The dead can have even more power over us than the living. When my father was alive, defying his preference by keeping my hair short was part of our dynamic, problematic though it sometimes was. But grief renders relationships one-sided and fogged by memory. Growing my hair long was a way of staying tethered to my father. After six-plus years of keeping it that way, I no longer knew whether it mattered, whether it honored him or was keeping me from letting go.
I wound up saying goodbye to long hair a few months after my son was born—with a tiny, nursing newborn and a full-time job, I was interested in making my life less complicated. Donating ten inches of hair, I reverted to the low-maintenance (and baby-proof) pixieish cut of my late teens and early twenties. The pragmatism of the decision helped assuage the guilt I had over my father’s hypothetical reaction. Was I the betrayer now? Ultimately, I managed to convince myself that my father would have been so pleased at having a grandchild that he would not have been the least bit bothered by my hair: such is the imaginative calculus of self-justification.
I shaved my head for the second time the summer Shiv turned three. He cheered me on as I guided the clippers over my head. “Mama, you ain’t got no hair! We match!” At the time we were keeping his short, too, due to a proclivity to roll around in the sandbox at school.
When you are a woman in your early thirties who shaves her head for no apparent reason—well, people want there to be a reason. As was the case when I had shaved my head a decade before, no matter the reason behind it, a shaved head invites speculation about who you are, whom you love, what your “agenda” might be. This is not without consequences. Having a shaved head moves you outside the conventional definition of what an “attractive woman” looks like, which means I get flirted with a lot less. I am a big flirt, so this is a bummer; men just don’t look at me the same way without hair. In fact, most of the men in my life initially responded to my shaved head with humor, the kind that’s usually masking discomfort or a sense of not knowing what else to say. They don’t seem to understand why a woman would want to cut off her hair voluntarily, without some really compelling reason, as if wanting to weren’t reason enough. It reminds me of how straight people sometimes react when they learn that, technically, I consider myself bisexual; I am attracted to women, yes, but I am also attracted to men. I don’t actually consider myself “born-this-way” gay, but that narrative seems much more palatable to much of society. After all, if I had a choice, why wouldn’t I have chosen their kind of life? If I could have had a man, why did I choose a woman?
On the flip side, I’ve never gotten so many compliments from women in my life. Not in a flirtatious way, though; the vast majority of the women I hear from are ones I read as straight (my gaydar is pretty good). Oh, I love your hair, they’ll gush: in the bathroom at the gym, in the aisle at the grocery store, in line to check out at a hotel. They call my hairstyle “brave,” express envy at how easy it must be to take care of. It looks so good on you, they’ll say. I wish I could get away with having hair that short.
I try to tell them that they can and that they should; I spend so much less time thinking about and dealing with my hair. It. Is. Glorious. But it’s also a reminder of the strict boundaries women have about how they look and whether they fit into a general standard of what’s considered attractive by white, heterosexual society. My hairstyle is an attempt to feel free from, or at least partially removed from, these stereotypes, like a matrix from which I can unhook myself. Of course, the jig is that, even as a queer woman, there is no unhooking, not really. I remember looking at myself in the mirror about a year ago and thinking, You look like a big ole dyke, which is, for all intents and purposes, kind of what I am. But it throws me a little, the knowledge that I present that way. I feel like the same person inside; in fact, I’m more confident and happy in myself than I’ve ever been. And yet I still want that external validation.
Which is why I haven’t grown my hair back out yet. For one thing, it sounds like way too much trouble—I’d need a lot of convincing to add more time onto my morning routine and more money into my personal grooming budget. Pragmatics aside, I want to test myself a little longer. My students tell me my shaved head makes me look intimidating, like I don’t give a shit, and I tell them that was the whole idea. I have never thought of myself as being particularly badass, but my haircut makes me look like I am, and in moments, I feel like it, too. I’m living into my hair, or the version of me that goes with it.
