After drinking at a house party in Gainesville we got naked in bed. Even with the kissing and rubbing, her moaning and Reiki, I remained as flaccid as an earlobe. She cried and cried. This had never happened to her. The next morning when we woke up slightly more sober she made me climb on my roof and shout, I’m gay! I did this to make her feel better about my not being able to fuck her the night before. Shouting this from anywhere only made her happy. I didn’t care who knew what about me anymore, broken by my family’s betrayal. She was another person who had expectations of me that I could not fulfill. One more way that I didn’t fit: the square peg in a sea of circular holes.
At the interview with Whole Foods the manager asked me what my life plans were, as though Whole Foods would require everything that I could possibly give. Most of the people who worked the front end were artist-adjacent or musicians.
“I don’t see myself being here longer than a year,” I replied, quite content with myself. Maybe this was to protect my viscera.
At the customer service desk the liberal white Central Florida crowd gathered like ants to sugar. Well-meaning white women and men routinely asked me my opinions on the frozen Indian food that was sold.
“I don’t know,” I would say and shrug, and sometimes, “Yes, it’s way better than the restaurant at UC7.” I didn’t know. I didn’t care either. This is how I acted in the face of Floridian whiteness. I decided then that I was not going to be anyone’s authenticator—especially not at Whole Foods. From my cash register, selling expensive groceries grown with organic processes by people in the Global South, I could see the image that Whole Foods used to market itself: a faceless brown body gripping a hoe and working the fields. Could the workers depicted in such gross images afford five-dollar bottled coconut water? I definitely could not.
I imagined my own great grandparents and the punishment that they suffered for white people. They worked the fields and ate little and drank much to escape the horrors of servitude. The Empire saw them as faceless, disposable, worthless except for what they could do for global capital. And here I was, working under a crass image of someone else’s indentureship to an American company. The humiliation of this resounded in the customers’ treatment of a brown cashier.
What did this mean for my brown body when white customers would look at my bangles and ask, “Were these your slave shackles?”
What did it mean for the managers to side with the middle-aged white gay man who insisted to me that “all Muslims are terrorists,” and that his “saying this is not racist?” I was told not to make a big deal about this, that I don’t really know what racism is or what it feels like.
What did it mean when a white customer would tell me, “Go back where you come from,” as I rang their groceries up and accepted their cash with a smile, since talking back would cost me my job?
What did it mean that all of these statements of white entitlement aggressively indicated that I did not belong here in the United States—or that I did not belong in Orlando?
It meant that it was time to drink through the bullshit of living in a brown body as an adult in Central Florida. And drink I did.
There were several people in the store I liked to party with: Sandra and her husband George—a semidomesticated couple. Ricky and Maddy, his girlfriend. And Nikki, a woman several years younger than me with a love of poetry and writing. IBar, or Independent Bar, was a club downtown that played music from independent labels. And of course, there were house parties.
On New Year’s Eve Autumn and Andrei came to Orlando from Gainesville. Andrei was back from China where he had been teaching ESL. They showed up at Whole Foods and took me to Sarasota in a friendly version of kidnapping.
We spent the night on the beach listening to folk music and reminiscing about what life was like. I remembered that I was a person who had a past. And just how beautiful Florida could be. I recounted the story of Chief Osceola and how it was rumored that his skull was sold after his decapitation—to add insult to the People of this land—to a dentist somewhere in the Midwest, according to a Linda Hogan poem. How Indians in the United States were called Indians because Europeans were idiots and thought they were in India. Even the name India is fatuous, given to people of the subcontinent by traders and marauders because they lived close to the river Indus. We were named by Europeans for the same river. Indians.
The morning was cool and balmy. Salt hovered over the surface of the aqua deep. Sargasso perfumed the fine sugar-powdery sand as tiny crabs scurried along, busy with their morning mantras. The oceans all connect, my Aji said—the Ganga, the Jamuna, the Pagal Samundar, all were the Kalapani. The black water that baptized us with contracts of indenture and would forever change our stories. That black water that galvanized us into people whose survival was resistance to Empire. That black water that was the sea of milk, Shesha being the SS Bern and SS Jura that carried my ancestors across, into adventure and punishment.
The yellow light began as orange and then pink until it reached its soft gold fingers across my skin. The ocean rolled slowly and hissed on the sand as its drops fell below the visible. Tiny coquinas burrowed deep into the wet. Sand lice shifted and scurried. Pelicans flew low on the horizon. The beach was a kind of temple—the deity: the sea. It was time for my own crossing, something more permanent.
As Autumn’s sibling, Astrid, and I walked along the beach, we found a seagull skull that I picked up and offered to the rising sun. So many beings here have lived and thrived, migrated and passed. Even the water that cycles from ocean to vapor to cloud to rain to ocean. I was a part of this motion. With three scoops of water I remembered my father, my mother, and my Aji. And the words she taught me to say. I turned them inward to the sun rising in my chest. How it began to burn brighter.
