On the first day of a class I sometimes ask my students to trace their own lives backwards, from this shared moment in this one room to the place each of them was born, naming the accidents and choices and forces of history that carried them here. Run the exercise on me and the line goes back through Phoenix, and eighteen years in Michigan before that, and Urbana-Champaign before that, and India before all of it. We are all migrants, if you follow the thread far enough, and the homelands we carry are half-remembered and half-invented anyway.
Towards the end of July, earlier this year, I flew out of Phoenix and some forty-eight hours, a missed flight and a 2.5 hour car-drive in torrential downpour, later reached Ijuí, a small city in the south of Brazil I had never heard of until a Fulbright invitation brought me here. I was there for two weeks, for work, something I have described in another post. This post is about something different. It describes one day during my stay there and encapsulates in some ways how much of who we are is an accident of where history and circumstance set us down, and how, across all that distance, we still find our way to one another.
Being in Ijuí for two weeks was different than most of my trips. I usually fly in, give a talk, get a meal or two with the hosts, and fly out again. This was different—an extended stay in a place with a gentler rhythm than the one I carry around inside me. Slower meals, longer silences, in large part because I speak no Portuguese and most of the people I met spoke no English. After the frenetic summer I had had, it was good to slow down.
This is the story of one day.
As with most days that I was there, my mornings were relatively free, so I grabbed some breakfast, and worked in my hotel room, on the projects that had fallen through the cracks, catching up on emails, updating my website, and on the talks I had to give. Early in the afternoon, one of the students picked me up and off we went to the university’s anthropology museum, the Museu Antropológico Diretor Pestana, part of the tour that had been arranged for me. A few of the graduate students came along, Fernanda, Daiana, and Luciano, and a curator who had worked there for decades showed us around.
Ijuí was founded in 1890, and unlike the older single-origin colonies around it, it was settled deliberately as a mixture: Germans, Italians, Poles, Russians, and others, placed side by side on purpose. The town still calls itself the Terra das Culturas Diversificadas, the land of diversified cultures, and the museum documents all of this carefully, including some parts of history that are, maybe, harder to celebrate. Colonization here was state policy, and one of the stated aims of that policy was to whiten the population. The people who had lived in the region for millennia before any colonist arrived, the Kaingang among them, were treated by the plan as an obstacle to progress. A version of the same sorting survives in the town today: I was told that the descendants of the later European arrivals often regard the Portuguese who arrived earlier as the “natives,” and, no, it was not meant as a compliment. The museum, to its credit, documents all of it, the pride in the history and geography of the land and the cost that comes with it.
From there we walked, five minutes away, to the university’s innovation space: robots, a power-grid simulation, the bright confident apparatus of the future, a room I could have been standing in almost anywhere on earth. I have spent a good part of my career in rooms like this one, and the strange thing about them is that they are the same everywhere… the same furniture, the same fonts, the same optimism, whether you are in Tempe or Bangalore or, it turns out, Ijuí. In a few steps I had gone from a place built to remember exactly where everyone came from, to document and honor our differences, into a place that flattened it all. I say this not as a criticism but rather just as a fact of the worlds we effortlessly move within.
Dinner I ate alone. I am a vegetarian, which in the churrasco country of southern Brazil is a significant disadvantage, and I got through the menu by holding my phone over it and letting Google Translate tell me what I could eat. In my headphones was a playlist of MPB, Brazilian popular music, that Fernanda, one of the students, had sent me that morning, none of which I understood and some of which I loved. The translation app I had leaned on all day did its work here too. It got me through the menu, and the small transactional exchanges that are essential for navigating the world. It wasn’t perfect, the words often appeared a beat later than I would have preferred, and I was never really sure of the translation, and the whole thing felt a bit absurd, but, for the most part, it got the job done (and generated a few laughs along the way). Then it was time for the concert.
I had been invited to the concert by Luciano, a student, who paid for my ticket and insisted it was a gift. It was in a large auditorium, a large stage and sloping seats, and it was packed. (I realized only later that this was the very room where I would give the last public talk of my visit and I was glad I did not know that beforehand. The stress of speaking from that large stage would have ruined the evening.)
The stage was lit entirely by candles. Four musicians, piano and strings, sat down and began to play. I was tired, two glasses of wine in, and honestly worried I would fall asleep. And then the music started. The first was Queen.
And nostalgia hit. On the 13th of July, 1985, Freddie Mercury walked onto the stage at Wembley for Live Aid and gave a twenty-minute performance that may still be the greatest in the history of live music. It went out by satellite to something close to two billion people, roughly forty percent of everyone then alive, in one of the largest simultaneous transmissions ever attempted. In India it came through Doordarshan, at the time very nearly the only television there was, one state channel for a subcontinent. Which is how it reached a common room in Pilani, in the desert of Rajasthan, and me, as a grey flickering image on a shared black-and-white set.
(A confession. I have this distinct memory of watching Live Aid in 1985 on a black-and-white television in a college common room in Pilani, where I was an undergraduate. But when I think about it, and having done a bit of research, that cannot quite be true. Live Aid took place on a summer day in July, when I would have been home, not on campus. And by 1985 color television had already come to India, courtesy the 1982 Asiad in Delhi, so the set I watched it on was almost certainly in color, not the grainy black-and-white I remember. The memory is wrong twice over, in place and in texture. And yet I cannot dislodge it. That is how I remember it, and how I will describe it. The facts are as they may be, but the memory is what carried the emotional weight.)
