Category Archive

I’m behind on my writing - adjusting to a job like the one I have is difficult because while I’m learning a lot, the routine is suffocating me. What an idiotic thing to complain about, I know. I’m feeling overwhelmed about the fact that I have no plans for August, and am torn between desperately searching for a job, and running away to somewhere. I’m not really the running away kind, in the way that I’ve been daydreaming about, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s just because it’s always what I’ve told myself. I’m feeling stuck, and tired, so writing hasn’t been on top of my to-do list these days. My apologies.

In any case, behind on my writing means I didn’t get around to writing about Loving Day, which was last week. A belated Happy Loving Day to you all. The Washington Post featured a great article - “What Mildred Knew” - that is definitely worth reading if you haven’t yet.

The other day I got asked a question from one of my best friends, an Indian American living in Texas, a friend whose life is a stark contrast from my own.

“So have you just given up on finding an Indian guy?”

Where could I begin? I couldn’t explain to her, someone who grew up in a context where there were only two kinds of appropriate men to date (Indian-Hindu; White), that it wasn’t that I’d given up on anything, that I’d been struggling with the guilt of dating white men for over three years now. And I couldn’t find the right words to tell her that it had both nothing and everything to do with race.

I hadn’t sworn off white men exactly - more like men altogether - but I had definitely decided that the problems of my past relationships could have been attributed to ignorance about white supremacy, white privilege, and the loaded histories and contexts behind relationships between white men and women of color. The risk of being exoticized and fetishized, of feeling colonized as a body, as an individual, could be avoided if I avoided relationships, specifically relationships with white men.

Well I think we all know what happened then, so I won’t bother reflecting on that again (moving on is hard. but that’s an entirely separate, and probably password protected post for another day).

I went to a wedding on Saturday night, tagged along with some family to this big North Indian Bollywood-esque wedding. There were probably four hundred people there, all dressed up, and at the head of the reception hall, the bride and groom sat like awkward cake-toppers on a throne that resembled a prom-photo backdrop. I was the only young woman with short hair, and the only woman who wore black (which, at a Hindu wedding is perfectly acceptable, though apparently not as appropriate as Barbie pink or Vegas teal).

As one of the groomsmen prepared to make a toast, he turned to the groom and began: “Dude, I always thought you would do something stupid, like marry a Chinese girl, and have to learn to use chopsticks or something. But at the end of the day you did the family right, you did us all proud, by marrying within the community.”

I was seething. is that the right word? It was seething mixed with stinging tears mixed with having the wind knocked out of you. I was all of those things, but managed to maintain my own plastic expression as half the audience clapped ferociously over the notion of “doing the family right.”

My parents did not “do their families right”. They married out of communities. They married out of religions. They married out of region. My mother was a triple threat to my father’s community and vice versa. The women in my father’s community felt they had been done wrong, that my mother had “stolen away one of the good ones.” My mother’s parents were progressive enough at the time to be supportive of the marriage, but they both dealt with the consequences of their daughter’s choices from their families. And while they were legally allowed to get married in India, I don’t doubt that they paid in other ways for their “betrayal to their own kind.”

My friend has dated exclusively Indian men. She is a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative her community strives to fulfill - a beautiful, intelligent woman who is looking forward to a life in the suburbs with children and maybe a dog. She and her husband will play boardgames on the weekends with other North Indian couples, and their social life will revolve around Indian functions, poojas, and weddings.

This just isn’t the way I grew up. I feel no real connection to South Asian culture - my own parents never drove culture into me because they too couldn’t handle the other aspects that come with it - the moderate politics, the gender divided functions, the classism, and prejudices.

So I told her the truth in the best way I knew how. No, I hadn’t “given up” on Indian men - the ethnicity of my partner just doesn’t matter as much as his politics - his racial and gender politics, his ability to negotiate through the dynamics that are bound to arise in being with a woman of color. Meeting straight men like that isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel, it turns out. More like standing blindfolded in a lake trying to stab at fish with a fork. So I’m in a privileged position not to have to limit myself to “Indian Men,” I’m not going to. There is a part two to this, about my failure as a candidate for the seemingly prototypical Indian man, but that’s really another issue altogether…

Until next time.

Note: This is an excerpt actually, from a speech I gave at an API Student Commencement Dinner at graduation - I had always had fantasies of speaking during graduation weekend so it was a real thrill - the content is important to me so I thought it was worth putting here.