I wished to feel whole. I wished to escape into motion. I wished the dawn waves would come and ferry me to a place where every day was not a struggle to be visible, to be happy in my skin.
Down the street from the store Ricky lived with two roommates. He invited me over, and I came and tried to erase myself in spirits and rum. I remember leaving the party to sleep in my car—waking up to vomit onto the curb, and then falling back asleep until I was sober enough to buy some overpriced coconut water with what change I could muster from my Corolla’s console.
After trailing my liquor stink into my parents’ house and showering I opened my computer and began to fill out the application for the NYC Teaching Fellows program. They wanted essays upon essays. I had to figure out why I wanted to teach ESL in New York City. The answer was not so hard. I wanted to undo the damage that English had done on my family—the cultural erasure that it perpetrated, the turning us into “stupid Coolies.” I wanted to be kind in the ways that I helped families and students navigate a system that was stacked against them.
As I submitted the application in the morning, my mother saw me at work. She made me a cup of tea and a piece of toast with jam and cheese. There were perks to living in my family home again.
Pap had been up for hours and turned back when he saw me working. I was in his way, a reminder of his failures as a father: raising an upstart antiman. I was out and into being out. I was vocal about homophobia and racism and the things that made my life difficult. He wanted as little to do with me as possible.
We were happy to avoid each other. He told me constantly how disappointed he was in me but would brag on the phone to whichever of his women from “back home” he was talking to, saying, “My son speaks Hindi.” For him, this was something he loved about me and hated. He loved my connection with my Aji—his mother. He hated the parts of himself that were brown. It was a complicated situation to be brown and an immigrant in Klan country. I didn’t know how to forgive him yet for this complete disavowal of me except when it benefitted him.
“What are you doing today?” my mother asked, hungry to hear about my plans.
“I’m trying to escape this racist cesspool,” I said forcefully. Her eyes widened. I didn’t fe
el like pulling any punches. I was motivated to leave the confederate flags, the regularized homophobia, the unbearable, dehumanizing whiteness. I had on many occasions spoken to my mother about the everyday racism that I faced. She would look at me and sigh.
“The United States is not as racial as England.” Her standard answer.
She had been traumatized by the British versions of the “rebel” who wore skinny Wranglers and who believed that “fags burn in hell.” She needed to believe that she was in a better place now, that we were safe from the ills that she faced: being pelted with stones and spat on as she walked through London during the reign of Enoch Powell. Here, though, the threats I faced were different. I was a man in a man’s body. At least in the United Kingdom Mom belonged to a brown community. Here in the Chuluota and Oviedo areas, there were only a few other brown families I knew who sent their kids to my school. There was only one Guyanese family, and they did not live close by. It was easier for my mother to believe that racism did not threaten the lives of her children here in this forest far away from the English National Front. If only she or Pap would have looked into the history of the American South and the demographics of Chuluota and realized what they were doing.
“Tonight,” I replied to my mother’s eager look, “I’m going out with Emily and Ronnel to a party.”
Another one of the benefits of living at home was that I got to know my little sister as an adult. Emily’s hair was fine and slack with curls. In the light it shone brown instead of the black of my own hair. Her face and voice were my face and voice—her register a little higher, her nose a lot smaller. She stood up to my chin and taught me how to drink rum and Coke instead of the cheap Pabst Blue Ribbons and Sparks that I guzzled before entering the club. Every time I mentioned working at Whole Foods she would roll her eyes.
“The people there act like it’s the best place on Earth to work and that you have to be a supercool smelly white person with unwashed hair to get in. Like the people there literally stink,” she laughed. “It makes sense they drink that piss Blue Ribbon, it’s fucking nasty! You should drink things that taste good,” she admonished. Rum and Coke was the Guyanese drink.
That night I took Emily and Ronnel, her childhood best friend, to a party as the designated driver. Ronnel was tall and had a beautiful singing voice; we had been in choir together in high school for the one year we overlapped. We both sang tenor one and were both queers. Being three years older than them, I felt like it was an important way for me to show my sister that I approved of her life. I wanted to learn how she was able to cope with living in this place. We blared a mix of Destiny’s Child and Alicia Keys on our drive across dark-brewed rivers and live oak forests.
When we arrived at the subdivision, the yellow lights from the street gave the buildings a sallow glow. Our shadows elongated as we walked up the stairs.
We discovered that the host of this party was under the legal age to buy alcohol. I grew uneasy, not wanting anything to botch my application to become a NYC Teaching Fellow.
Emily and I stood outside while Ronnel ran inside to begin his smoke and drink. After a couple of minutes Emily and I decided it was time to leave. “Let’s go to Denny’s,” she said as a consolation.
As Emily braved the inside of the kegger to get Ronnel from the din of bad college music, an undercover police officer approached and demanded that everyone leave at once. He was white and pale, his skin almost translucent. Did he have a gun? I wondered.
