of your basic American history that were not teaching in middle school and high school and it seems okay to be asking questions. And that way we re know where our country that has had people from all over migration and immigration is part of our

05:24 History for many generations.

05:28 Yeah, you do. And I think one of the things about your book came out and I I read your book and that was about when we met. One of the things about your book is that many of the essays were written over the course of twenty years. And so are our kind of set in the past. And in some places where I was also in this place has some time that some of the same times knowing some of the same people. So some of the characters in her nonfiction at, these are people. I know and, but, but she and I never met sejal. You and I never met. And so, in some ways you were kind of

06:10 Almost an ideal reader in that you got, you know, some of the, some of that but, you know, you weren't someone I knew.

06:19 Yeah, so maybe it's worth saying I'm so we we overlapped in graduate school at UMass Amherst. In our twenties, were even in the same Department with the same, but we were in different programs. I was in creative writing in English or American studies are buddy, and I had a lot of good friends in English and an American studies, but our lives just didn't intercept and it's

06:52 It is so bizarre like there. I mean, there's so many places where we ought to have met. You know, we would have a person in common.

07:00 I mean, Kathy Simone biles. Karen Cardozo. So I'm eating at the age of 47. I think one of them is that we happen to like we happen to have you happen to have been in some of the same places at the same time and never have met and even, you know, socialize with some of the same people and never met, but then the other thing is that you and I both struggle with chronic illness in different ways. And, and that certainly, for me impact, my ability to, socialize to maintain a like to find friends to do that kind of thing. The other like, the lifestyle is somebody living with chronic illness in her late forties.

07:57 Is that why you're? And I was just talking to Raj, my husband about, you know, just the pace that I kept when I lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn in my 30s, just running from thing to thing to conference, to reading to party to somebody's wedding, you know, getting to the airport. I mean, it just seems now this this case that I can barely

08:23 I don't know if I can try to can almost not. I almost can't imagine that. It's like I'm thinking of another person. You know, what, I think about my life and paste now, but, you know, part of it for me, why it was it kind of a miracle to meet you was I was around a different.

08:45 I don't know a different kinds of people more artist when I lived in New York. When I move back to my hometown that really wasn't who I knew, there were some people that I knew from growing up and then other people from jobs, but it felt mostly white, which is not unlike my experience of growing up here. That was not my experience in New York, accept the institution. I thought it was mostly white, but I had friends of color Asian American friends mostly but not entirely who were in New York. So I miss that. But when I, when I reached out to you, I recognized your name.

09:31 Anna would also been a team asked about you, and it, and when I reached out to you, I said I invited you to show me some Bollywood films at the George Eastman house, which is near me, and I thought, well, maybe that would be something that someone I don't know. But who has some Indian background and, you know, in the English Department, might be interested in seeing not really taking into account that, I don't like Bollywood films. I don't go out that much at night, but I wasn't teaching full-time that if I were teaching it didn't matter. Even if I was living like, 10 minutes from Eastman house, like I do, I probably wouldn't have enough for that. But of course you're almost an hour away.

10:20 Yeah, and so this is the type of thing when when I saw that invitation and I thought this is definitely, I'm interested in meeting this person. But this is definitely not the type of activity I can do. And it made me question, whether I would be able to forge a friendship with somebody who wanted to go out in the evening.

10:40 Did still go out in the evenings, but I tend to have like a 10-minute radius, which is pretty much my radius from the thing that I loved about.

10:48 Growing up in Rochester and returning here is that everything's really close. I never got never deal with that in New York. I mean, I dealt with it, but I lived close to work because the whole like an hour to get to work thing or an hour to see your friends that was harder on the weekends, an hour and a half.

11:10 Yeah, but I mean, I, I reached out to you with an idea of what I might reach out to, you know, inviting a possible friend to do something like when I was in my thirties, that's one of the things that I was. So, I didn't realize I was, I think one of the reasons I think of you as, like, a friend, I wanted when I was 7 years old is because when I met you and we started having conversations.

11:43 About some of it. It's almost like I think because we both like we're both artists. We both kind of engage with imagination and creativity as a way of feeling out who we are and where we are.

