Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  I envied them. There was so much safety and celebration in their identity, which they didn’t have to reserve only for the weekends or keep contained within their home. They didn’t seem to know how good they had it; they complained about having to take Hebrew and Judaic studies, while I would have given anything to have had access to classes on Hindi and religions of India in high school. As I got to know my students’ families, I noticed similar sets of generational tension around issues of assimilation and tradition, tensions I was intimately familiar with. Parents and grandparents struggled when religion didn’t seem as important to their kids as it had been to them, insisting on bar and bat mitzvahs but wondering if the ritual had become too much about the party and not enough about the parsha (Torah portion); they felt relief that their children and grandchildren did not face the same type of open hostility and institutional anti-Semitism that they had but also worried that young people wouldn’t be as committed to their Jewish identity if they didn’t have to fight for it.

  Halfway through my first year of teaching, I was asked to speak to the middle school student body about Hinduism during our morning assembly. Having attended an Episcopal school for twelve years, I was already practiced at being the religious minority in school spaces. Recalling the chapel talks I had given as a student, I pulled out some Indian clothes and a bindi for maximum impact. In my presentation, I attempted to explain or contextualize things I felt the students were most likely to encounter or be exposed to about Hinduism: images of gods and goddesses (especially Ganesh, whom everyone always has lots of questions about), the story behind the holiday of Diwali, the meaning of the om symbol, and the significance of a bindi.

  After going through the most basic of the basics, I opened things up for questions. An eighth grader, not my student but a kid with whom I was friendly, raised his hand and asked me, “Ms. Mehra, if the bindi means all of those things, why don’t you wear it all the time?”

  I had compared the bindi with the Star of David many students opted to wear around their necks or on rings around their fingers: a marker of identity, of belonging, a way of saying I am part of this tribe. I had also explained the significance of the placement—symbolic of the third eye of Lord Shiva, seat of meditation and concentration. A reminder to be plugged in and present. I’d sold it well. No wonder he asked.

  It was the first but most certainly not the last time I would say to a student, “You know, that’s a really great question. And I’m not sure what the answer is.” I probably did know the answer somewhere, deep down. But it was too embarrassing to admit to a room full of middle school students and my new colleagues. The truth was, to wear a bindi every day felt too brazen, too “out there.” It would mean a more intense claim of my identity than I’d ever felt comfortable with before. My long hair and pierced ears meant something very personal, without necessarily being signifiers to anyone else. If I was to start wearing a bindi, I would be marking myself plainly, indicating who I was (at least to those who knew what a bindi was or meant). I’d be immediately identifiable to other members of my tribe.

  * * *

  Being first-generation and queer makes for quite a potent mix of desires and expectations. Growing up, I had the sense that I was constantly being held up to different sets of standards but found lacking on both sides. I wanted to be accepted by the dominant culture but also wanted to find my footing inside my minority identity—that was one juggling act. Once I had some facility with it, I found myself faced with the task of reconciling my queerness with all of the work I’d already done, a seemingly impossible task.

  For a long time, I coped by distancing myself from Indian people other than the ones I had grown up with. Because I was self-conscious about whether I was “Indian enough,” I was certain that others would judge me, too, would check to see if I lived up to their standard. My belief, based on stereotypes, was that I wouldn’t; I was an unmarried liberal arts major who didn’t speak Hindi but who did have a white girlfriend. It was one thing to be judged by white people—that was unavoidable—but I could avoid judgment by Indians if I simply kept out of their company. In college, I showed no interest in joining the South Asian Society and went to visit a local Hindu temple only once; it made me so uncomfortable that I never went back. (By way of contrast, I attended services at the Episcopal church across the street several times.) When I needed ingredients from the Indian grocery store, I’d send Jill, because no one there would expect her to speak Hindi.

  I avoided overtures of friendship from other Indians, resented the implication that there should be some sort of automatic kinship between us, convinced myself that I “wasn’t like them.” I was the only Indian kid in my college and grad school friend groups, and I enjoyed and became accustomed to that experience. Irrationally, I felt that other people who shared my background might clue everyone else in to the fact that I was, as it turned out, a minority.

  Over time, as I’ve grown more comfortable in my own self-conception, I’ve grown more at ease—or, at least, less on edge—while in the company of other people who are brown like me. I can now see with some critical distance the ways in which I fell prey to the very stereotypes I thought I was trying to avoid; I didn’t want to be “too Indian,” and the American cultural imagination of my youth had a very fixed and rigid definition of what “Indian” looked like or meant, a definition that some Indians themselves share. The choice was either be that kid or resist being that kid.

  But I wanted to have it both ways; I still do. I wear a bindi, eat beef, sleep with a white woman, throw a killer Diwali party, cannot resist Christmas music, and am snobby about mangoes, chai, cornbread, and pork barbecue. The term “desire lines” comes from architecture, referring to the natural paths created over time when enough people take an alternate route; think of college quads and the lines that cut diagonally across the grass, offering a quicker way to, say, the library than the ninety-degree turns a concrete sidewalk can provide. Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed sees desire lines as a way of “queering” a space, of changing the game. The presence of a desire line means that there is a different way of doing things; desire lines literally break new ground, creating physical proof of the pre-prescribed way not being the only way. For a long time, I thought I had to pick one sidewalk or another. Now I see that by claiming what feels authentic to me, I have made my own pathway in the grass.

