by Scaachi Koul
When Raisin was born, her eyes were a cloudy blue. “They’ll get darker,” Mom told me. “They usually do.” She was fair-skinned, even fairer than her dad—my brother—who has the surprising complexion of a standoffish vampire. She had less hair than any of her brown family members had at birth. All of this was a victory to us, to my mom, to me. I quietly hoped her eyes would stay blue, that she would keep these recessive features from the white half of her family. When she looked at me, I could see her pupils, and I remembered how that was such a luxury when I was a kid. In the fifth grade, our teacher made us stand nose to nose so we could see what happens to the human pupil when lights are turned on and off. My partner was Bryn, a white girl with baby blues, and I watched as her irises shrank and grew. “I can’t see yours at all,” Bryn said. “You’re like a shark.” Raisin would not be a shark.
We were less pleased, then, with her nose, wide and squished—very Indian, very ours. “Maybe it’ll get smaller?” Mom said. But no, we knew she was stuck with our nose. “I wonder if we could put one of those black binder clips on it,” Papa said. “Make it a bit thinner.” But she was perfect the way any tiny body that enters your family is perfect. We all wanted to touch her head and smell her hair and carry her around like a little doll. Papa would hold her in one hand and with the other pull apples down from the sour apple tree in the backyard. My dad, his olive skin darkening in the sun, his thick beard and hooked nose contrasted with Raisin’s little face, her pink skin, her blue eyes. (They did, indeed, get darker, and now they look like blue Warheads. Her skin, though, is as pearly as ever.)
In India, I meet Raisin and the rest of my extended family at the train station, since they had been touring the country for a week before I landed. We are there for my cousin Sweetu’s wedding, the latest in a long line of my generation to accept a modernized arrangement. Chacha, my dad’s younger brother, picks me up from the airport and takes me to meet everyone, with Raisin and twenty or so of my other family members spilling out from the station entrance. Raisin is wearing leggings with knock-off emojis and a T-shirt that says “UNDERCOVER NINJA.” Her light brown hair is tied in a French braid but frizzed around her face, like a halo. She launches from her father’s arms into mine, squeezes me around the neck, and gives me her requisite, “Hi, Boo.”
“Did you have fun on the train?” I ask her.
“Yeah, but my tummy hurt.” She is clutching a Sprite bottle and has that sickly look of a small body that has been hurling from motion sickness.
The last time we came to India as a family, I was ten. My brother had orange-frosted tips and was getting his undergrad, my mother’s parents were alive, as was my dad’s mother. Raisin wasn’t even a concept yet. We took the train during that trip, and I too emerged feeling queasy and needing to be held.
This trip is different for obvious reasons, but it is always the same town, it is always December when we come, it is always twenty degrees, cooler since we are far north. My aunts still greet me by rubbing my face and telling me that I look like their mother, so beautiful, so fair. Chacha calls me fat and then laughs so hard that he starts coughing. (I call him old and he forms his hand into a butcher knife, making little chops at my neck.) Nothing has changed, and yet I am holding a little white body and people passing by are looking, because she so clearly cannot belong to us. She looks so out of place here, even next to the other little kids she is related to. She brushes her fingers through my hair and asks, “Boo, did you bring me any chocolate?” She never notices when people are looking.
—
Calgary was a city of just over a million when I was growing up there. It’s split into four clearly divided quadrants: northwest, southwest, northeast, southeast. We lived in the southwest: a predominantly Caucasian neighbourhood with plenty of kids and schools and grocery stores. We were one of a few non-white families in the area. The northeast, comparatively, is rife with immigrants, particularly South Asian immigrants. You can move to northeastern Calgary and get by speaking Hindi or Punjabi only. It was a long drive for us, though, so we visited the area sparingly. I knew they were my people, but it didn’t feel like it. I was pushing against any first-generation narrative, while all the people in that area were seemingly proud of it. Aunties wore salwars to go grocery shopping, and little kids had those silver or gold bangles we were all given at birth. My brother has always worn a gold chain with a pendant that has his initials, but he tucks it under his collar. In the northeast, the boys wore them outside their basketball jerseys. We were different from them, and I was determined to keep us different. Every piece of gold jewellery ever given to me was hidden in my dresser; I refused to wear any of it because it made me feel I was being marked as an Other. (I now wear all of it, sometimes at the same time, a signal to other Others that I’m an Other too.) Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we’re taught anything, we’re taught to hide.