11:59 It's not common in, in like, at least my South Asian circles, which is mostly my family. My family is not a family of artists. My family is family of

12:11 I don't know. Middle-class income earners.

12:15 Scientists engineers in the elders and then they're like my generation is, you know, second generation. They're all. I know. They're all doing other things, nobody's an artist. And so I think one of the other things that I that I found such kinship with you around was your kind of confronting a lot of whiteness along the way in the same ways that I did, but you did it and he struggled through it with art with no reading and writing and

12:47 And thinking through those things. And so I think you know, I was in a lot of white spaces, growing up and and in spaces that didn't necessarily understand the kind of mixed identity. And so just to have somebody recognized that there was a fuller part to me that I was both Indian and of German white ancestry that I was experienced that I could experience America as a white person at times and not at times at other times and not always be in control of that. That's not a conversation. So I can have with most people and I think some of it is having experienced America in similar ways over similar periods of time. Slightly similar places like the Midwest, like the midwestern rustbelt City, Cleveland, you know, in Rochester, only 44.

13:47 Hours apart there, in this, kind of zone of cities that were getting doctors out of India, you know, because they needed talents in those cities. And in a lot of these places right now will be no American. When was South Asian. Also whose fathers are one wife and one other than a doctor in like Vestal New York and wanted been in Buffalo and then moved to Binghamton, right? It was it kind of is very similar.

14:27 I think places that were less attractive to doctors you can get out of there. Yeah, yeah.

14:37 I mean, you know, what's interesting here. And when I was seven, I had a number of South Asian friends. Mostly Gujarati. A lot of them were Gujarati with a parent from East Africa. This is an Indian family that we were friends with in Cleveland. And I think one was good ROTC. I don't remember what the other one, but I remember when we got, you know, even though different I means either totally different job. Be totally different food way right now.

15:27 But I think, you know what, when we started talking, I remembered the bhushan's. I think I told you about them, this family, or my parents were friends with a couple of families with Mom was Wyatt Earp and anxious. The other was American, I think and

15:45 The one father was Bengali. One was.

15:48 I think Punjabi and it was so interesting to talk to me because my, especially, I think because my parents had more set ideas of like, if you're Indian, this is what you do. So to see an Indian family that actually look, this Indian family has people who aren't any in it and they look at what they look different. I actually always sort of wish that I would maybe marry somebody who was not Indian and then have kids, who looked not so specifically Indian because I think in part because I don't know if that's internalized racism or I was just so effing tired of being asked all the time to represent our country and culture that I hadn't been to you. And like one of my cousins looks more, like you and has curly hair. I mean, she is lighter. And she's definitely a yes. She did a little bit of acting and he knows, is interesting. She really doesn't look.

16:43 Typically Indian, right? But there's such a range of people, what you can look like as someone's of any kind of South Asians background. Yeah. My life would have been really different, honestly. If I hadn't had another South Asian girl, in my grade growing up, who was also her parents or South Indian. Let me so different, you know, different in significant ways, but she was the one who I talk to at the end of my virtual book launch. And she said, what would you say to your fourth grade self? And I just, I think I surprised both of us. I said, oh my God, you weren't there. I would have been the only one, you know, and she's got daughter. She lives in Brookline, Mass. You know, where there are more Asian Americans and she's got twin daughters, and she, she will say, every once in awhile. You know, when I

17:37 See them, I think of us cuz it just and we didn't talk about it here, me and talk about any of this stuff, but just to have just to not be the only one in the room was up to and I think about that because my town was so white that I feel like that's got to have been the same or similar with black kids in my class. And I remember you remember the grade and the moment when I used to sit with I had a friend. It was white and her friend. It was black and we ate lunch together. And then when he got drafted over to, or do you want it to go to the black table? And I was like, I don't have a table, man, have a lunch table, you know? Yeah. Because my friends for the most part were in other schools and other town. So I had like Community but they weren't local local down. Yes.

18:36 Little brown girls with like few and far between, and

18:43 And I think you know, it's it's interesting you talking about like the internalized racism. I certainly feel like I saw in like I can think about Anakin and see myself is kind of in between.

