Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  With me, he was a “you can do anything you set your mind to” dad, bragging about my grades and engaging me in political discussions and debate from an early age. He was, by any measure, a man who loved being a dad and an active parent. He told me he loved me all the time; his affection came easily. I felt safe inside of our relationship, appreciated and praised for my intellectual capabilities, challenged and supported in my academic and extracurricular pursuits. But my appearance was always the sticking point; in addition to hair, my weight was a concern. He never outright shamed or degraded me but dropped a lot of thinly veiled comments about whether I’d exercised on a given day or whether I “needed” to have dessert. I know that health and genetics were at least partial reasons for these remarks—my father had type 2 diabetes and underwent triple bypass surgery when I was a freshman in high school—but nevertheless I hated them. I did not see myself as beautiful, and this occurred like a personal failure; nothing from the outside world seemed to reflect a sense of that beauty back. In the very white company I kept, I felt freakishly other, and not in an interesting, exotic kind of way. In my Indian immigrant extended family, I was known as the smart one—smart, but not particularly pretty. I was proud of being smart, but I also wanted to be seen as beautiful, wanted others to see me in a way I could not see myself. Instinctively, though, I knew that I should not betray this desire, knew that it was shameful to want this. Though beauty clearly came with its advantages, the language of it’s what’s on the inside that counts was all around me. I never stopped longing for the kind of attention I thought being beautiful would attract, but, pragmatically, I knew that smart was my wheelhouse, the realm inside which I was most likely to receive praise, so I focused on that.

  * * *

  Around the time I got my driver’s license, I chopped off all my hair. Having worn it shoulder length or longer throughout middle and early high school, and having had various levels of success with my frizzy curls, I found a pixie cut daring and freeing. It was an aspirational haircut, a style that belonged to the kind of person I wanted to be: bold, sassy, fun. I undertook this change in style around the same time that I developed my first really close friends, people who “got” me, around whom I felt comfortable being myself. In them, I found a group of people who gave me permission to be weird (it didn’t take much in my relatively homogeneous high school environment), and my haircut was a way of signifying and celebrating that difference. To wear my hair short was to reject a certain kind of adolescent femininity and, consciously or not, also a way to give the middle finger to my father’s beauty standards, standards that weren’t just his but also reinforced by every American magazine and Bollywood movie I ever saw.

  My father wasn’t just the main man in my life; he was essentially the only man. In addition to an extended family network full of daughters, I attended an all-girls’ school from grades one through twelve; only one of my close friends had a brother. I didn’t spend much time around boys until my friends started dating them in high school, and I didn’t make a close male friend of my own until college. I felt wary around boys. It seemed like I needed to be someone other than myself in order to relate to men, or in order for them to be interested in me.

  I went through several unrequited crushes on boys who were all older than me (a trend that would continue into adulthood) before I became conscious of my attraction to women. I came of age in an environment where female affection, including displays of it, fell under the umbrella of “normal,” so I may well have had earlier crushes that went unidentified. There’s also a chance that I resisted the pull of female attraction because, once I gave in to it, I felt like a cliché: the girl who hadn’t had any luck with boys who then wound up liking girls. I didn’t believe in cheap causality, but I worried that other people would.

  In the moment I realized I was falling for the girl my best friend was dating (yes, I know, it was not ideal), I was stunned. I was the straight one in my group of friends; we even joked about it. Being queer—I wouldn’t have used that term back then, though it would have been handy, since calling yourself “bisexual” meant no one took you seriously—was not a possibility I’d considered for myself.

  I never stopped liking boys, but dating a girl, as I did my senior year of high school, freed me from the awkwardness I had previously felt with men. I no longer felt the need to attract their interest or earn their approval; I wasn’t so worried what they thought of me, whether they saw me as pretty or wanted to kiss me. I didn’t need them anymore, so I was finally able to enjoy hanging out with them.

  Coming out may have improved my relationships with guys, but it was fairly detrimental to my relationship with the one man who mattered most: my father. When I came out, it seemed to validate the fear behind his complaints about my hair and also his belief that my sexuality was a choice, one that I was making deliberately to inflict harm upon my parents—first-generation rebellion gone extreme. Was my short hair really the first step in coming out? Should we blame my twelve years at an all-girls’ school? I was choosing a different life from what he had envisioned for me, one that seemed a direct rejection of the values and beliefs he and my mom had assumed I would adopt as a matter of course.

  * * *

  I never had a sit-down-on-the-couch, planned-and-deliberate coming-out conversation with my parents. Instead, I kept my relationship with my high school girlfriend a secret for the first few months. I was afraid, not only of what my parents would say but also that telling them would spoil the newness and joy of my first time falling in love. Instead, I relished coming out to classmates, teachers, and friends, nearly all of whom responded with the joy and affirmation I craved. But since I’ve never been able to hide things from my mother for very long, eventually she realized that I was keeping something from her.

