Am I Indian?

I have just moved back to Delhi.  Well typically you'd have to leave a city to really come back and I'm not sure that's what I've done.  You see, I crossed through here on the way to school from the hospitality of one comrade or family member's humble abode to the next.  Soon enough, Dubai didn't feel right and I found myself submitting to the searing acrimony of this Maharani of India's political kingdoms; that subcontinent of chappal throwing politicians, that shrine to news literati and the embodiment of North Indian commerce and aggression - Delhi.

On having been here without my own car, home, sense of direction or the right skin colour and looks ('right' being of darker complexion with perhaps a moustache of some description) I am at the behest of the people who actually get things done - physically, laboriously and certainly not honestly.  People see me coming a mile off and speak to me in English either because of my clothes or my fair complexion.  On replying to my brothers in Hindi I am told that it's amazing that a foreigner speaks the language so well.  Most cab drivers, waiters, ATM machine attendants and office boys seem to have side-qualifications in anthropology and genealogy because according to them, it defies belief that I am Indian.  I have been declared 'French' or 'something'.  And I'm sure 'something' isn't remotely brown-skinned or moustache-worthy.

Still - the fact that I have officially been declared non-Indian by the working classes, means that to get anything done - be it to purchase a school bag or apples, to get a gas cylinder or to take a short ride to an adjacent neighbourhood, means that I have to pay tourist prices.  And it's not like I have a choice.  In the world of services, one is at the behest of India's teeming mass of new anthropologists.  I am having to pay my way through learning what the actual rates for things are.  I am having to become angrier and angrier to get what I want done.  It works some of the time.  At others, I am a returning Indian who must pay for the right to know what it means to be Indian.  Being Indian isn't simply having the passport.  It's knowing that the kilo rate of potatoes drops after Dusshera to Rs. 20.  It's knowing that broker's fees for finding you a house should be 2 weeks' rent and not a month's.  And it's knowing that when you're shown the rate card for kilometers travelled in an autorickshaw, that you aren't being shown the night rates on the back.  Someone once told me that nothing worth knowing comes for free.  For all the taxes I haven't paid in Dubai, I feel now that I'm paying for a Bachelors of sorts.

Just wait a year.  Then we shall see how Indian the colour of my skin is.  Then we shall see just who imparts the lessons.