Hamari bahu Sunita

Finally, at last, when the TV anchors announced that the eagle has landed, we lay spread-eagled asleep, knocked out by the long journey into the night.

Finally, at last, when the TV anchors announced that the eagle has landed (thank you, Ken Follett), we lay spread-eagled asleep, knocked out by the long journey into the night. Finally, at last when we saw the spaceship halt on the tarmac and rushed to the refrigerator, pulled out the marigold garland from the deep freeze where it had been put to retain a limp freshness for the last 30-odd hours, and returned to garland our first TV glimpse of the space superwoman, she was being carried away on a stretcher, off camera. Finally, at last we saw Atlantis on earth but not Sunita Williams.

If you threw the garland at the TV set and went off to sulk wherever it is that you sulk, who can blame you?

All of last week, the news channels took us from here to eternity and on board the space station where Sunita had floated in and out of our lives for the past six months. By Thursday we were ready to accompany her back to earth. Get those garlands.

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‘Sunita’s week’ as ABC called it, was drawing to an end by Friday. From the morning, news channels were replaying Sunita’s time in space — 195 days said Times Now, a record for a female astronaut but what’s there, her father said on NDTV and CNN-IBN and Headlines Today and Times Now and her uncle on Aaj Tak, Star News, Zee News, NDTV India plus all the aforementioned English channels from Ahmedabad (apologies to all channels omitted due to the inability to watch more channels simultaneously), isn’t she the Marathon Woman?

At different times or all at once, the channels did the following: provided a minute by minute countdown to the landing 12 hours away, reported from NASA (CNN-IBN for sure because the correspondent was CNN) on the speed and position of the spaceship (England, around in the world in two hours), brought us the weather report in space, sorry USA, sipped tea with Mr Pandya in New Jersey, spent sleepless nights (two actually) with Mr Pandya in Ahmedabad (first was her father, the second her uncle who spoke reproachfully of his enforced wakefulness as though NASA and the weather gods were deliberately thoughtless of his comfort), bit nails along with every remote relation of Sunita’s in India (danced with them too after her arrival), stood permanently next to jungle Jim Jugal who was the last Indian apparently to have met Sunita before she took off for the wide open — and watched people in Karnal watch TV with sad memories of India’s first born galaxy girl, Kalpana Sharma. Oh yes, forgot, offered prayers before the TV for her wellbeing…

We are as patriotic as the Indian flag, deeply concerned about Atlantis and its entire crew, including Sunita Williams, who, we were repeatedly informed had an Indian émigré father, had never paid India an adult visit but had spoken to Indian kids on the telephone from up there — didn’t that justify the carpet coverage?

Maybe, but this obsession with India giri Friday and Saturday? Images upon images of Sunita in various gravity less positions, on the treadmill, on a space walk, hugging the Russian astronauts (or are they still called cosmonauts?), waving her hair in greetings, eating a samosa (didn’t NASA beam those pictures to India?) — short of seeing what she looked like in her nappy (they have to wear them in space), we knew everything about Sunita — and nothing about any other space visitor, or the investigations they conducted.

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Truth is, Sunita is quintessential American. She is a running freak, a fitness fiend, a woman who wants to come home and walk along the beach with her dog and her husband and eat a pizza. So why were the Indian TV channels so desperate to turn her into a desi bahu? Why do they pursue Aishwarya Rai at Cannes, Shilpa Shetty in Big Brother? Could it be that we, collectively, still suffer from a firangi fetish?