My generation was told we could be anything we wanted to be. We came of age singing along to Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, watching Murphy Brown and Designing Women, witnessing a woman fly into space and being appointed to the Supreme Court. The message of independence was driven home especially hard at my all-girls’ school, where we were empowered in ways that made feminism a posture so obvious we hardly ever spoke its name aloud. But this conscious move toward giving girls the tools to succeed and break glass ceilings focused solely on gender. There was no talk about how things might work differently for us non-white girls. Race very rarely entered the conversation when it came to girl power.
* * *
As with race and culture, I also straddled two worlds when it came to religion; I like to tell people that I was born into Hinduism but raised in the Episcopal Church. My parents brought me up with a religious identity that included an openness to other faiths. They themselves were the product of tolerant, pluralistic environments, and my mother had attended and taught at Catholic schools in India. They had no fear or hesitation in sending me to St. Mary’s, especially because we continued to practice our cultural traditions at home.
It was within the religious context of my childhood that I worked through what it meant to navigate an insider-outsider dynamic. I visited India twice as a child—once when I was so young that I could not remember the trip—but never felt entirely comfortable being tethered by proxy to the country and its culture at large. Hinduism, though, I’ve always felt deeply connected to. The Hinduism of my childhood was visceral, immersive, and filled with sensory detail; I loved its emphasis on ritual and practice, the lush aesthetics of its sacred spaces and depictions of the divine. When I was growing up, we had a prayer room in our house and my mother would get up early each morning to read scripture and sing hymns before breakfast. I often woke to the sound of her voice, rising and falling in the curve of a familiar melody, sometimes slipping in to join her before getting dressed for school.
Because there was no Hindu temple in Memphis until I was in middle school, my parents and extended family were my primary source of knowledge about our traditions, explaining rituals and holidays, encouraging my spiritual interest. At school, I was also encouraged; I was the most enthusiastic student in Bible class, where I learned about Jesus through Mrs. Williams’s felt-board depictions of his life. I loved chapel, took pleasure in the quiet time for reflection we were given each morning, but I went back and forth about whether it was okay to say the “in Jesus’s name” part of the school prayer.
Though I felt drawn to Jesus and his kindliness, I was keenly aware that he wasn’t mine. I didn’t want to stop being Hindu, but sometimes I thought it would be easier if I were a Christian instead, if I could wear a cross and go to youth group on Sunday afternoons and not have to explain to anyone what I believed. I felt most acutely out of place on the few days a year communion was offered during chapel. Though I looked on with a conflicted sense of longing as my classmates walked up to the altar, I staunchly refused when friends—even our chaplain—suggested that it might be okay for me to take communion, too. “But I don’t believe,” I said incredulously. “That would be disrespectful.” Everyone seemed to like the idea of my being both, but no one could explain to me how I might go about doing it.
Sometimes I coped by exaggerating my “Indianness,” placing emphasis on what felt like the most exotic and potentially attention-attracting aspects of my identity. I struggled to figure out what level of visibility made sense. When was I sharing my heritage, and when was I flaunting it? For every teenager, adolescence is a delicate balancing act of demonstrating one’s uniqueness while trying also to fit in with the crowd. For me, the “uniqueness” part was easier than for most of the other girls, the “fitting in” much harder. It was with half mortification and half exhilaration that I got dressed in Indian clothes to perform Bharatanatyam with three or four of my fellow brown-girl classmates in chapel; I had the same set of feelings when I was forced to reveal to friends that I was skipping lunch because I was fasting for a Hindu holiday. “We have a calculus test today! You should have asked to take it tomorrow instead!”
But I was accustomed to being in the minority, to the world being inconvenient and not revolving around me. Unlike my classmates, who only knew a world that catered to them, I did not feel entitled to any special treatment. I never once had the day off from school for the religious holidays my family observed; our celebrations were invisible to my classmates and neighbors. There were no stores selling Diwali decorations or cards, no mention of it in the news, nobody wishing me “Happy Diwali” at school. We celebrated, but the parties never took place on the actual holy day, because there’s no way my parents were going to pull me out of school or take off work.
Learning to make allowances for my family’s traditions pushed me to appreciate my heritage more, to understand that I had to make room for it in my life, to experience firsthand how assimilation can become such an appealing option for immigrants; almost everything in the dominant white culture is set up to have you conform, instead of keeping your odd, inconvenient traditions alive. At times I struggled with the fact that I often identified more with the traditions that weren’t mine, such as our school hymn sings, where we’d spend an entire chapel period requesting and singing songs that I found just as beautiful but more personally resonant than the Sanskrit ones from Hinduism, which I could sing but not understand.
