I.M.Patel , U.R.Patel and V.R. (all) Patel

“How do you spell Patel?” asked the girl on the other end of the line.

How do you spell Patel? Seriously? Either this girl was five years old ... or had been living under a rock her whole life.

In any case, it’s not that hard to spell Patel. Paula, Anton, Theodore, Emil, Ludwig is how I would spell it out in Germany. But the girl was American, clueless, had a southern twang and had apparently never stayed at a motel.

I dutifully spelled it out and asked her how come she had not met/seen/heard of the name Patel - Patel as in over two million of us spread across the globe, not counting zillion others in the home country. The 2000 census ranked Patel at 172nd amongst the nation’s 1000 most frequent occurring surnames - and get this: we outnumbered Singh! We can’t beat them in bhangra, but by god! we can procreate faster than they can whip up sarso ka saag. I guess we are busier making dhokla in India as they outnumber us there.

More than 300,000 in the US and over 700,000 Patels live in Britain. Some of them turned up at a reception in Buckingham Palace, enough to warrant Prince Philip to tell an Asian businessman Atul Patel that “a lot of your family is in tonight.” So the Prince doesn’t know we aren’t alllll related. Thank heavens. Can you see us at the Thanksgiving table? Oh, I mean at the Diwali pooja. Admittedly though, the Prince’s best impolitic gaffe was asking a student trekking in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?” Methinks he should keep his royal mouth shut and take refuge under one of his wife’s flamboyantly ugly hats.

Some time ago, I was stopped at immigration. The officer looked at my name, at the passport, and then back at me. Was my husband an engineer, a doctor or did he own a motel? he wanted to know.

Talk about surname stereotyping. Talk about being bang on the money.

Becoming an engineer or a doctor was the order of the olden days. If, however, money or brains were insufficient, ‘Go West Young Man...and buy a motel!’ was another fail-safe parental command. And so he/they did. $40,000 not only got you a downpayment on a decent motel in the distressed and oil-crisis times of the 70s, but also US residency. These days the Patel-Motel Cartel is super strong and almost 60% of motel owners are Indians and one third of those are Patels. When my husband drove cross country forty years ago, every motel he stopped at had a Patel behind the reception desk. Now that same Patel sits behind the steering wheel of a Mercedes and hires goras to greet people with Hello! and Welcome to Days Inn, EconoLodge, Quality Inn etc.

When it was discovered that my husband had the saubhagya to be a Patel, the moteliers not only refused payment, but invited him to sit at the family table for a nice comforting thali of khitchdee and curdi as well. Whether he got undhyu or not, he does not remember.

Patels love other Patels. Introductions having established that there are two Patidars in a meeting, an instant rapport is created and offers of friendship/help/food and lodging flow forth. They have their own Patidar samaj, hold their own exclusive garbas, pray at their own mandirs, feast at their own picnics, and have their own little circles (gor), village classification or ‘gams’.

Aah, the famous Patel Gams. The Charotar Patels have a system of cha-gam (6 villages) and panch-gam (5 villages) and sattavis-gam (27 villages). The six villages are Sojitra, Karamsad, Dharmaj, Bhadran, Vaso and Nadiad. The five villages are Peej, Ode, Sunav, Uttarsanda and Nar. Never mind about the 27 villages. Why? Because it’s good to belong to the five villages, but best to belong to the six villages, or marry into one of them, as I did. Not that I give a rat’s ass about belonging to Sojitra, the elitest of villages. I mean, c’mon, I think they just got electricity and running water in the 80s...the 1980s. They have a whole caste system built into this segregation, complete with snobbery and exclusive bragging rights.

The ‘Patels Rule the World’ group on Facebook has 16,756 members. The name is a bit presumptous, but then megalomania is one of our strong points. And newsflash for singles with a ‘view to matrimony’ - they also have their own little personal match.com.

Which brings me to marriage. Patels love to marry other Patels. I was born a Patel, my mother was née Patel, my mother-in-law was née Patel and so on. I remember filling out and handing in my passport application, when the clerk tossed it back contemptously and asked if I spoke English. Instead of telling him I spoke it a whole heap better than him, I elaborated with the same patience I use with my special ed kids... that I know the meaning of a maiden name and yes, I, my mother, my mother-in-law and all the pedhis before them were all Patels.