  What was hardest for her, strangely, was the fact that she hadn’t seen it coming. She has long prided herself on her “sixth sense,” especially as it related to me, so she felt thrown for a loop that something was taking place that she’d never even imagined as a possibility. She’d thought my strange behavior and behind-closed-doors phone calls were about drugs. When I told her I was “just” kissing a girl, I asked, surely that was preferable to smoking pot? Apparently not.

  For as long as I could remember, my mother was my confidante, my coach, and my toughest critic. Her own mother died when she was a toddler, and she despised the stepmother who’d taken my grandmother’s place; as a result, she made it a point to develop closeness and trust with me, sometimes at the expense of closeness and trust in her own marriage. While she was not thrilled about my dating a girl, she was willing to wait it out, to hold off on issuing a definitive response, convinced that this was “an American thing” and hopefully just a phase. For this reason, she urged me, conspiratorially, to refrain from coming out to my father. We would keep it between us—no sense in creating drama if it wasn’t going to be an issue in the long-term.

  Looking back, I know I should have rejected this power play, should have hashed things out with my father sooner. Of course, what I didn’t know was that he would live for only five years past my high school graduation; my time with him was limited. Not knowing this made it easier to move away from him, to convince myself that the distance was a normal part of growing up, to feel thrilled by the secret keeping and sense of independence it brought me. I spent a lot of my senior year apart from my parents, driving from school to friends’ houses or to my girlfriend’s apartment, feeling freer and more capable than I ever had, popular and interesting and under the impression that this was essentially what adulthood felt like.

  Though she was the one who had insisted we not tell him, my mom wound up outing me to my dad in February of my senior year. She and I were in the middle of some kind of fight—about what, I have no memory—and my father came to my defense, which was not uncommon. My mom and I clashed regularly in my teenage years: I exerting, she pulling back, my dad mediating. In this instance, his defense of me sent my mom over the
edge, and she countered by revealing the piece of information she’d been hiding, a piece of information clearly intended to discredit me and upset him: I was dating a girl.

  After confirming this information with me and processing his initial shock, my dad’s first tactic was to sit me down in the living room for a serious talk, his default first tactic. Serious talks, when they happened in our house, took place in the living room. The only other things we used that room for were piano practice (me), Saturday morning newspaper reading (my dad), and taking pictures of family dressed up for some kind of occasion.

  I think my father thought he could talk me out of being gay—at least, he tried. He seemed to believe that if he simply explained to me the hardship and difficulty I was causing my parents, the ungratefulness that my “choice” demonstrated, then I would stop dating my girlfriend, or at least agree not to date any more girls after this one. When I refused, he stopped speaking to me for three months.

  I met his anger, withdrawal, and indignation with my own. There are few creatures more righteous than I was as an eighteen-year-old; my father’s desire to raise a strong, independent woman with convictions came with unintended consequences. I didn’t even bother to try to persuade him. I’m not sure if I thought he would come around eventually or if I was simply protesting on principle. The bond that had long existed between us broke.

  Things were tense in my house for the first time in my life. During the last few months of my senior year, as I received college acceptances and won awards at graduation and made plans to accept a merit scholarship offer to attend Rice University in the fall, I grew more accustomed to seeking affirmation and community outside of the world my parents had built for me. I still loved my nuclear family, as well as the extended Indian community I’d grown up in, but I had begun to see its limits. I started to conceptualize myself outside of and apart from my native environment.

  * * *

  Overall, my coming-out experience was fairly mild; I wasn’t kicked out of my house, I wasn’t cut off financially, I didn’t face any violence, nearly all my friends and teachers were supportive (at least in theory). The break with my father, though, was painful. His coldness felt like the worst kind of betrayal. Maybe his love was unconditional, but it didn’t seem like it. To make matters worse, I dated a guy during my first semester of college. He was the first guy I’d ever had a crush on who liked me back, which perhaps had something to do with the moxie I’d gained as a woman with some relationship experience. We dated for a few months, my one and only heterosexual romantic relationship. Short-lived as the relationship was, it lasted long enough for my parents to get their hopes up; they met him over Parents’ Weekend and were smitten.

  I, on the other hand, was not. By Thanksgiving, it was clear to me that my boyfriend was more emotionally invested in the relationship than I was. He was talking about someday-babies while I was still stuck on my ex-girlfriend. After winter break I broke it off, and a few days later I shaved my head. I know, it seems like another terrible cliché. But the act was not wrapped up in any man-eschewing, radical lesbian sentiment; my partner in crime in this adventure was my best friend and roommate, Rebecca, who is straight. The head shaving was her idea.

  In college, Rebecca was much less of a conformist than I was—even before shaving her head, she was often misread as a lesbian, thanks to all of the stereotypical boxes she checked: lack of makeup, almost exclusive preference for pants, familiarity with tools, cars, motorcycles, and construction. She’d already shaved her head once before, and it was her boldness that inspired me to shave my head along with her, to see if I had the guts to go through with it. I did.