18:58 You know, somebody that looked more like you that was a little darker and then somebody that would like to see a little white girl named Jennifer and kind of wondering where and when I where I should go, you know, whether whether I could pass or not. I never ever felt like I could, I guess that's the thing. Like they do with somebody that notices, something about you, the Harry Ness of you or whatever it is, and you, you can't get that out of your head like a signifier. And so it's interesting like what you start to think about as signifiers of your exoticness because you know, when I was a little kid, it was oh you're so pretty, you know, as I got older it got more sexualized and and you know, there were there were there times, you know, where you're playing down.

19:59 Things that evoke attention. And then there are times when you, when you don't and and I know for a fact that like, when I wear like, yellow gold jewelry, I get and I go to an Indian restaurant. There is more like, oh, she's Indian like people to come.

20:17 I'm just wearing a t-shirt and a baseball cap.

20:23 What is the things that really irritated me growing up? And and when I did eventually get married was just the emphasis on what the hell, you're wearing all the time. And I think, I think for my mother especially growing up outside, India really important. If it's an Indian of that, you have to wear any clothes and I found that. So, I just found a limiting. You know, I mean, I hear, I have this, I have this show. All right, now that I picked out in India and its really soft and so I like wearing, but I thought I am, I am always aware of like, okay. So is this looking ass neck, right?

21:11 Yeah, I was getting dressed to meet you. I mean, I can I put on another one of these because that's often what I wear, you know, especially if it a lot of it has to do with. I don't wear as much jewelry. A lot of it has to do like being called, right?

21:25 It's just a temperature thing, and I comfort thing that way, but I did think about like,

21:32 Do I want to put something on that work. Like looks that looks Indian or something that you can't tell if it's Indian Indian girls here. I mean kids with salvation background. They mostly married moved away and have kids. And I moved back and I don't have kids in 7, lots of ways. I don't and they're mostly in feels like

22:02 Medicine business, Pharmacy. I don't even know what else. I mean, they're not they're not artists. They're not professors and

22:15 They're not teachers. So I think that they'd also even I have a couple of childhood friends who moved back interesting. Like I mean, like my husband there people who had lost someone in their family. So I think that's largely why they why it was important them to come back up to. I can think of a few parents. I think made a point of being here to be with their remaining parent and raise their children. So, I mean, I think that that's a whole other culture when you're raising kids are with other people who are raising kids and your kids friends.

22:57 So I never I almost never see them, you know, unless it's something like a Diwali program and even then that I feel more and more even though I grew up performing at those things and going to them you're doing a dance performance or whatever that I feel more and more distant from that.

23:18 That experience is that being like a fundamental part of being?

23:24 South Asian American Raven, just who I am, right? Yeah. This is making me want to talk a little bit about yoga. One of the things that I like that, that we discovered that we shared was that you. And I happen to study like, get an introduction to yoga from the exact same instructor at UMass from, this was like late 90s. Early 2000 98 round there. And, and, and that introduction to yoga, at least for me. It was foundational. It connected to like the, like, what? I remembered and observe grandfather practicing Yoga 3 Day.

24:24 Austin has and an alignment. And it was, she was, she was so respectful and thoughtful, and after I left that place and went to graduate school. I remember trying to do yoga at, like, a new Yoga Yoga Studio in Takoma Park, Maryland, and with all these white women and I really felt uncomfortable in Maryland, with a white woman. I was not expecting that. I mean, the instructor at UMass

25:01 She would always learn this stuff. Like I think she went to University of Florida and studied composition means. But I I it was, it was before it was before like Lululemon and expensive brand name, yoga with like super skinny.

25:25 White women yoga was exercise. It was, it was right at the beginning of that, it was before I was in gym class, but it just like you said, it was Foundation. All it had to do with. I felt like also a way of managing stress and having life, your, your balance in your life, as a student or best offer a graduate course, like like it's like through the course and you learned how I think about how you go to class and get some exercise and stress reduction. And that's why I remember you. And I talked about this, I belong to this gym locally and

26:22 I always, I had to squish down a part of, you know, they're there. White women. I went to HighSchool with you-know-who like now have found India and are there. Good instructors? Some of them are good teachers, but I think that it I don't feel like they

26:39 And I'll just now, but I really, I don't think there's an acknowledgment of it and it's not that it's only people of South Asian background own yoga, but I don't, I don't think that they understand it there.