My friends had white names—Jennifer, Kayla, Kellie, Molly, Kirsten—names my parents made fun of because what do those names even mean? A loaded question, considering the name they gave me barely makes sense to other brown people. When we were in India in the early aughts, Chacha told me that Kayla, or kela, means “banana” in Hindi, and when I took that information back to my friend, we laughed for a solid school year. I had a funny name, and teachers and the parents of other kids always asked: “Where are you from?” I learned fast that the correct answer wasn’t “I take the E bus and I’m the second to last stop and that’s where I live,” but rather “My parents are Indian immigrants.” With that answer, their faces would light up and they’d say, “Oh, I hear India is amazing! Does your mom make curry?” Then I would shrug and say, yeah, sure, I guess she does, but isn’t that like me asking if your mom boils water?
My race didn’t seem like a problem until 9/11, or at least, I never noticed a difference beyond forgettable microaggressions. I watched the towers come down while pulling my socks up in the living room, getting ready for school. Mom sat stock-still, watching in horror, and I remember this only because it was the first time she wasn’t rushing me to catch the bus. She sat in the living room on the coffee table, a wooden spoon held aloft, her face frozen in fear. When we got to school, my fifth-grade teacher made us sit around her in a circle and tried to explain what had happened, but mostly asked us to give her our impressions. It boiled down to some “bad guys” taking over a plane. It was like a Die Hard plotline, and the only thing that was out of the ordinary was that our teacher wanted to discuss the news, which we would have otherwise ignored. Buildings fell all the time, wars happened. I understood the news as a dark thing to watch. I didn’t worry.
But the older kids get, the more context they have about the world, the better they are at putting words to sentiments, and holy shit, are those sentiments ever racist. At a day camp the following summer, I tried to sit with a group of girls I was desperate to be friends with. Their ringleader was a few years older than us, and she was impressive. After all, her cousin was a backup dancer for Britney Spears. (There was absolutely no way to verify this, but I recall thinking that she looked vaguely Hawaiian and so did the dancer so I just chalked it up to something too ridiculous to lie about.) I followed them around for a few days during activities—running in circles, throwing ourselves on padded mats, unstructured hair-braiding time—until I steeled myself to sit with them for lunch. My mom always packed me “white” food, things that wouldn’t be “embarrassing.” Sandwiches, apples (gross), Rice Krispies, juice boxes, Fruit Roll-Ups. Once, Kayla brought split-pea soup and was teased so relentlessly that I hugged my mom extra tight that evening for never packing me khichdi, even if I did love it. So that day I brought my lunch bag and sat down in the grass with them. But one girl turned to me, flipping her long brown hair over her shoulder, and asked, “Why are you sitting with us?”<
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“Why not?” I said.
“You’re brown.”
Ohh, I thought, so this is what it is. This was the difference felt but rarely spoken. This was why certain girls just didn’t want to be friends with me, it’s why certain parents looked at me for too long. It’s why everyone wanted to know where I was from. I was brown. Calgary didn’t have a huge black population at the time, but I knew one black girl in kindergarten and I knew that was the word for her. There was a Chinese girl in the first grade and she called herself “Asian” so I knew that was the name for that. But for us, I never named it. Papa told me we were Kashmiri, which was good, because we were from the north. He told me we were of the Brahmin caste, we were descendants of pundits, literally meaning we were smart and educated and worthy, cultural history that wasn’t necessarily true but was certainly felt. He never outright mentioned that we were also some of the fairest in the country, and how our privilege was largely related to the sheer dumb luck of being lighter, but I’d figure that out soon enough. Papa talked about us as though we were the best India had to offer.