* * *
India always seemed remote and foreign to me. As a child of immigrants, I was careful never to claim the country outright: “My parents are from India, but I was born here.” My attachment to India was by proxy, and while I was proud of the paths my parents had taken to bring my hyphenated self into being, India never felt like mine. The attendant trappings of its culture existed as a kind of grab bag that encompassed several categories: genuine attachment, inconvenient association, fashionable accessory. My mom says I used to complain about eating Indian food once a week as a kid. (I both love to eat and know how to cook that same food now.) Coming back from winter break in fifth grade with mehndi on my hands was pretty cool, but white classmates asking for bindis after Gwen Stefani started wearing them on the red carpet in 1998 was stressful. None of us knew what “cultural appropriation” was yet, but I could feel the specter of it pulsing around the edge of my life.
I struggled with being defined by or limited to my Indianness. Perhaps my least favorite demonstration of this was when white people, upon correctly determining or establishing that my family was Indian, would respond with something along the lines of “We know [insert name of Indian people] in [insert name of faraway state]! Do you know them?” Not kidding. It happened dozens and dozens of times—my parents and I used to joke that one day we were going to respond with “I know these white people in Minnesota! Are they your cousins?”
I was raised to be a good sport—when you’re different, you always have to be a good sport. Being annoyed or offended is part of your daily experience, and you don’t always realize that this isn’t necessarily true for everyone else. My parents, immigrants to this country, were clear on the messaging: we would not complain or draw attention to unfair treatment, even if we were sure it was purposeful and somehow motivated by our skin color. They staunchly refused to interfere or swoop in; I had to figure out how to navigate those scenarios on my own, because they knew I’d be doing it my whole life. Though I didn’t realize it until later, I was socialized as a brown girl to notice when and how my presence made others uncomfortable—by the time I was ten or twelve, my own discomfort in social situations seemed inevitable.
Likewise, I understood when my presence was being deliberately orchestrated for a certain message or effect. I wasn’t ignorant of the visual asset my brown skin provided—I never had to guess why I was routinely selected to be photographed for promotional materials for any school or summer program I attended. But to a second grader, being on the cover of St. Mary’s Magazine felt like the specia
l attention I craved. Even in high school, I didn’t mind being the “diversity card” in my group of friends or realize that I should cringe when a college roommate told me that they’d deliberately revealed to their parents that I liked girls just to freak them out.
The line between appreciation and appropriation is fuzzy, and as a brown person, I often feel like an unwitting Border Patrol agent, never sure which side of the line I’m protecting. Growing up, I found that many of my white friends seemed hungry for pieces of my culture because they did not feel that they had a satisfactory culture of their own. Their identities were convenient but boring. They wanted something to help them stand out or to offer more texture to their identity. I was lucky to have friends, classmates, and teachers who were curious about my religion and culture, and I waffled between eagerly sharing what I knew (at times exaggerating how much I actually knew) and feeling paranoid that my background was the only interesting thing about me.
No doubt it was at least a partial draw for my friends. It became a point of pride when they no longer had to ask for utensils when eating Indian food with my family; my mom gave one of my best friends the nickname “Sangeeta” because of her musical talent and arranged to have a langa (ankle-length skirt) sent from India for the graduation gift of another classmate. Only later did I wonder if this was sharing or selling out, granting easy access to the “fun” aspects of my heritage without any of the attendant work.
* * *
One of the most beloved traditions at St. Mary’s is the annual Christmas pageant, in which seniors who’ve attended the school since first grade or longer enact a series of scenes from famous paintings of the Nativity, Annunciation, Adoration, and so on. It’s old-fashioned and strange and treated with enormous respect by the student body. As a senior, I was selected by classmates to be one of the six Marys—the first but not the last non-white, not-Jewish-or-Christian girl to do so. Everyone called me “Brown Mary,” and the church ladies who volunteered for the pageant paired me with another Indian student, Amrita, who served as my Joseph; we threatened to bring in a brown doll to be our baby Jesus but ultimately dared not. As our humanities teacher pointed out, we were probably the most historically accurate-looking couple up there, though not what Fra Angelico had in mind.
I was sick as a dog in the days leading up to the pageant; the day before, I was running such a bad fever that my mom took me to see a doctor at the critical care clinic. My fever had to break, he insisted, or I could not go into school the next day. (I think I was the first high school patient he’d ever seen weep upon being told not to return to school.)
I spent the morning of the pageant in my bed, wrapped up in blankets and shivering, begging my body to be well. Down the hall, my mom performed her daily puja (worship ceremony) and I took comfort in the sound of her voice. Singing with her, I felt truly desperate, appealing to the Divine Female on both sides of my personal equation—Durga and Mary—to give me this opportunity to make Christmas pageant history. An hour before the cutoff window for school attendance required to participate in extracurricular events, my fever broke.
The rest of the experience is a rush of feeling and sensation—my beautiful classmates cheering my arrival, embracing me, feeding me soup, doing my hair and makeup, sneaking ginger ale up onto the altar for me to sip as we waited our turns. The collective breath of the younger girls as they paused inside their “Gloooooooooria in excelsis Deo,” the heat of the lights inside the tableau box, a sense that the line between reality and something transcendent was blurring, the way Hinduism speaks of: being offered a window into the beyond of our own human experience.