  * * *

  I used to think that an inevitable part of occupying multiple identity categories was always feeling like something was missing. These days, I wonder if that’s just another old way of seeing that requires rethinking. Instead of not being Indian enough or not being American enough or not being queer enough, what I have is a series of choices that results in me. I think about my son, who has an even broader set of choices than I did. After all, he has one mother who wears a bindi every day and one mother who duck hunts. He participates in puja with me and my mom and has learned to say “Bless this food in Jesus’s name, amen” from his grandfather, Jill’s dad. In both cases, Shiv improvises his four-year-old add-ons of gratitude: “Thank you for the trees and the birds and God and chocolate cake, amen.”

  Shiv, even more so than me, really raises the question Who counts? I’m Indian, but primarily by virtue of my genetics; both of my parents were from India. I’m southern, but only by the virtue of my geography; I was born and then raised in Memphis, Tennessee. Technically, Shiv is second-generation, and in the classic narrative of immigrant life, the second generation moves further away from the culture of origin, assimilating to a degree beyond what was possible for their first-generation parents. But will this be true of Shiv? Like me, he is American by birth; unlike me, he is not ethnically Indian. Still, he is my child, and he is his grandmother’s grandson—will he feel like he is second-generation? Will he experience himself as Indian or having ties to an Indian heritage? He has been exposed to and participated in Indian cultural practices since he was born, and Hinduism is the dominant religious framework of his childhood. (
Though Jill’s parents are observant Christians, Jill is not.) He’s obsessed with Hindu mythology and prefers reading it to the Bible we have a copy of. (Recently, when looking at a book about Vikings and seeing the stone renderings of their gods, he told me, “Our gods are much more beautiful-er than their gods, Mama.”) He’s eaten Indian food his whole life, celebrated Hindu holidays, and understands Hindi perfectly because my mother speaks to him in it exclusively, at my request.

  The identity categories that Shiv embodies make sense to him and make sense to us, his family; they seem natural, obvious. But taken outside the scope of our family, they can begin to be puzzling. When he grows older, will he have trouble gaining access to Indian culture and experiences? Will he want that access? Will he have to prove he belongs? And what of his blackness? Everything that is housed inside of his lived experience, will it help expand our collective imagination about what black life can look like, or will it instead block him from belonging when others don’t recognize him? Shiv calls everything into question.

  * * *

  Sometimes it feels like I’m still on the identity seesaw, though not as often as it used to. But the feeling inevitably creeps in—here I am, being a good Indian girl by keeping vegetarian during a Hindu holy week, but being a bad southern guest when I have to turn down homemade ribs to do so. I feel like I’ve earned a southern cook merit badge when I cure my own ham for Easter, then like a slacker Indian parent when I realize that my son has not yet celebrated Holi. It helps, though, that there are more and more models for this kind of life, more demonstrations of hybridity and creativity—instead of feeling guilt for defaulting to Christian hymns when my son asks for a song at bedtime, I am working to embrace it, to acknowledge that “Seek Ye First” is deeply embedded in my consciousness, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong or bad with being someone most people haven’t seen the likes of before.

  I wonder what will linger for Shiv when he is old enough to make his own choices. The ethos I want to pass on to him when it comes to collaging one’s identity is this: Keep things slippery. Embrace your desire lines and don’t let anyone force you to make an accounting for them. They’ll want to define or capture you—don’t let them. You don’t need to help them make sense of you, as long as you make sense to yourself.

  Cult of Motherhood

  I have always known that I wanted to be a parent: no doubts, no uncertainty, no “depends on who I end up with,” no question. I was going to be a mama one way or another. In high school, I became convinced that I wouldn’t wind up partnered until much later in life (I was a late bloomer), so I told my parents to be prepared for me to adopt as a single mom when I turned thirty. Then, when I was nineteen, I met the woman who would become my wife, shifting that narrative dramatically. Another shift: Jill was thirty-eight, had already decided not to have kids, and had built a life for herself without children. Then I became a part of that life, bringing along my fervent desire to parent. What had seemed like a certainty to me for so long morphed more and more into a question.

  I’d always thought I would have a baby the way most women do: by getting pregnant. My own mother worked hard to make pregnancy happen for her; it took many years, a great deal of heartache, and not a small amount of money. The story of how I came to be and the attendant determination that brought me into the world have long framed my understanding of parenthood as something undertaken with solemnity and effort.

