T and I: Cosmopolitans

T and I are big on identity.

"Who am I?" T asks frequently, with a sweet pout of wonderment.

When T asks such primal-identity questions, I gets transported to a Kim-ish world.

Kim, as in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, born of Irish parents in British India, is orphaned at a young age and makes a living as a vagabond-beggar on the streets of Lahore, in undivided India. He is a white boy in Indian clothing, who speaks street-Hindi.

Kim's Irishness remains occluded till the end, when it's unveiled--to show him as a white, who has only momentarily been in identity-exile.

Post-revelation, Kim gets confused about his identity; looking up to the sky that looks down on Grand Trunk road, he asks, "Who am I?"

T isn't confused about her identity in the least bit. She knows who she is--a cosmopolitan.

When I met T, I liked the idea of a cosmopolitan; by default T got liked by I (one of the reasons behind I liking T).

T says she is a cosmopolitan because she is all worlds at once; T has traveled profusely, and has a bit of the Asian, the European, the American and even the Russian in her.

T varies between saying she is eclectic and she is a cosmopolitan.

T says cosmopolitan is interchangeable with sophistication. A cosmopolitan, she says, is bound to be a sophisticated human.

I says cosmopolitan means having primary allegiance to the planet at large, to all humanity, to their weal, and looking at the world with unprejudiced eyes.

I aspired to be a cosmopolitan for she had a hunch that cosmopolitan is a sneaky version of western.

For Indians to be cosmopolitans they had to first westernize themselves.

Was the fact of T and I's Indian identity just let out?

Doesn't matter, really, for neither I nor T know how to be an Indian.

T and I are cosmopolitan.

T is westernized in a particular way: she speaks American English with an impeccable American accent. Americans mistake her to be one of their own. Indians hear her as their Other.

T is a liminal.

What's I?