Wrestling with Ghosts
Being the first-generation daughter of Indian immigrants means that I have learned to avoid Urban Outfitters, the clothing and tchotchke bazaar for twenty-somethings, because there’s inevitably going to be an image of something I find sacred being hawked to college students without so much as a caption to acknowledge the appropriation: Shiva on a pillow, Ganesh on a wall hanging. It means I have learned that most yoga studios are, ironically, hostile places for brown people, because of the butchery and false interpretations of a practice that, for me, is rooted in Hinduism and not about looking good in lululemon pants. I have likewise learned that anything associated with India, especially food, is going to be described, inevitably, as “exotic” and probably also sexualized, as if spices could somehow be “sultry.” I have long since given up on explaining that the complicated religious concept of karma can’t actually be reduced to “what goes around comes around.” I have watched the food media act as if they’re the first people in the world to discover cardamom, when I’ve been putting it in my tea since childhood. I have felt intense guilt when white people have seemingly more claim to my culture than I do, with their knowledge of Sanskrit and Ayurvedic medicine. I have discovered that being first-gen feels like living on a seesaw, constantly going back and forth.
Most other first-gen kids I meet feel the same way—I use the term “kids” even when referring to adults here, because a key aspect of the first-gen experience is constantly defining yourself in relation to your parents. Arguably that’s true for everyone, but I think when your parents are mirrors of the dominant culture, it’s easy to misjudge or altogether miss just how pervasive their parental influence is, even on decisions and choices that have seemingly nothing to do with them. For first-generation kids, though, it’s pretty obvious what was passed down from our parents, what we rejected from our parents, and what we simply absorbed from the dominant culture.
There is a certain amount of recognition among first-gen kids, even if our families are from wildly different places; our experiences, values, histories, and stories tend to have several strands in common. If you’re first-gen, you know what it’s like to be a kid trying to navigate a culture without any help from your parents, because they grew up somewhere else. You’ve experienced the stumbling, vacillating back-and-forth urges between conformity and rebellion, in response both to the dominant culture and to your parents’ culture. You’ve felt annoyed by strangers who ask, “What are you?” or by romantic partners who exoticize and fetishize you or teachers who want you to serve as a representative for an entire culture, country, or religion to the rest of the class.
* * *
Until my mid-twenties, a bindi was something I wore only on “Indian” occasions—that is, any occasion that called for wearing Indian clothes. When I was a kid, this consisted of religious holidays or trips to the temple, gatherings of our extended family, weddings, that kind of thing; very rarely did I wear my Indian clothes out into the white world. The clothes and their accompanying bindi were like a costume of sorts, one that I put on when it was time to occupy the Indian part of myself. In a sense, a bindi is an apt metaphor for my relationship to my Indianness, something I kept putting on and taking off, something that made me feel simultaneously embarrassed and also proud.
Growing up, I was always so glad that my mom was not one of those sari-clad Indian moms at parent-teacher conferences or in the grocery store. I had friends with moms like that, and I felt bad for them. My mom was a liberated Western woman with two
master’s degrees and a job outside the house. She wore pants, but she also woke up early each morning to perform puja in the prayer room in our home, down the hall from my room. I would often wake to hear her chanting in Sanskrit, occasionally joining her to kneel in front of images of Ganesh, Shiva, Durga, and others, accompanying her as she sang the aarti (hymn/prayer). She fasted on Hindu holidays, waking up extra early to prepare special foods and iron the Indian clothes we would wear later in the day, after we’d been to school and work. Having lived in America since she was twenty-one, she navigated all kinds of cultural details seamlessly, in a way that I found dazzling. Her depth and breadth of knowledge, especially as it related to food, was something I always aspired to have myself. Not only does she make homemade yogurt, using a culture she smuggled from India, but she also makes killer shrimp creole, dosas, and spaghetti sauce. She taught me how to make a mirepoix around the same time she showed me the proper way to start a vagar. In the kitchen, my mother modeled how I might occupy multiple cultural spaces at once.
