Macro to Micro

It was a weekend afternoon and my mother and I were watching a Hindi film together, side by side on the sofa, the VHS tape rewound and ready. The film was Bombay, Mani Ratnam's beautiful and devastating love story about a Hindu man and a Muslim woman who fall in love in a small town, understand immediately that their families and community will never accept them, and make the only choice available to people whose love is considered a problem: they leave. They run away to Bombay, that great cosmopolitan city where no one knows them, where they can begin again as simply two people who chose each other.

The story was heartbreaking in the way that only stories about ordinary people caught inside history's largest arguments can be. The Babri Masjid. Hindu-Muslim violence. A country tearing at itself along the fault lines of religion while two people who simply loved each other tried to build a life in the middle of it.2

We were somewhere in the middle of the film when my mother turned to me.

What she said next was not the kind of thing my mother said. Not then, not in that season of our relationship, not in the language we had available to each other at that point in our lives. She was traditional in the way that first generation immigrant mothers often are: warm, loving, fiercely devoted, and operating within a set of cultural expectations that left very little room for the kind of conversation she was about to have.

She looked at me and she said, quietly: “isn't it sad how we don't accept our own?”

I was in the middle of it. Not looking back at it; living it. The man I wanted to marry was Indian, Hindu, someone I had enormous amounts in common with personally; someone I loved deeply. And his family was putting up obstacle after obstacle. Not because of who I was as a person, but because of where my family was from. A different part of India. A different mother tongue language. Different regional foods and customs. A difference in caste. We had eighty percent in common and his family was focused entirely on the twenty percent that wasn't.

As my mother and I watched Bombay, the negotiations between our families were ongoing. The outcome was not yet certain. My in-laws had not yet caved — and caved is the right word, because when they finally did, it was not with warmth or welcome. It was with reluctance. Begrudging. In the way that people concede not because they have changed their minds, but because they have run out of other options.

“Isn't it sad how we don't accept our own?”

My college sweetheart before my husband — a white American man, Christian, from a different part of the country entirely, from a background that shared perhaps twenty percent with mine — had a family who’d welcomed me without hesitation. No negotiations. No obstacles. No begrudging consent.

The family with whom I had almost everything in common made it as difficult as they could.
The family with whom I had very little in common opened their door.

“Shame on us.”

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That Bombay afternoon stayed with me because it cracked something open that I had not known how to name before. Not just the specific injustice of my own situation — though that was real and it hurt in ways I was still learning to articulate — but something larger. A pattern I began to see everywhere once I knew how to look for it.

We tell ourselves that our divisions are about the other. That the enemy is out there, somewhere beyond our borders, our neighborhood, our community. That the threat comes from outside. That the problem lives in someone sufficiently different from us that we can point to the difference and call it the reason.

But look at where the deepest fractures actually run.

The Middle East — a region of profound shared history, shared language, shared faith — tearing itself apart along the line between Sunni and Shia. Brothers in almost every sense of the word, separated by a theological disagreement that has calcified over centuries into something that justifies extraordinary violence.

Ireland, not so long ago, was at war with itself. Not with a foreign invader but with its own people. The same island, the same ancestry, the same grey skies and green fields, divided by which version of the same God they prayed to.

The Korean peninsula. One culture, one language, one people — families literally separated by a border drawn by external powers — now so divided that North and South look at each other across that line as if looking at strangers. As if the shared history, the shared blood, the shared everything had never existed.

India and Pakistan. The violence of partition still living in the bodies of people alive today, passed down through generations like an inheritance no one asked for, shaping the relationship between two countries that share more than either is always comfortable admitting.

And closer to home, the fracture running through the United States right now. Between people who share a country, a constitution, a language, a history, and yet look at each other across the political divide with a level of animosity that has, in some cases, been used to justify violence. Not strangers. Neighbors. Sometimes family members sitting across from each other at a table that used to feel safe.

The pattern is the same everywhere you look. The sharpest divisions are almost never between people who are truly different. They are between people who are almost the same. People who share enough that the remaining difference feels like a betrayal.

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I used to read the news obsessively. I used to stay current on global politics, international conflicts, the slow and fast disasters accumulating at every scale. I felt that being informed was a kind of participation. That knowing what was happening in the world was my contribution to making it better.

And then I asked myself: what am I actually able to change?

I can vote. That is a civic duty — a dharmic one in fact — the minimum we owe to the society we live in. Beyond that, I am not going to solve the conflict in the Middle East. I am not going to reunify the Korean peninsula. I am not going to resolve the fractures in US democracy from my living room, no matter how carefully I follow them.

But the micro? That is mine.

How I conduct myself every single day. Whether I extend respect to every person I encounter regardless of where they come from or what they believe. What I put into the universe in my daily interactions, knowing that what I put in is what I am contributing to the whole. The commitment I have made to myself that I will never make anyone feel the way my husband's family made me feel — that specific, particular shame of being rejected not for who you are but for the accident of where your family is from.

The macro is a reflection of the micro. I believe this completely. The geopolitical fractures we read about in the news are not separate from the fractures in our own families and communities. They are the same fracture, scaled up. Every time one person treats another with contempt for an arbitrary difference, they are adding one thread to a fabric that, woven together across millions of interactions, becomes the world we all have to live in.

This is why I have made a conscious choice in my writing.

I do not write terrible in-laws. I do not write the mother-in-law who humiliates her daughter-in-law, the husband's family who makes the new bride feel like an intruder in her own marriage. These stories exist in abundance — in Indian culture especially, say the words mother-in-law to almost any married Indian woman and brace yourself for what follows — and they are real, and they matter, and many of them deserve to be told.

But I am not the one to tell them. Not because I don't have my own stories. I do. But because what I want to offer is something different and in some ways harder to find: a window into what it looks like when it goes right. When the people in a marriage actually see each other. When the family structures that could crush an individual instead hold them. When love is not a battleground but a practice.

The absence of a nightmare is not the same as a dream. Most of us know what a bad relationship looks like. Fewer of us have ever seen, clearly and in detail, what a genuinely good one looks like from the inside. That is what I am trying to show.

It is my way of working on the micro. My way of putting something into the universe that I want reflected back. My way of answering my mother's quiet, unexpected question on that afternoon years ago when she looked at a film about two people who loved each other across a line their families had drawn, and said: “shame on us.”

This is me, trying to do better.

Welcome to the Gurukul. The door is open.