That, however, doesn’t matter when you just want to get through junior high. Some boys brought me a deodorant stick to help mask my “natural” curry scent. In grade eight, Joshua, a guy whose main vocation was eating erasers, called me Osama bin Laden’s cousin. I took out my gold ruby hoops—the same ones my grandmother had worn—because they felt too obvious. I didn’t follow my friends into a yoga trend. I got my nose pierced but took the stud out two years later because I felt it marked me. (I’ve had it put back in three times since.) When we had to study different countries in social studies, I would opt for a country that was predominantly white. Greece was a safe bet, France even safer. One girl innocently asked me what kind of food my parents made for dinner, and I roundly told her to go fuck herself. Then, in high school, I was repeatedly called a nigger, because racism doesn’t have to be accurate, it just has to be acute. I thought about how much money it might cost for a nose job, something to break down the most obvious ethnic marker I have. All I’d need is some slimming, shattering the cartilage to refit it so I didn’t have that Indian bump. Make the tip pointy like a ski jump. (White people love skiing; they’re always doing weird shit with snow.) I avoided the sun because, though my skin is a sickly yellow in the winter, it becomes a deep golden brown in the summer.
I pushed against brownness through high school, into university. When I moved to Toronto, the number of brown people I saw in a day tripled, and I resented it, because they knew I was one of them. I didn’t want to be in this club.
But then Raisin came out looking like a girl I would ordinarily have considered my enemy. I would have wanted to be her friend because she’s cute, objectively. Even I would have seen it at her age, if she were in my class, gliding through life like only a Normal can. And so her life would be (and is) different than mine, because her race is a footnote instead of the title. Unlike me or her father, Raisin isn’t being raised Indian; her only real exposure to it comes from my parents, whom she sees twice a week. Her race seems tangential to her existence, hardly something she examines but, rather, something the rest of us have put under a microscope from the minute she started gestating in her mom’s insides. My parents felt blessed by her fairness, her light eyes, her distinctly “white” features—typical shadism, the idea that lighter skin is better skin even when it’s all brown skin, a frequent topic within brown and black communities but one rarely discussed openly. I was eighteen when she was born and I objectively knew whiteness wasn’t better, and yet, weren’t we lucky to have a little white girl whose life would never resemble our own?
When Raisin was very small, I rubbed lotion on her belly after a bath and marvelled at how different our skins were: mine a dark yellow, black hair sprouting on my arms and hands, hers like milk and honey. It felt as if I was dirtying her, rubbing my skin against hers when hers was so “good.” I wrapped her in a little towel and she looked up at me with blue eyes, the same kind I always wanted for myself.
—
Jammu is a city of nearly six hundred thousand in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, in the northeast of India. My mother was raised farther north in Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley, which is broadly considered a conflict region by most, but Papa’s side left the valley in the 1920s. (Mom’s parents stayed until the early ’90s, when most of the family left after being targeted as both the religious and ethnic minority in their area.) Although Jammu isn’t physically in the Kashmir Valley and is therefore not as unstable politically or militarily, the two places are considered inextricably connected; signs across the city boast their connection. Things like J&K government or J&K general store or J&K daycare. Chacha tells us that Jammu and Kashmir has its own set of rules: its own constitution, its own national security regulations, and once its own prime minister. Security crackdowns are so severe here that my phone doesn’t work anywhere unless connected to Wi-Fi. Actually, no phones do unless you buy a local SIM card once in the region. No Apple applications work either, another moment where Siri can’t do shit for me. Jammu is beautiful, the place I remember most from all our trips to Indian cities. (Mom, however, always reminds me that Srinagar is much more beautiful, all lush trees and floral scents and houseboats. But, considering the region’s fluctuations, she has always refused to take us home with her.)