Though I’m not sure I did it consciously, I followed her lead when it came to balancing the different parts of my identity—neither sentimental about nor ashamed of my Indianness, but also careful not to let it be the dominant feature by which I was known. After all, my mother was the one who decided when I was born not to speak Hindi to me, afraid that I would then grow up speaking English with an accent and face the same judgment and discrimination she and my father had. Though she, like almost everyone who grows up in India, is multilingual—English, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu—she opted to raise a monolingual child.
I have deep shame about not speaking Hindi. This is primarily an adult feeling; as a kid, I was content to understand the basics: colors, animals, foods, how to write my name. In a sense, I understood my experience as inevitable; in the group of Indian families who formed our extended family, there were several other kids who didn’t speak their parents’ languages either. The ones who did had learned by necessity via grandparents who came to stay for extended periods of time, grandparents who didn’t speak any English. But I didn’t have any grandparents in my life—both of my father’s parents had died by the time I turned five, and my mother is essentially estranged from her father and stepmother. By the time I wished that my parents had chosen differently with regard to my language, I was already a teenager, way past the window for sounding like a native speaker. What’s more, my parents were so accustomed to speaking in English, even to each other, that asking them to switch to Hindi didn’t really work. There was no chance of taking Hindi at my high school, though I did try in college, but to be honest, I didn’t push very hard to locate resources that might help remedy my linguistic lack.
The older I got, the more that “not speaking Hindi” became conflated in my mind with “not being Indian enough.” I’m not sure if the origins of this linguistic gatekeeping were wholly imaginary or based on a true sense of disappointment on the part of others, but I do know that my failure to fully master the language mirrors my ambivalence about my identity. Difficult things do not generally intimidate me; when motivated, I research and fall into obsessive rabbit holes and self-teach and commit myself to building new skills and habits. But my sense of the impossibility when it comes to learning Hindi is based on fears far beyond any actual effort that might be involved.
The last time I tried to learn the language, I was a graduate student in my early twenties, anticipating a long-planned trip to India with my parents. It would turn out to be the last trip we would ever take as a family of three—not something we knew at the time, but still a fact that adds to the drama and significance of the story. Six months before we left, I asked my parents for a set of Rosetta Stone DVDs for my birthday and practiced with them rather faithfully until we left. While in India, I didn’t speak much Hindi—I’ve always been very self-conscious about my accent—but I did understand quite a bit of what was being said. Filled with a sense of accomplishment, I returned home determined to continue my progress. I pulled out my old books from college, asked my mom to correct my pronunciation and explain grammar rules I didn’t understand. I downloaded Hindi language learning podcasts. And then my dad died.
Everything about my sense of identity shifted after my father died; not only did I have to work to figure out who I was without him but I also had to do so while already in the midst of defining myself in that really messy way that is characteristic of most people’s early twenties. I wanted my father’s death to change me irreparably, or rather, I knew it would, and I wanted to let it, wanted to lean into and intensify that change. Somehow, I decided that it would be impossible, pointless, to learn Hindi without my dad. My grief about him became conflated with grief over a language I would never learn.
* * *
In nonlinguistic arenas, embracing my Indianness was the primary way I connected to and sought to honor my dad after his death. Because my father was a person who loved to eat, I decided to become a person who loved to cook. Food was, and still is, a way for me to throw out an existential tether across space and time. Plus, cooking is practical; it gave me something to do and a way to connect with people, both things you really need help with when you’re in the throes of grief. In the months following my father’s death, I spent hours on the phone with my mom, asking her questions as I tried to re-create dishes in my tiny grad school apartment kitchen. I subscribed to food magazines, threw my first grown-up dinner party, and set out to master any dish I knew my father had loved or that I thought my father would have liked.