Second Note: This prequel-my-post-with-a-note thing is not going to become a habit.

~*~

I think one of the hardest things about graduating is saying goodbye to the people we have grown to care about over the last few years. Being at a college like this has not been the easiest experience. It’s been difficult for some of us to get through four years of college. Being here has sometimes meant feeling lonely or disappointed or angry or scared or unsafe. But being here has also meant meeting some of the brightest and most competent and loving people ever…

Community need not be completely unified – it need not be made up of people who have the same shared experiences. It is made of voices that must learn to speak and listen to one another, and negotiate with one another. Participating in and working in and being in a community is a process – and it’s ok that our community here in this room has sometimes felt fragmented and disunified. It’s really ok – we all learned from each other and we found support with individuals here. I feel very lucky to have found the people here in this room when I did because these people helped me feel less scared, and less alone and less angry and less disappointed. These people helped me find a voice to speak clearly and articulately in spaces where I was afraid to speak. These people asked me to think about how best to serve my community, how best to live a liveable life, how best to take care of myself while also taking care of others. The people in this room are leaders. They helped make a difference here. They will continue to make a difference wherever they go. I’m so proud of the people here, of the students here. Given all of this, I will reiterate – saying goodbye is difficult.

But this is what I realized in the last few weeks – I’m ashamed to admit how late in my college years I truly came to understand this. I come from a history built on goodbyes – goodbyes that were much much more difficult than the ones I will have to say in the next two days. Let me expand on this a little.

In 1947, my grandmother, her siblings and her mother said goodbye to their home in what is now Pakistan. Her father would remain there to tie up loose ends while his family went on to start a new life in India. They did not know how he was doing for three years. It is called partition for a reason – it tore communities away from their homes and separated families from one another, sometimes for years and sometimes forever. I can still see the trauma in my grandmother’s eyes when she discusses this time in her life. I cannot imagine what it must have been for her to say goodbye to the people she loved, to the home she grew up in. I cannot imagine what it was like for her to say goodbye to her parents and move with her new husband to a new city, when she was only 21. How does one recover from these kinds of goodbyes?

My parents immigrated to the United States in 1982. My father and mother said goodbye to their families and arrived in a new place halfway around the world, with what they had. They did it, I think, for a life that would be better than the one they had left behind. They did it so they could live a life that wasn’t their parents’ lives. To do this meant saying goodbye to family and friends – it meant being separated from an entire history, it meant giving up a homeland, one that would never seem the same once they had left. What was it like to feel this kind of isolation? To feel so overwhelmed by homesickness at a time where one could not simply email or call regularly.

The point of my recollecting familial history is this: for most of us, myself included, we come from immigrant histories that our founded on goodbyes. We, or our parents or a parent or grandparents or great grandparents or great-great-grandparents left homes and families –risked heartbreak and homesickness so that we could eventually be here. That’s really astounding. That’s really something we need to consider when we leave college because it is a testament to the kind of love that exists amidst fear and anger and pain. I really believe that we have to stay committed to remembering and writing our own histories, of uncovering our own pasts, because there are many many people in the world that have tried to take this opportunity away from us. It’s important to realize that it isn’t just about making a difference through our work and our decisions on a political level, it isn’t just about looking towards the future, it is about remembering the people we’ve said goodbye to in order to create new opportunities for other people’s lives. The goodbyes we say today will give way to a better life for ourselves, and hopefully for our families, present and future.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where crying was nothing that needed to be sheltered - there was no shame in it (although neither of my parents ever seemed to do it). But then you know, I grew up to learn about when it’s “okay to cry” and when crying makes women look weak (turns out, the answer is ‘always’), and when it’s  a matter of pride, a matter of saying “there’s no way I would give you the satisfaction of seeing me so upset” - this latter feeling has turned up in the classroom more times than I’d like to admit.

Then in the fall, I found myself stifling emotions further and further, until my ability to strategically be open with other people became a flawless talent - where I could spend hours counseling and guiding others only to spend the remainder of the evening sitting and doing work while tears leaked out of my face for reasons that are too overwhelming at this point to write about at all, let alone in public. I’m an expert at avoiding my own life and focusing instead on the needs of others. WOC? Could be.