  These days, in my professional and social circle, parenthood is a default choice, a matter of course, part of the plan. Perhaps this is more prevalent in the South, or in immigrant communities, but the experience of childless women in my life is that they are constantly being called to account for, even challenged on, the reason they don’t have kids. I half tease, half scold my own mom for acting like “such an Indian grandmother” when she asks me when my recently married friends are going to have kids. Thankfully, she knows better than to ask my recently married friends themselves. One of my colleagues got bombarded in the reception line at her wedding by a brand-new in-law: “So, when are you two going to start a family?” I have my own baggage about the assumption that two people in a committed relationship don’t constitute a family; Jill and I experienced plenty of that as a couple who couldn’t legally marry until thirteen years into our relationship. But even we have been subject to a second set of questions, which arrive like clockwork around the time your first child turns one: When are you going to have another? Don’t you want to give your child a sibling?

  For certain people in my life—colleagues who are Orthodox Jews and friends who are Evangelical Christians—the reasons for having children are clearly articulated within their religious tradition. But for the rest of us, science has proved that having kids doesn’t make you happy—in fact, it tends to make most people unhappier—and it isn’t particularly good for your marriage, if you have one. Raising kids limits you financially, impacts your ability to capitalize on all kinds of opportunities, and, if you’re a woman, can screw up your body and be detrimental to your career. So why do it?

  I know couples who wish they’d waited longer to have kids; who wish they’d had only one instead of two; who even feel that, as much as they love their children, they should have given more thought to whether they should have become parents in the first place. Suggestion and socialization are powerful, and my layperson’s knowledge of biology helps me understand how forcefully our bodies can push us to do things that are not rational or in our own self-interest. For all of the conversations about how to parent, the debates over styles and approaches, the millions of dollars of marketing devoted to convincing parents of the necessity of one baby registry item or another, we fail to discuss whether someone’s choice to parent in the first place is a good idea.

  Parenting may well be the life experience around which we have the most expectation, which is why I find it puzzling that there is such a lack of discussion around entering into it. Though there is more room now, culturally, for women to express their reasons for choosing not to parent, men seem not to need to explain why they don’t want to have kids. Middle- and upper-middle-class adults view having kids as an inevitability; there is no conversation and little coaching (where’s the premarital counseling equivalent for child-rearing?) around deciding “whether or not,” because the question has already been answered.

  * * *

  When you’re in a relationship like mine, there’s absolutely zero chance anyone will get pregnant by accident, so having a child necessarily becomes a deliberate undertaking. In my early twenties, there were times when I worried—despaired, even—that I would have to leave my relationship with Jill in order to become a parent. I respected, tremendously, the fact that she was unwilling to tackle parenting with anything less than a full commitment; I wasn’t interested in jumping into parenthood with someone who wasn’t totally on board. But I couldn’t imagine a life for myself without a child, or without Jill.

  Then in late 2004, Jill opened up the paper and read an account of AIDS orphans in Africa. Along with the newspaper story was a picture of an orphan—Bruno—no more than two or three years old, clinging to the legs of an aid worker. All of the boy’s relatives were dead. Jill, deeply moved by this story, began to think differently about the prospect of becoming a parent. She felt herself drawn powerfully to the prospect of adoption, which we had tossed around as an option but not seriously considered or investigated. In the end, it was Jill’s compassion and deeply embedded sense of ethics—her desire to step in where others couldn’t—that led to us deciding officially to become parents and to do so through adoption.

  In this way, my narrative about parenting moved away from sperm donors and pregnancy and birth toward a new image of what becoming a mother might look like. The transition was not difficult; I was not as attached as I thought I might be to biological parenting, to the thread of genetics or the experience of carrying a child inside my body. Choosing adoption pushed me to think about what exactly I was attached to and why
.

  For most couples, adoption is plan B; they come to adoption after trying, unsuccessfully, to conceive. For this reason, agencies stress the importance of distinguishing between the need to have a baby and the need to become a parent. Though our culture conflates the two, they are not the same thing. My attachment to having a baby was not nearly as strong as my desire to become a parent, which made moving into adoption a fairly joyful choice. Many couples who have struggled with infertility are able to make the same choice, although they may simultaneously experience deep grief over the prospect of not having a baby. But I’ve read accounts from others, both single prospective parents and couples, for whom getting pregnant and giving birth are essential and not something they’re willing to give up on. The language of possessives runs consistently through the accounts of these stories, references to a child “of my own,” “of our own,” “of their own.”

  There is still a widespread feeling that adopted children are somehow less connected to their parents than biological children. Jill and I are the only adoptive couple we know who didn’t try to make a baby either before adopting or after. There are others like us, but as far as I can tell, we’re in the minority. Because of this, I catch myself internally questioning couples who spend so much time and energy trying to conceive and carry a biological child. I know this is unfair; just because it wasn’t hard for me to give up my own attachment to conceiving and giving birth to a child doesn’t mean it is that easy for others. I may not understand why some people possess such a strong need to have a baby, but I don’t have to. Adoption is not for everyone, and while I’d like to see more people consider it, my response stems more from how difficult it can be to live in a culture that conceives of parenthood, especially motherhood, as being inextricably and exclusively tied to biology. Biology is the primary lens through which motherhood is examined, translated, and evaluated. It is the be-all and end-all, the complete justification for parenting behavior and choices, which is why I’ve seen people balk at the cost of adoption while at the same time seeming to understand perfectly why prospective parents would spend the same amount of money (and in some cases more) to pursue fertility treatments.