I waited for my charges at the bottom of the stairs. That same officer in street clothes came up to me and told me, “Leave right now.” The parking lot was abuzz with opening and shutting car doors—a night serenade of Top 40 centos, as the music from each car blared and then stifled.
“I am waiting for my sister and her friend to come out. I’m the D.D.,” I said.
He repeated, “I said leave NOW.”
Emily approached without her friend. As she came, I said to her, “Let’s wait by the car, this rent-a-cop needs to flex his muscles.”
The officer turned ruddy white. Clearly in his feelings he said, “You in the red shirt, come here. What did you call me?”
“I was talking to my sister.” My voice was flat.
“What is your social security number?”
“What? I’m not giving you my social security number.”
“Okay, then give me your license.”
“It’s in the car.” I tossed my keys to Emily and said to her, “License mere jhole mein rakhi hain. Is suwar ko dene ke liye le aana.”
She approached with my bag and as she gave it to me the policeman looked at her and said, “Drop it. Don’t step any closer to him.” Was he touching his pocket when he looked at Emily?
“But you asked him for his license. It’s in the bag!” she said as she placed it on the ground.
The officer looked at me and then at her and then back at me. “I am going to ask you one more time, what is your social?”
“I thought you wanted my license.” I was genuinely confused. It didn’t seem like he knew what he was doing.
At this time seven white police officers crowded us and started taunting me by saying things like, “You can’t just walk around with a beard speaking Arabic and not expect us to question you. You fucking hear what he is saying? Do you speak English? Just give him your social security number, you fucking idiot, or we will arrest you.”
White faces blended together with white faces. How many were there now? Eight? Why were they all screaming at me? I was being responsible here—driving people home who had no business driving themselves.
“What are you trying to arrest me for, exactly? Why are you swearing at me when I am speaking rationally to you, explaining why what you are saying is contradictory and confusing? It would be miraculous if I just started speaking in Arabic.”
Their German shepherds barked and pulled at their leashes and the policemen tried and tried to provoke me into an argument so they could subdue me. Our shadows, lengthening and then fading as more and more red and blue lights gathered, stretched out before us on the cement.
They were all white, of course. How many of them were secretly part of the Klan? A friend in high school, just around the corner, confided that he knew of Klan members in the school, in the district, and on the police force. Police FORCE, I thought—the right wing of the vulture of racism. Of pickup trucks and Go back and starve in your shithole slogans. These were the “protectors.” Better than what was in England? I didn’t know. I had to get the hell out of Central Florida. It was not a place for me.
I finally gave up my driver’s license and the rent-a-cop issued a trespassing warrant against me on any University of Central Florida properties. I looked at the officer, into his cool pale eyes—the eyes of a demon. I wanted to remember as much as I could about this moment. I noted his name in the journal I kept in my bag. Jenkins.
“This isn’t over,” I called back over my shoulder, Ronnel and Emily now safe in my car.
The drive home was uneventful. No music. Just the black of night and the occasional yellow streetlights.
“I need to get the fuck out of here, Emily,” I said.
Looking out of the window at the rushing scrubland she answered a simple, “I know.”
The next morning I called the Oviedo Police Department to file a complaint. The person who answered asked what the matter was. I explained last night’s harassment and that I was a victim of racism and racist profiling.
The officer on the other end laughed. “I assure you none of us are racist here.” I asked to speak to his boss, who was conveniently absent that day.
I wrote a letter to send to the precinct and to a community organization that tried to target institutional racism, but after four days, as I was driving along the highway with Emily to Whole Foods, where she had just begun working with me, we heard on the news that an officer in plain street clothes had been shot and killed by a uniformed officer on a UCF property. He pulled a gun and a passing
uniformed officer saw it as a threat and shot the undercover officer before he had a chance to explain his situation. The dead officer was named Jenkins.
We looked at each other. I remember him touching his pocket when Emily came close with my bag. I’d been in more danger than I knew. And I’d put my little sister in front of a charging bull.
In a matter of days, I opened my email to read that my application status to join the Teaching Fellows had changed. I was invited to both Oakland and New York City to interview. Could I actually break free from this town without Central Florida chasing me out like a ghost or wildfire?
New York was first: a three-day event during which I stayed with Jegga in her mom’s house in Little Guyana. The first day consisted of a timed writing exercise. The second day was a sample lesson delivered to a class of interviewees and two evaluators. The third day was the panel interview with two New York City teachers.
I wrote my essays at a classroom desk in Midtown. Above me hung a student project on Hindu deities and the goddess Saraswati—goddess of learning, of language, of music—showered her blessings on my paper. I recalled Aji’s song: Utho bahini bidya pardho …
My lesson on count nouns versus noncount nouns was directed at an ESL student body. I highlighted vocabulary words that they’d need and led them in a guided exercise.
In the panel interview, two older white women asked me high-pressure questions. One asked me about gender and what I thought about “girls” using the “boys’” bathrooms. I replied something about gender being up to the individual. She furiously wrote notes and laughed, “Well, I guess in the Village anything goes!” Was this supposed to unsettle me?
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