I spent yesterday with a woman who is truly phenomenal, who has lived a life I thought I would only hear about through memoirs and rumors. She’s wise and smart, and stunning. And whenever I see her, I just feel compelled to work out those little issues that aren’t really little at all. That’s how it goes though - she’s a woman who knew my mother before I was born, who has insight on my family I could never conceive of, and has statements to make about my own life that make me feel  blessed and confident about the uncertainty of where it is headed.

Coming home - to my parent’s home - has always been a space where I could curl up and cry - a good cry; the kind of cry that resonates out of your guts, where you can’t see and you can’t breathe and liquids are pouring from your face and every time you try to breathe deep it gives you enough time to rethink all the things that made you cry in the first place, forcing a new surge of heaves and sobs to rise out again. And you think of the people you love and the people you’ve lost and the things you are afraid of, and it keeps going until finally you start to breathe a little normally and brutally rub at your face until it starts to regain feeling and dryness and you sort of…keep going.

That’s really the best way I can describe the good cry. Maybe I’m not the writing type after all.

In any case, I saw this phenomenal woman, and I came home and I finally had a good cry - a cry that had been working it’s way out in short and uneasy spurts throughout the last few months, but had been suppressed for as long as possible.

Also, I really have no problem crying in front of strangers. It’s the people I care about, the people who care about me, that I hate crying in front of.

Yes, that does say quite a lot about me.

Anyway, what a lacking post - but here it is - I’ve written something, and it was about a good cry.

Until next time -  I’m sure the next few months will be filled with things worth ranting about and turning over in my head.

I’ve been struggling a little to write this on account of how it makes me sad to think about it - but this is memory I suppose - it’s something I desperately want to hold on to but I also don’t want it to make my emotions go haywire every time. It is written as a possible contribution for Apples and Thyme, an event going on at one of my favorite blogs, Vanielje Kitchen.

My Nani (my mother’s mother) practically raised me. My mother stayed at home to raise me for my entire childhood but my nani - she really developed a particular part of my identity in such a way that I can’t tell whether it was a nurturing process or a naturally inherited one. Probably a bit of both.

In December, I went to India and Nani made those foods that make my mouth water and my eyes well up - she insisted on making only my favorites because I haven’t seen her in years and suddenly all the energy seemed to surge through her body once again and she bounded into the kitchen every morning to set aside dough for chapatis.

Chapatis - how to describe them, truly describe them? When they are homemade, when they are handmade, by a woman you respect and love so much, when they are perfectly round because of years of practice and patience as a wife and mother; when they are perfectly oiled and never burnt and when they are eaten with rice and with that favorite dhaal that she doesn’t like but that she makes for you. When they are accompanied by story after story, about the ‘47 partition, about learning to cook for a stranger you must spend the rest of your life with, about raising two daughters, about raising a granddaughter.

She says “they only taste this good because they are made by your nani” - and that’s true to some extent. I’ve eaten naan and chapatis and parathas from the best of women and the best of restaurants and it just isn’t the same.

When I think of chapatis - the time it takes to prepare and yet how quickly they can be made after years of practice - I think of her. I think of her sacrificing everything because it was what you did and I feel guilty when I think of the times I mistook this selflessness for weakness. I think of the patience she puts into every task and that kind of love that resonates in every gesture. In every chapati is a part of that woman, a part of that woman’s trauma and grace that I so desperately wish I was able to understand.

When I was younger and I watched her in the kitchen as she turned the last remains of the dough into a small heart which she would let me play with before it was put on the pan, I used to imagine her giving a part of her secret life to me - that part of her life that she never talked about but I knew existed long before my life even began. I loved pressing my fingers into the very same spots of the dough that she had, until the heart became an uneven slab of mangled prints.

Now thinking back on it, I still feel this way - this sense of wholeness that comes only when I am with her, or with my mother or with my aunt. Where the fragmented parts come together to make one complete heart.

My nani has affected the way I think about food because I see it now as a metaphor for intimacy and for colonial trauma, as a mode through which we pass down our stories and histories, and through which we receive both painful and pleasurable inheritances. But she has affected the way I view and pursue strength as a woman also; she moves me to want better and to love despite everything else.

One day I will learn to make chapatis as perfectly round and flat as she does, and it will probably be the day I learn to love the way that she does.