With so many of us, it is easy to find someone to marry that you are not related to. How easy? The interconnections of the Patel intelligentia is a powerful machine, rivaling the CIA in efficiency and networking. A few phone calls and all the kakis and fois and masis and mamis set off on a mission to find you a perfect (Patel) soulmate.

In my days, there was the monthly Patel directory, which listed all eligible boys and girls with their complete bio-data (and which gam you belong to), but which is now sufficiently outdated and replaced by websites dedicated to find you the (Patel) love of your life. I remember an aunt asking me for details so she could register my name (talk about ‘bride registry’!), but retreated hastily when I asked whether they had a directory of girls who commit ‘aunticide’. The thought of letting us date and find our own loves of our own lives never occur to them or maybe it does. Where’s the fun in that? It would take their joy out of interfering and meddling in other people’s lives.

But let’s start at the very beginning...a very good place to start.

The Patidars go back a long, long time ago. They are the descendants of Aryans and originally from Punjab. From there they moved to Marvad and further onto Gujarat. On their southbound trek, somewhere along the way they left behind their bahaduri and bhangra genes and traded them in for vyapari and garba ones.

A popular legend is that they are descended from the two sons of Ram - Luv and Kush. The sons of Luv became Levas and the ones from Kush became Kadva. Romantic as that sounds, the Levas probably came from the village of Leava and the Kadvas from the village Karad.

The earliest mention of Patels is in the 16th century book “Couto” where there is a description of the commencement of the Portuguese rule in Bassein. The word itself means farmer, landowner or village headman. To facilitate tax collections, the British delineated and renamed some Patels into Amins (farm managers) and others Desais (those who kept books). The probable etymology seems to be from ‘pat’ - roll or register, and Patlikh or record keeper. Patlikh was shortened to Patal and then became Patel.

And there you have it.

Now if we get enough members for a new group on Facebook, we could call it “Patels Will Rule the White House”. It can happen.

The Singing Teacher

My father couldn’t have cared less about the United States Army, but he firmly believed in their slogan ‘Be all you can be’.

We were encouraged to take any and all kinds of classes. Whilst art and accounting classes were fine and dandy, he was told that singing ups the chances of finding ‘a suitable boy’ for his girls. Now this probably holds true if you were born in a South Indian family, but methinks he should have focused on me learning how to make dhokla (or even) rotli instead. Would have stood me in good stead.

Not being endowed with the same good looks as Nina or Varsha, he thought that a melodious voice would be a sufficiently substitutive asset and look good on my bio-data. He overestimated my vocal cords, which, stentorian when used against the servants or the driver Jadav, were godawful when used for anything remotely connected to a tune or melody.

One of my favorite quotes is by Coleridge:

‘Swans sing before they die - t’were no bad thing,
Should certain persons die before they sing.’

My point exactly.

My father, however, the eternal optimist and conveniently in absentia when the singing teacher came, hired a professional to attempt the impossible with me and the possible with Nina. Varsha, for some reason, was allowed to opt out and had tabla lessons instead.

Within six months Nina had mastered the saptak, the Indian musical equivalent of DoReMi and was already practicing ‘Bol re Papi Hara’, the song from the movie “Guddi” and based on the classical raga Miya ki Malhar. It was self-evident that she was the apple of the teacher’s eye. When it was my turn, the same eye filled with tears, as the lines from the song ‘meri aankh se moti paaye’ suggested.

She was not alone in her misery. At least she was being paid. I had to listen to myself, week after week, sorrowful and suffering in the atonal sessions , continuously practicing the sargam,. That is, only part of the scale. Month after month, I warbled Sa, Re, Ga and Ma. Opening my mouth in preparation to sing the note Pa, beads of sweat would break out on her forehead, and she would shudder in an anticipatory dread.

Why don’t we just focus on Sa, Re, Ga and Ma for today, she would suggest. I never reached Pa.

Foiled by the note Pa, or Fa in the equivalent Western solfège. For Julie Andrews it meant a longer way to run, for me it meant an eternity to learn how to sing. I was not ready to continue for an eternity. Things came to a head when the woman had the audacity to ask for more money after six months. At this point my father conceded that it would be easier for Helen Keller to drive, than for me to belt out a melodious note and he tossed her out. I consoled my father, telling him that I would take my chances finding a boy, who would love me for myself and not for my voice.

I eventually did find a boy who loves me for myself. If truth be told, he loves me more when I don’t sing.