26:52 Adair, their relationship as white people. And you know, you cannot get away from colonialism and commodification and cultural appropriation. And now there's more language around that but I started taking yoga a resume with this.

27:08 White guy in Brooklyn. Who's from Staten Island? I think Frank Ricci terrific yoga teacher and it was just such a relief like it was not, I don't know how to explain it, but

27:23 There just wasn't any exotify of India, there wasn't again. I think it's because I myself went through yoga teacher training that was Iyengar based, but I just think the conversations are, are, are changing and his

27:40 Find his glasses to be so respectful. And I feel like some of these other.

27:46 Approaches and I begin like white people saying, okay. I just I started my own brand of yoga and here's like an expensive teacher training and

27:56 I don't know if I,

28:00 I need an order to take classes locally and because I live here and it's a small town and lots of ways. I would just kind of

28:09 Try to squish that, you know, like my discomfort like put it aside because who you know, until I met you Karen, who was I going to even talk to you about it? Who would get it? I've had a bunch of white friends in class and some of them got it, but literally felt like you. If you're wearing wool, if you're wearing something, for me, is sometimes uncomfortable against my skin, I can tolerate it, but I'm always aware.

28:36 At that. And

28:39 You know, I just comfort, you know, I mean, I, I think, I think that's why I stopped going to yoga classes a few years ago. And I think a lot of it was because I was tired of managing that discomfort. There was something there's something uncomfortable about being in these spaces like this, about a mistake flew away from us. It was a brilliant piece, right? Because it also, it's not was not aimed at White readers was like, what is it like for so many of us to walk into this room and they have to have this kind of fake.

29:33 Blessing about it. I don't know if it's fake. I mean, like, who decided that we never say? The only way, the only times my parents ever say namaste, right? And their Indian Hindu are up like when they're when they meet maybe someone who's Punjabi someone where they don't share a language or you know, or like a grew a holy person. Otherwise that you know, you don't turn around and say somebody in a class. Yeah. My only mine won't contacts for Namaste was just saying the most States like, what everybody says to my grandfather. Give us a biology which is really means father. So it's really actually his kids and they're all the grandkids. You the first time I was asked to say it and, you know, go through this thing. I was just like,

30:35 It felt very strange. One of my, one of my yoga teachers here that I really do like who's also studied in in in India. She always says, just The Light Within me, you know, I don't know what it recognizes The Light Within you then stay at, you know, when she was I actually just really appreciate that again. I feel like she's a very respectful and Reverend attitude towards you know, without

31:00 Without any appropriation like yeah, which it. Shouldn't be amazing, but it's like, if you're going to say it like, don't mispronounce it.

31:17 I mean Namaste. Nobody says that accept people in classes. How did that get? Okay.

31:27 I mean, it really reminded me there and there was an extra insult to me here and he's being the white girls who were cheerleaders. I mean, you know where to find it in a way. When I lived on the Upper East Side. It was sort of like fine. This is the culture. I mean

31:47 But I think to get back to my hometown and then to have

31:51 White people saying Namaste to me. I was like, yeah, I don't think so. But you were in school with

32:04 Grow up to be, you know, and then there's days that, I mean, I'm not even kidding.

32:17 Yeah, that's what makes me uncomfortable participating. In this case. It was remodeled during the during the pandemic of it started before that and their yoga studio. This is why I'm not sure I can go. Back is called somebody.

32:39 Really?

32:43 Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like if you have to name, it couldn't just be like the youngest but yeah, I don't know. I don't I don't.

32:57 I don't appreciate when there's so much ignorance about Asian American history and about South Asia in general to have like these Sanskrit terms taken out out of context. I find so stupidly American like why don't you actually need?