Watching that performance, years ago, made me want to learn more about Freddie Mercury. “Do you know he is Indian?” someone said. Really? An Indian rock star? Was that even possible? As it turns out, Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara, in 1946, on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. His family were Parsis, Zoroastrians whose ancestors had fled Persia for the coast of Gujarat more than a thousand years earlier. As a boy he was sent across the sea to a boarding school in Panchgani, in the hills of western India, where he learned piano and started his first band. In 1964 a revolution in Zanzibar drove his family out, and they resettled in Feltham, a suburb of London. Three countries and cultures in one teenaged boy. And out of all that displacement came the most extravagantly English rock star of the twentieth century. Empire scatters people across the earth, and the scattered people make art, and the art comes back to find a boy in a common room in Pilani who has no idea of any of this. (I am, as you can see, sticking to the truth of memory, and not to the truth of facts.)
Listening to Queen’s melodies that night in Ijuí took me back almost forty years, to that Live Aid moment. In a flash.
It was not only Queen the quartet played. The next band they took on, for whatever reason, was Coldplay. The only reason I know Coldplay is because of my son. Back in middle school he was a huge fan, and suddenly I was back in Okemos, Michigan, in our basement, where he and his friends, for reasons known only to them, decided to make lip-synced music videos to Coldplay songs. To say these videos were bad is an understatement. They were worse than terrible. Which did not stop them from sharing the videos, on this new tool called YouTube, with their teachers, for the annual talent competition. What were they thinking? The videos survive somewhere on YouTube or in my Google Photos archive, and they are hilariously worse than my memories of them. Trust me, I checked. These videos are better unviewed.
But the bigger (deeper?) point was not that there were multiple versions of the same songs in my head at once, but rather that each had reached a different version of me, at a different moment in time, in a different way. Live Aid arrived by satellite, collective and miraculous and barely visible, a whole planet aimed at one stage. Coldplay reached my son and his friends, through MP3 players and YouTube, as something to be remixed and shared. And now, in Ijuí, the same music arrived through four people on stage, surrounded by fire, musical instruments in hand. I have spent my working life studying how the tools we use to carry meaning to one another change the meanings we seek to carry, and here I was, touched, moved, transplanted, transported, by the simplest tools of all: strings, horsehair, breath.
I have written elsewhere about another trip, to Durban, where a musician named Chats Devroop drove me around the city and told me its history. The hotel I was staying in had been closed to people who looked like him (and me) until 1994; he had been allowed to perform in such places but not to use their bathrooms. We visited the 1860 Heritage Centre, which tells the story of the Indians brought to South Africa as indentured laborers, and I stood there, an upper-caste Indian who had come to the United States by choice, looking at a history that could easily have been mine and was not, only by the accident of circumstance. That evening Chats dedicated a song to me, “Mera Joota Hai Japani,” an old Bollywood number about being a mongrel of borrowed parts, and I wrote then that the weight of our shared history felt balanced, for a moment, by the lightness of our shared humanity.
I understand now that Ijuí was the same trip in a different key. Both were about leaving home and arriving home and finding that they are not always, or even necessarily, the same place. Two men in their sixties in a car in Durban; a hall full of strangers in Ijuí, close enough, each time, to feel not just the life I have lived but the lives that could just as easily have been mine. Both trips handed me a real and unlooked-for human connection, and both made me look, in the same breath, at the violence buried underneath it: indenture and apartheid in Durban; colonization, a whitening policy, and my own inherited caste in Ijuí.
There was one more thing I could not stop noticing, sitting there in the dark. A Brazilian host had given me MPB music. Brazilian musicians were giving me British and American music. A Brazilian student had given me a ticket to hear the soundtrack of my Indian adolescence, and that of my son, out of his own pocket, expecting nothing at all. Nothing in that exchange made any sense, and none of it was transactional. I kept receiving things I had not asked for and could not repay, and the only thing you can do with a debt like that is hope to carry it forward and hand it to someone else, later, somewhere else.
This is in no way to minimize the loss and violence that underlies it all. Or the migration, and the mongrelization. And the costs that places on individuals, particularly those who did not choose it. The temptation is to think that seeing the darker history cheapens the warmth, that you cannot be moved by a candlelit concert once you have spent the afternoon learning who was pushed aside to build the town it is played in. I have come to believe the opposite. We are all migrants and mongrels, carried far from wherever we started, some of us by choice and some by force. Freddie was carried out of Zanzibar by a revolution. I was carried into Ijuí by a Fulbright. My student’s ancestors came by circumstances I will never know, and my son was carried by nothing more than the accident of where he was born, and a choice his parents made to move, across the globe, with all their possessions in two suitcases. All these moves can feel disorienting, but that should not keep us from recognizing the beauty that emerges. That moment, uniquely mine, gathered up the music of Queen, a memory that may not even be accurate, Coldplay and a basement in Okemos, and the sheer unlikely distance all of it had traveled to reach me, at that moment, sitting in that particular chair.
I cannot fully explain why it landed the way it did. It was specific to me, made of my own accidents and no one else’s. And that, I think, is exactly why it is true for the rest of us too. We are all unique accidents of fate, and yet, and this is the crazy part, we can still connect, deeply, personally. One could say despite our differences, but maybe one could argue, because of them.
Coda 1: Later that week I spent a delightful evening at my host’s home, the wonderful Fabiana and Denilson, with some vegetarian food, specially cooked for me. And on Spotify, I put on some Bollywood music. And as we talked, across food and wine and languages, it felt just right.
Coda 2: On my last evening, one of the students, Daiana, put on traditional dress, brought her guitar, and sang me a classic gaúcho song, “Canção do Amigo” — a celebration of friendship, written by Elton Saldanha, Rui Biriva, and Vaine Darde, and most famously recorded by Rui Biriva. I did not understand a word of it in the moment, and did not need to; you can hear a version of it below and read the lyrics in translation (courtesy, letras.mus.br), and they are every bit as beautiful as the evening was.