I am an Indian-American girl, who speaks Russian — How can this be?

There is intensified negative rhetoric about Russia lately due to the recent US sanctions and Russia’s recent involvement in the US election. As an Indian-American girl who is fluent in Russian, I am writing this post to mitigate some of this negativity by sharing my experiences in Eastern Europe as a child and then a college student.

For as long as I can remember, one of the first questions people always ask me is how I speak Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, English (with an American accent) and basic French all at once. I have been getting this question a lot more in light of the news. I recently met a neighbor, who seemed weary to befriend me because she was afraid if I would record and listen in on her conversations.

It perplexes people and bewilders them at times. Some keep probing and asking repeatedly. I am sometimes forced to give a 20-minute explanation with my life story. They raise their eyebrows and take a second look at me like I am an exotic animal in a zoo.

When I was seven, I met a janitor at my school in Michigan, who had never been outside of the midwest. He kept on probing and asking. “But why? How? It felt a lot like getting a tooth extracted at the dentist.” So from that moment on, I decided it was better to lie sometimes and simply state that I was from one place — either India or Michigan, depending on who I was talking to.

I spent some time reflecting about why people often react this way. It seems it might have little to do with me and more to do with them and their limited world view. After all, below are some of the common stereotypes in my mind.

So based on these stereotypes, who am I as a Russian-speaking, Indian-American girl?

People suddenly can’t fit me into a box and are forced to take a second to pause and actually think.

1) Am I the daughter of a powerful, high-flying diplomat?
No.

2) A wealthy snooty trust-fund kid?
No.

3) Someone with an insanely high IQ?
I would hope so. Perhaps it’s a good sales pitch in an interview.

4) A weirdo?
I hope not.

5) An exotic trophy to be won/conquered?
Oh geez. (insert eye-roll)

What am I then?
I am a human-being made of the same blood and bone matter as you are. I wake up in the morning, brush my teeth, iron my clothes, drink my tea and get ready for work exactly the way you do. I have a similar set of dreams and insecurities as you do.

I am not a political scientist or a historian, but I have been very privileged to have traveled and lived in many diverse parts of the world. I remember listening to Bill Clinton’s speech at Yale many years ago and I cannot agree with him more when he said that the human genome project discovered that as human beings, we are all 99.9% genetically identical. And yet, the vast majority of people spend their lives focusing on the 0.01% that differentiates us. He advised us to focus on all that unites us as a race.

My interactions with Eastern Europe as a five-year old in Moldova and then a college student illustrate his words well. I met many nice, warm Eastern Europeans. Though they seemed foreign, they were like me in so many ways.
As a five-year old in Moldova, the neighborhood babushkas (or grandmas), gave me a nickname, “Ha-ha-toushka,” because I was always laughing according to them. Behind our apartment complexes, each one had a small vegetable garden. They would show me and the other kids how various plants like tomatoes were grown. They let us water them and eat them once in a while.

I remember I began to cry once because I fell off my sled during a blizzard. Along with the other kids, I had been sledding down a concrete road covered with snow and sleet. One of them comforted me and took me home to my mom.

My six-year old, blonde Moldavan friend and I would play with Barbie dolls. Our favorite game was dressing up in her mother’s old, lacy white wedding gown, putting on her mother’s red lipstick and big high heels. We would then pretend to be brides. We played perhaps just like millions of little girls around the world.

When I was eighteen, I spent a summer in Moscow. My dad thought it would be a good learning experience, as when he was nineteen, he left India to study in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had given him a full scholarship along with thousands of other students across various emerging countries. I remember arriving at my new summer home — the exact same youth hostel my father had visited in the 1970s. My father was confident this was the perfect place for his daughter. He claimed it was once a vivacious place bustling with smart international students playing guitars, discussing politics, engaging in romance and salsa dancing on top of pianos and kitchen tables.

But when I arrived, he was right that the place was packed with international students. However, it didn’t have hot water and had a perpetual, lingering odor of some strange mixture of chloride bleach and marijuana. The elevator mysteriously never stopped on the 7th floor. So I had to stop at the 6th or the 8th and take a flight of stairs to get to my room.

After putting down my suitcases from the airport, I set off to find some food. I hailed a taxi on the street, New York style. I met a forty-something year old taxi driver from Kazakasthan with a mustache named Timur. He didn’t speak English and I spoke poor Russian.

I could hear my mother’s voice in my head. “I don’t know why you talk to strangers so much. Don’t talk to them, don’t trust anyone on the street, don’t ever get into a stranger’s car.” But despite the language barrier, somehow my heart told me I could trust Timur. So I took a complete leap of faith, blindly kept sitting in his car and began pouring my heart out in my broken Russian. “I eighteen. Very sad. Alone. Born in India. Just came from America. No food. No hot water.”