I’d wanted so badly to participate in the pageant because it was a tradition I’d witnessed and looked forward to for years; I did not know that it would also be a rare moment of feeling comfortable inside myself, an opportunity to have the two worlds of my childhood merge, and to be celebrated and embraced, not in spite of any contradiction but alongside of it.
* * *
Though I am fifteen years removed from my time at St. Mary’s, my compliant, All-American Ethnic Girl self still returns almost as an involuntary reflex. I now teach in a majority-white (though coeducational) school, similar to the one I attended, where I bring many of my previous navigational tricks to bear. I learned long ago that even if you don’t know more about India than anyone else, you still become the default expert. Nowadays, I feel much less guilty about saying, “You know what? I have no idea,” when asked a question that assumes some kind of intrinsic knowledge of a culture based on the color of my skin.
I find myself looking back and wishing that instead of seeking to make my differences seem smaller, I’d pushed them further in the other direction. I wish I’d known how to make my classmates’ cultural biases visible to them, though they were invisible to me as well. I came of age in an environment that emphasized sameness, focused on what we had in common, and refused to speak about—or even acknowledge—anything that was different. Celebrations of diversity involved obliging but distant consumption of other people’s cultures and messaging about how we were all “more alike than different.” Some would suggest that I should better appreciate the matrix of excruciating politeness and determination not to offend that imbued my formative years, but the net result of that matrix was a sense of liberal, progressive smugness. My white peers got the benefit of feeling enlightened and tolerant without actually having to be so; I was allowed access into their world so long as I didn’t force them to give up anything or challenge their perceptions of their own inclusivity.
I was well trained to accommodate the majority, and it is with conscious effort that I now try to interrogate and interrupt those default patterns. One practice I’ve taken up is the deliberate use of my name, the name my mother chose for me long before I was even born. I don’t use a “Starbucks name,” something more “typical” or “mainstream” to substitute when ordering a coffee or making a dinner reservation. This is a small act, but for me it has meaning. My name is my signifier, my sign; even the Old English etymology of the word “name” can be traced back to a word that means “to call, nominate, appoint.” Names have power—think of how creepy it feels when someone who hasn’t earned the right of intimacy calls you by your nickname—and answering to something other than the name I was given, the name that claims me, feels like a compromise.
I’m aware that I might not feel so righteously entrenched in my “no Starbucks name” positionality if my name were more multisyllabic, consonant laden, or at the further reaches of American English pronunciation abilities. Not only does it feel like erasure to forgo one’s true name, the same feeling can be achieved when hearing it said incorrectly, over and over and over again. But apologizing for or hiding your name can also be part of a broader posture of trying to take up less space to make things easier on those who’ve never had to stretch beyond the boundaries of their knowledge and experience. We don’t heat up our leftovers at work, because they “smell funny” to our colleagues. It feels conspicuous to talk to our compatriots in our native languages in public, so we don’t. I wonder what would happen if we stopped worrying so much about whether we’re making those in the majority uncomfortable? It’s not from nowhere that white people developed the idea that they are entitled to be comfortable all of the time; they demand or expect it, sure, but we are often the ones who comply.
Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair
PART ONE: FAMILY AS RORSCHACH TEST
Browsing through babyGap, checking out at Whole Foods, waiting in the security line at the airport, I would always hear the question “Is he yours?”
“Is that your baby?”
“Are you his mother?”
“Are you his nanny?”
Ever since my son started to speak and call me Mama in public, the questions shifted:
“Does he look like Daddy?”
“Is your husband tall?”
Sometimes I’d be bombarded by statements, as if, by the force of sheer
declaration, these strangers make sense of what they’re seeing:
“You don’t look anything like your mama!”
“But Mama isn’t very tall!”
“You must look like your daddy.”
I am curious to see how Shiv will field these questions when he is old enough to understand and answer them; I know that how he responds will depend in large part on how he sees me respond. Which is why, though I’m tempted, I’ve resisted the urge to print passive-aggressive “fuck off” note cards that I could hand out at will:
Thanks for your interest in our family!
As it turns out, you’ve asked a question about something that’s none of your goddamn business. You should know better. Don’t you know better?
The next time you’re tempted to ask deeply personal questions of complete strangers, please try to remember that the world and its possibilities are far bigger than your little narrow purview attests. Check your assumptions. We don’t owe you an explanation. Neither does anybody else.
Have a great day!
Friends often try to assure me that people mean well, urging me to go easy on them, to be gracious, to give people the benefit of the doubt. “People don’t mean to be offensive,” they tell me. “They just don’t know how to say it without coming across that way.”
What these friends don’t understand is that when the act of explaining your family structure becomes a part of every day of your life, you grow tired of being gracious. It’s exhausting to have strangers view your life as an opportunity for an educational experience. The underlying message to Shiv is, You and your family don’t make sense to me. You need to explain it to me. You owe me an explanation.
Brown White Black Page 2