  The whole thing was like a double-dog dare to myself: Let’s see if you can be as ballsy as you want to be. Let’s see if you can let go of what other people think long enough to see what could be possible when you do. What I didn’t anticipate, and what was perhaps even more emboldening and useful, was what it meant to deal with everyone else’s reactions to my hair (or lack thereof). Some people—almost always men—would come right out and ask, searching for a narrative that made sense to them. Were Rebecca and I cancer patients in recovery? Had we shaved our heads in solidarity with a cancer patient? Were we joining the military? The idea that we’d shaved our heads simply because we wanted to, because we wanted to see what would happen if we did, boggled a lot of minds. My parents were likewise flummoxed, though they took it more in stride than I’d anticipated. They thought I was nuts, but they weren’t angry; head shaving confirmed the theory, perhaps, that I was in a phase of experimentation that was not destined to last.

  For me, a shaved head served as a kind of litmus test. At a time in my life when I was examining old friendships, sorting through which ones would last and which ones might not, people’s responses to my hair were helpful data. Likewise, as I worked to create new relationships at Rice, I was able to determine quickly who cared about what. But there is perhaps nothing more significant about shaving my head at nineteen than the fact that I met Jill not long after I did it. When I showed up as a student in the Intro to Comparative Religions survey course that she team taught, she thought I might be a Buddhist nun; I thought she might be the single most charismatic person I had ever met. I fell in love with her quickly, though it took me a while to realize that’s what it was. Jill and I both had the matrix of “teacher crush” in mind until it became clear that our connection was in a category by itself. By the end of my freshman year of college, I knew that Jill—nineteen years older than me and, whoops, also my professor, and, double whoops, already in a relationship—would be my forever person, even though I had no idea what that would look like. I also had no idea how to tell my parents.

  It was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to be marrying any men, so it seemed necessary to disabuse my parents of the notion that I might, lest they become too hopeful that my sexuality was “just a phase” after all. Leaving out any mention of Jill, I came out to my parents a second time, in what was surely the world’s most ill-advised phone call, the I’m gay for REAL conversation. Needless to say, it did not go well.

  Throughout the rest of my time at Rice, my relationship with Jill solidified as her previous relationship ended, but it still remained a secret from my parents. They did not know that I alternated between backyard dinners at her suburban home (now our suburban home) and late-night library sessions and parties on campus. Jill and I began to introduce both sets of our friends to the idea of us as a couple, and we were met with some skepticism but also a fair amount of support. When I traveled with her to Shreveport to meet her parents, I was introduced as a “friend.” When my own parents came to visit Houston, I introduced Jill as the same. Once, she and I traveled to Memphis without my parents knowing we were there, staying at a Hampton Inn five miles from the house I grew up in. Sitting in that hotel room, drinking Jack Daniel’s Country Cocktails with my friends Wayne and Caroline, who were meeting Jill for the first time, I felt a lot farther away than five miles from my parents.

  * * *

  By the time I graduated from college, I’d had enough separation—literal and emotional—from my parents to commit to rebuilding my relationship with them. So when my father requested that I grow out my hair in advance of a trip to India, I was more open to considering the request, which I might have previously dismissed out of hand. He must have known that, too; our relationship had been strained for nearly five years. On some level, I was a twenty-two-year-old who missed her dad, missed the magic of being Daddy’s little girl, missed living in the era before I had disappointed him so thoroughly.

  That was the allure of his request—if I agreed, I would be doing something for him—perhaps paving a path back into his good graces. Fully committed to Jill, I knew my relationship wasn’t going to change; my hair, though, was up for grabs. I’d become more confident in my identity, and my hair didn’t necessarily need to serve as any kind of statement. So I stopped cutting it, and by the time our trip to India rolled around, I had managed t
o get it to chin length.

  There was something powerful about spending three weeks in India and being surrounded by both media advertising and real-life images of women who looked like me. They were beautiful in a way that did not seem so completely separate from me; they were the kind of women that my father, with his long-hair obsession, had wanted me to resemble all along. I understood for the first time what he saw, or wanted to see—I understood the appeal. In a strange twist of perspective, I found myself drawn to the idea of being that archetype, the curvy Indian girl with long, enviable hair. She felt achievable. She felt like me.

  Less than two months after we returned from India, my father died, from a by then untreatable pulmonary fibrosis, which was discovered on the Fourth of July. He was hospitalized, seemingly out of nowhere, and once admitted, he never left. He died on July 22, 2006. In a turn of dramatic irony, after my father’s death, my hair started to fall out. This is a common enough response to acute stress, but it didn’t seem coincidental to me. In most cultures, hair is shorn as a sign of mourning, but that was the opposite of what my father would have wanted. So I grew it long instead, past my shoulders and down my back, relishing the knowledge that I was doing something my dad would have liked. There is so much uncertainty in grief, so many questions about the proper response to something so awful; keeping my hair long was one way to concretely mark myself as fundamentally altered by my father’s death. Plus the work of it—caring for it, spending time and money and energy on it—gave me, in my sadness, something to do.