To suddenly be whipping up batches of rajma (Indian-style red beans served with rice) and be in possession of a spice dhaba (steel spice container, ubiquitous in Indian kitchens) just like the one I’d grown up watching my mother use felt both wonderful and strange; I had distanced myself from many of the markers of my Indianness while in college. Coming out as a senior in high school had thrown me into a bit of a predicament regarding identity. In the first eighteen years of my life, I had worked to create my own sense of what it meant to be first-generation and brown, adopting, adapting, and rejecting the various models around me. There weren’t many, but there were some. Then, when I realized that I wasn’t straight, I saw models for what that life might look like, both in the broader culture and in my friend group, but my models were all white. The trouble was, I didn’t see any way to reconcile the two. Being brown and queer made me feel like a true anomaly; I’d never even heard of other brown people who weren’t straight. (Though I knew that it couldn’t be true, at times I felt like I was the only queer brown girl on the planet. My parents seemed to think so, too.) I felt myself presented with no other option than to leave my Indian identity behind for a time while I explored this other facet of who I was.
The queer community I eventually found replaced or mirrored the large, welcoming, and joyful Indian community I’d grown up with, except that the new community was almost exclusively white. They knew a thing or two about identity construction, though; many of them had been forced to leave behind much of what they’d learned in their families, and several of them were exploring their own gender identity and expression. Some of them had changed names, discovered just how queer they could safely be at work, found or created evening and weekend spaces to use for refuge and recovery. From them, I learned that defining your worth on your own terms is wearying: forging your own identity, learning not to care, separating and disentangling, establishing the rules for your own life. Being queer cannot be taken up at a leisurely pace, put off for a time that seems more convenient; unlike the long arc that my Indian identity traced through my life, my post-coming-out queer identity felt more like an explosion that then required me to tinker with the pieces before they would fit back together.
Still, I did not know how to reconcile the world I’d been allowed into, a world in which I learned to reclaim the term “dyke” and think of my own gender expression as performative, with the brown world in which I’d been raised. I wanted to be able to honor the Indian part of
my identity without feeling like a sellout, wanted to be able to own up to the parts of that identity that still felt authentic to me. In the wake of my dad’s death, I decided to try to find a way to feel at home being Indian while also feeling at home being queer, no longer compartmentalizing the two.
* * *
In many cultures, grief comes with a change in appearance: traditions like wearing certain colors and clothes, rending garments, or shearing hair. For me to have cut my hair after my father died, though, would have been no change—I’d kept it short for years. So instead, I did two things my father had always wanted me to do: I grew my hair out, and I got my ears pierced. When I was younger, short hair and a lack of earrings had been markers of rebellion, ways to distinguish myself from “all the other” Indian girls I knew; suddenly, they became a demonstration of my desire to acknowledge my connection to my father’s culture.
In India, as in many cultures, it is traditional to pierce a baby girl’s ears in infancy. My mother didn’t hold with this, however—she wanted me to be able to consent. So while all the brown girls I knew had their ears pierced from day one and the white girls I went to school with all waited anxiously for whichever birthday their parents had set as the boundary line for earrings, I kept my ears unpierced until I was twenty-four, a year after my father had died. Piercing my ears felt like the perfect way to mark my body, to look on the outside like the “good Indian girl” I’d always felt wary of being. The difference now, though, was that while I was wearing sets of earrings from my mom’s literal dowry, and learning to put saris on by myself (with the help of YouTube), I was also finally out to everyone in my life, no longer keeping Jill a secret, no longer feeling quite so compartmentalized.
The “wearing a bindi every day” came next, and unexpectedly. I was in my first year of teaching, at a Jewish school, where I witnessed for the first time a very different approach to minority identity. Whereas I attended a school with very few students who shared my background, most of my students had spent their entire lives attending Jewish schools, participating in Jewish youth groups, and going to Jewish summer camps. Though they knew the outside world considered them “other,” most of them had little direct experience with feeling that way.
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