He leaned back, told me not to worry and said that he was there for me. I kept blindly sitting in his car in a foreign city. He first drove me close to the center, and pointed to the left and said “Gandhi.” There in the middle of a beautiful square was a large statue of Mahatma Gandhi complete with his walking stick, round glasses and sandals, or any every Indian child knows him “Bapu” or meaning father, father of the nation.

He then drove and parked by a shopping arena. On the left was a grocery store and on the right an Indian store! We went and bought a water heater and some food and then we walked into the Indian store together. I began to smile as the right wall of the store was full of Bollywood movies, with Russian subtitles and the left wall had tons of Indian food. There was 1960s Bollywood music blaring in the background. It didn’t feel much different than an Indian store in Queens or New Jersey. I did some shopping while Timur waited patiently. He even helped me carry my groceries into the car.

Then Timur drove me to McDonalds, complete with a Ronald Mcdonald statue standing at the entrance. He then looked me in the eye and uttered his first English words to me: “Happy Meal. … I’m loving it.”

I began to laugh. … After a twenty-hour journey from New York to Moscow and the dismay of seeing my summer home, these were perhaps the most endearing words I could hear. Perhaps Moscow wasn’t so different from home after all!

I then proceeded to order some French fries. He drove me back to my hostel and didn’t charge me for the trip. I never saw Timur again, but after all these years, I still remember his generosity.

When I was twenty, I spent a summer in Vienna, Austria. I remember going to an open-air farmers market. There was an old Russian couple selling vegetables. They began whispering to each other in Russian and then told me exorbitantly high prices. Perhaps I looked foreign.

I then began speaking to them in Russian. They seemed a bit perplexed at first, but then began warming up and then sang a Bollywood song from the 1950s to me “Ichak Dana Bichak Dana Dane Upar Dana, Chhate pe Upar Ladaki Nache, Ladhaka Hai Divana.” This was one of my grandmother’s favorite songs, so I began to smile.

They said they wanted tons of Bollywood movies. The actor Raj Kapoor was their favorite. I later learned that in the Soviet Union, Hollywood movies were banned, so many average Russians resorted to watching Bollywood movies instead. “An Indian girl, living in the US, speaking Russian, now in Austria!” they said, seeming impressed. They said they had not met many Americans or Indians. It seems they had seen and heard about them for much of their lives. They then refused to let me pay them and I took home a bag of vegetables for free.

In my youth hostel, I also met many polish girls, who barely spoke English. They had never met an American so they were quite fascinated by me. We hung out a lot together — buying groceries, dancing, shopping and site-seeing together. We would cook side by side in the kitchen on a tiny stove together. Me with my Indian vegetable rice and lentils on the left and they on the right with their Polish stews and soups. We exchanged recipes and much more. They came all the way to Moscow by taking multiple buses. I thought this was unusual, but they said it was common in Poland. They had friends that had traveled all the way from Poland to China in buses!

At a party once, they suddenly began to have a heated argument/ shouting match about World War II. I was a bit taken a back. I didn’t know many American teenagers, who would argue about World War II battles. But it seemed many wars had impacted Poland so deeply that this seemed to be an important and formative part of their identities. Later when things quieted down, I asked them about Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps in history, which was on Polish soil. “The Polish people did not cause this,” they said. “It is very important for us that you tell your Americans friends this back home.”

Like this I can write endlessly with many more stories of nice and warm Eastern Europeans.

People often told me that learning Russian was a waste of time and not a useful skill in the American economy. They said the same thing about my native Indian languages — Hindi and Punjabi. Learn Excel shortcuts or computer programming instead they advised. I pity these people for their limited world view.

One of my bosses in investment banking in New York, who made millions every year, once said that most high-paying jobs in just about every industry require building relationships with diverse people and a great deal of hard work/resilience. Learning these languages gave me a tool to build relationships with people from so many diverse walks of life and a better means to understand human nature. Perhaps most of all, living abroad and learning languages taught me how to deal with rejection and helped me build resilience. There were so many instances when I felt like an outcast — for example when I was lost in central Moscow and had to ask disdainful strangers for help using my broken Russian with a heavy American accent or when I was accused of being a thief in a church in Ukraine because of my Indian skin tone.

It is not possible for every one of us to learn languages, travel around the world or even learn about every diverse culture. But I hope that the next time you read articles with negative rhetoric about Eastern Europe or any part of the world for that matter, I hope you remind yourself that despite what the politicians, economists and journalists may say, as people we are quite similar to each other. Recognizing and building common ground is perhaps at the crux of resolving every human conflict.