It’s really difficult for me to write these days. I’ve just come back from a 3 day wedding - a wedding filled with firsts: the first Indian wedding (this was a North Indian wedding), the first family wedding I’ve attended (my cousin), and the first event where I have had to be around family, fully decked out in North Indian clothes and seen as an adult.

A lot of life is about performance, I’ve come to realize. It’s all about those little details that keep family from getting caught in arguments - what I refer to as “family politics” - a fake laugh, keeping your mouth shut when your elders tell you that you’ve gained weight, learning not to correct “art college” from “liberal arts college” when they attempt to belittle your choice in humanities. At a certain point, whether I intend to or not, I find my eyes move slightly down, my walk becomes a little slower and my voice is heard considerably less when I’m at family events (hereby referred to as “functions”). These things all come down to the gender roles that have been assigned to me through a variety of things - little comments that were made to me as a child by extended family, the media. And the particularities of these gender roles are dictated by my family’s culture.

I have a long history with battling culture. I was sitting at the henna-ceremony, looking around at the one of 40 women that had attended the event who was around my age. The first was 23. And married. Her hair was perfectly straight and her outfit was perfectly tailored and her husband was an attractive and wealthy South Asian man. She looked like an Indian Barbie doll. She looked domesticated and manicured and feminine - and to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether she is reading Sister Outsider under her covers with a flashlight while her husband is asleep or not. What matters is her performance - her ability to fit a model that is dictated by a culture that I cannot relate to.

My claim is this: I don’t know if I ever will feel connected to my identity as an Indian-American because of culture. Culture is not the thing that dictates my struggle for social justice. The reality is, the aspects of “Indianness” that make me feel like an Indian-American is the solidarity I share with other Indian-Americans regarding racism, sexism and homophobia in the community. It is often shared experience my family has with other South Asian families that immigrate to the United States. It is the brown color of my skin that I have grown to love that helps me to identify as Indian-American. It is my parents. My grandparents. My aunt.

There is more to say, but it will have to wait.

Cross-posted at Feministe

I am very liberal with the term ‘home’. When I am living on campus during the academic year, I refer to my parents’ residency as ‘home’ - but as soon as I return to northern California, my tiny campus becomes ‘home’.

Most of my childhood was actually spent in Texan suburbia. I remember the house fairly well - the way the outside looked. I keep in touch with a couple of people who still live there so I remember random details about the small suburb of the large city I grew up in. But do I feel attached to Texas in any way? Do I consider it home in any way? Nope.

I was born in San Francisco and went to high school in the Bay Area. And although my heart feels very warm when I think about the bay area, I feel very removed from it. I commuted to school so I never had the chance to explore the town my parents now reside in very well - there isn’t much to know and I like the feeling of familiarity but I don’t feel an overwhelming attachment to this place.

I thought this is the way everybody felt. And now I realize more and more that people are very attached to their homes - the locations they consider home. They feel “at home” in certain spaces - it isn’t just a temporary space where they move their things.

But this is how I feel. After I moved out of Texas I have metaphorically lived out of a suitcase. Locations are fluid. They have sentimental value - there are stores and restaurants I miss seeing and I love my parents’ home. And there was a brief time where my parents’ home was home. I feel comfortable here. But it feels like I’m visiting whenever I’m here. Maybe it’s because I don’t have siblings that live here. I didn’t build a life anywhere. I just lived my life in a few select places, in a couple of lovely little houses.

Then I went back to India. Even using the phrase “back to India” should say something about my relationship to the land. I wasn’t born there - I’ve been there 3 times. I was 1 yrs. old, 12 yrs. old and then I went last December. I’m not fluent in Hindi, the language the community where my grandparents live uses, I don’t feel connected to most of South Asian and North Indian culture. I don’t identify as Indian-American because of culture or religion. I am very unread on the history of the country.

But it feels like a home. There is a sense of belonging that I feel in the air, and in the community. I’m fully aware of my outsider status there - I’m not trying to give up my U.S. citizenship privileges and problematics by proclaiming my connection to the so-called motherland (I feel uncomfortable using this term - does anyone have an alternative? Maybe just ‘homeland’). But I do feel connected to that location in a way that felt new.

Salman Rushdie has a collection of articled and essays entitled Imaginary Homelands and he explains this term so wonderfully:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind…

While I think Rushdie refers more to the immigrant community that looks back at their home, and more specifically people who are exiled from the homeland, I feel very strongly about this statement. Home for me, is just a narrative. An important narrative, yes, but ultimately, just a story, just a series of memories that makes up a blend of overwhelming nostalgia and trauma.