33:17 Yeah. Yeah, I mean anyway, I think maybe we should talk more about chronic illness and I've learned so much from you even in this. I don't know year and a half about

33:35 What it is like when I mean, I know what it's like to live with an invisible illness. That I was really encouraged. I realized both at work and in my family to perform wellness and so that's what I did until I couldn't anymore. Yeah, that's a story We Share to. I also was performing Wellness in my family and in my work, in my heart and all of my Social Circles for a long time, until my endometriosis got so bad that I was starting to get surgeries for it. And and then I went through, I mean, I think we met maybe I think let's see. My first surgery was in 2008 and we met in 21, 2019, very end of 2019.

34:35 He's facing the limitations of my body. Let's say you know, and so so yeah, I think you know, one of the things that I really enjoyed in the past year was sharing with you a lot of my struggles, but also my strategies and getting like such great feedback about those strategies and

35:03 And how they inspire you, you know.

35:10 Absolutely. I mean, I just, I think, I think I grew up with this.

35:15 Like you just have to again for my parents as Hindu Americans, you know, this whole you got to adapt, you gotta just like a crazy relative, narcissist moves into your house. You got it. You know, I got to make room for that and

35:33 I just realized it's some point like that. It was it was over accommodation and it was harming me, right? And how do you actually say it after? I think it is different for men and maybe men who are doctors or you have whatever other privileged that it was the women who are expected to accommodate and the youngest girl. In my family doesn't have kids, like you're seen as being. I think, I'm unencumbered, unless unless you, you're a mean. So, you know, we are family. Our extended family was, in town in 2018, when my parents have the host of this huge cut on, her girl, came to town and my mother kept saying, you got to have everybody over like even if it's just pizza and ice cream and it was 10 days 90s, really long days at the Dome Arena. I mean, it was exhausting. I think, I think we didn't end up doing

36:33 People were only know, everyone was saying, different amounts of time. But there was this like you've got to do this and I said, if this is harmful for us,

36:42 For housing.

36:44 Why do we have to do it? Because other people are going to talk and say they didn't have us over like

36:58 Go ahead.

37:02 Sometimes I feel like the the pressure that the little that the littlest girl gets to accommodate whatever is happening in the big family unit. You know, like the little sister is always accommodating and easy or needs to be easy. There's pressure to be easy. Then, you know, you might not get your needs met. There's this kind of pressure around being accommodating and, and I feel like, if you like, there's, there's so much pressure around that. If that, if you resist it, then you're called into question, you know, you're sitting at the counter with his friends and read an essay in the book about our wedding and just said and had texted him about it. And and I had worked with with, with him at the same high school and

38:02 Rob said to me, just turned and said, you know like your book has a real accomplishment and I said, I don't think I could have done it without you and I don't mean that in a I guess what I mean that is like he really supported me and actually forced me to but like the same notice, things like to disappoint people to not go to a college reunions to not do these things because it was like, your are you going to get your book done? Are you going to do the best job you can on this or you going to make someone else happy and like, you know go to Boston for 4 days and then be tired and then and you know, I think that's artist.

38:41 We have to be able to tolerate being told that we're selfish or that were disappointing people for not and also people as people who live with chronic and invisible illness.

38:53 Yeah, and also, I think you have to come to be okay with

38:57 Not always being able to explain why you can't show up. You know, you don't always have like a reason that's going to make sense to people. I'm still struggling with that, you know.

39:09 I am I know that you're up. You're much better than saying? I can't, I can't even

39:26 I can't even imagine the last year without you, but

39:30 You don't mind and it's interesting cuz we don't we don't see each other.

39:35 Very often.

39:39 This is where I am grateful for technology and even social media because those helped connect us and of connecting on a regular basis. Like, you know, like it gave me the space to have more phone calls, I think.

39:58 Lily and I feel like you know when I say it was at least Maya and it's it's a miracle to have. Matt Rochester doesn't have places that engender these meetings at as much if you're not going to an art opening or Thursday because I was going to a dentist in Geneva. That also you know that help otherwise Geneva was out of my radius. Your dental appointment, brought you to have coffee with me for the first time that you're going at, you know, like an hour to the dentist. Like, go to our dentist. He's 10 minutes away. But, you know, sometimes you got to do things that are

40:45 They don't make practical sense, but that feel real.

40:50 Yeah.

40:52 That's what I believe.