Only recently have I stopped feeling so unsettled about this. I felt so thrilled at being able to “diagnose” my relationship to this sense of home and homeland that most people around me seem to have. And then I just felt scared.

Now I realize that I still have many things to learn and that part of growing is building one’s own home. And it’s fine to have many homes and a nearly-fairytale vision of one’s homeland. We should hold on to these things if it is what makes us feel safe.

Home is about the people. I can’t help feeling like as communities become further linked and connected, and national boundaries become more blurred, home will only grow as an imaginary concept and we will have to start thinking of home as the multiple spaces where our heart may reside.

My grandfather was recently diagnosed with being bi-polar. He is in his 70s, perhaps early 80s, and he was officially diagnosed in a clinic in Delhi about a year ago. I’m kind of unclear about it, because although my mother is fairly open about discussing mental health, she and my grandmother consistently worry about news that might affect my state at school (i.e. they don’t want me to worry). For the last 8-12 months (again, unclear to me), he has not spoken more than a couple of sentences at a time. Even when I went to visit, he really only spoke to me if I asked him a direct yes/no question. I can’t really get into how overwhelming it was to see a man who was part of my upbringing and realize that he was not as I remembered him. To realize that he was not how he wanted me to remember him. Being the traditional patriarch of the family, he has caused a lot of problems for his wife and daughters. But to me he still lingers in my mind as the man who taught me long division, let me pretend to cut his hair, and sang old Hindi movie songs while we walked to the mailbox.

My father is a very stoic man. He has always been very introverted - according to the bits and pieces of his childhood that I have collected from his in-laws, who were very close to his parents. He changed career paths about five years ago - hotel management to yoga instructor. All of his yoga students talk about how compassionate and sensitive my father is (my mother is considered a very “lucky woman“) - a few refer to him as “a man in touch with his feminine side”. He cooks, does the laundry, and has always had an attitude towards my mother that appears to be very liberal, progressive, and “unlike the average man”.

My father has never talked about his childhood. I’ve seen him cry three times. The first time was when I was very small, and we found out his older sister died of cancer. He loosened his tie while he sat in this chair in our apartment, put his hands in front of his face, and let out a sob that I can’t ever forget. The second time was when he left for New York for six months to work as a line chef at a holistic institute, in the time between his career change (I was about 12). The third time was when I left for college. When I think about my father, the things I hear about him, and the way that I know him, I only think of that first time I saw him cry. In a suit, failing to resist vulnerability. My father has a biting quiet temper (which appears at any time - my relationship with my father depends on my ability to consistently walk on eggshells) that is garnished by the context he grew up in: where man was patriarch, and where, at the end of the day, his wife still owes him something.

There have been five straight men in my life - three white and two men of color - who have at some point in our relationships or friendships - revealed the fears, failings, and vulnerabilities that were embedded inside them, amidst years of gender socialization. (Don’t cry. Be strong. Be a man. Don’t be weak. And never fail anyone ever.) Some of these conversations happened over a period of time, and developed because we were in a relationship, we had become close, and because I could not stand never knowing what was wrong. Other conversations were not conversations at all - they were ephemeral confessions that probably held more meaning to me that they did to them. I am not friends with the three white men anymore. The first joined the marines. The second I pushed away upon realizing the extent of our verbally abusive relationship. The third - we never were friends to begin with. Both men of color have stayed in my life, for very different circumstances that are irrelevant right now. All of them, at some point, have thanked me for being able to share something about themselves. Everytime that happens, I cry.

I cry because I’m angry that men continue to come to their token woman of color friend because they can’t explain why, but she listens the best. Because despite feeling greatful, they continue to disrespect and take advantage of me. Because they are afraid that their significant others will get to know this “side” of them.

But mostly it’s because I think of my father and my mother’s father. Men who are never going to open up. Because they can’t - for different reasons - but because they hear the voices in their heads that tell them to be men. To never talk about how they are doing. To never admit to themselves how they are doing. To never let people get too close to them. I cry because I have to accept that there are whole histories there that I might never get to hear about - because it’s not ok for them to talk about trauma and pain and the past.

And also I’m scared that I might become like that. Because it’s the only way to “make it in this world”.