At the Taj Mahal in nearby Agra, people ask Raisin’s mother, Ann, if they can hold her daughter. They want to take a photo with her, of her. It gets to be troubling, with strangers trying to pry Raisin out of her mother’s arms and Papa chasing people off with aggressive Hindi. I don’t totally blame the locals: she is fascinating if you haven’t seen a face like that before in nature. She looks white, and I can imagine some people wondering if she isn’t a little young for a tourist trip to India. And when they hear her name, an obvious Hindu name, they must marvel at how beautiful she turned out. What fortune that she looks like this instead of like us.
Raisin doesn’t seem to notice. She’s here for the chai, which is super-sweet and served with cookies from any aunty who can at least understand, “Sugar-tea, please?”
The India of this trip is not the one I remember from fifteen years earlier. Now, I find my preferred type of toilet rather than ones that force you to squat and, inevitably, pee all over yourself. (White people have a lot of flaws, but they did indeed master taking a leisurely forty-three-minute dump while comfortably seated.) Nearly all storefront signs and billboards are entirely in English, the rickshaw drivers know if you’re being rude to them, and the men notice that I am an adult woman who makes eye contact and scowls. Signs for “DRUGGIST AND CHEMIST” and “LADY DOCTOR, DR. RANJANA DHAR, TIME: 11 AM TO 12 NOON TUESDAY/FRIDAY” spill into the streets. (What kind of gynecologist only works for one hour, twice a week?) On the back of a car is a sign trumpeting the academic performances of three girls in the public school system, each of whom has a 97 per cent average. The women wear tight jeans and heels and plenty of makeup. I look like a local here, the only obvious sign I’m not being that I rarely colour in my waterline with kajal. (This changes halfway through the trip, when three aunties ask me why I look “so sickly” and start purchasing black eyeliner for me so I can draw thin lines around my eyeballs.)
But most unsettling is how this time I notice my own fairness. I notice that while I might be a person of colour among the diaspora back home, or in any white-majority country, here I am the white person. Kashmiris are notable because there are so few of us left, and because we’ve taken up a privileged space in India. In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they’re bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he’ll try to bond with me over the trouble with “the blacks.” All of us struggle towards whiteness.
At the wedding venue, a handful of workers make our food and clean our dishes, and all of them are dark-skinned Indians. I can generally pass for
whatever race you desire: when I’m in Ecuador, locals speak to me in Spanish; when in Thailand, Thai; I’m mistaken for Greek or Latina or Italian in certain parts of the U.S. But the employees here are undeniably Indian, with undeniable dark skin. When I finish my chai, the same woman who’s there all week takes my cup. She prepares us our breakfasts and our hoddles of tea, brings around snacks, does the dishes. She has a saucer-sized nose stud and a flash of white teeth. No one is polite to her, no one says please or thank you, no one except my cousin Sweetu even calls her Aunty, which we were all taught to call someone older than us. When my elders finish their tea and she comes by with a tray, they place their glasses on it without acknowledging her.
It’s impossible to ignore that the women who ask for money at the airport are dark-skinned. Or that men whose skin is a few shades darker than mine don’t make eye contact, while boys with skin like mine want to talk; they mumble things to me in the streets, they stare at my bare shoulders or stand too close to me in line at the bank. (This happens back home too, but here I notice the difference because here, I foolishly thought we would all look the same.) No one with dark skin works at the bank. No one with dark skin sells us our jewellery or the custom-made Jootas Ann gets, the ones where the toes meet at a point and almost curl, ones we call “Jafar shoes.” I don’t know what came first, the class differentiations or the shadism, but they are inextricably linked.
When I think about our other trips here, I realize it has always been like this, our entitlement spreading wide out—I just didn’t notice until now. On our last trip, my dad let me buy a massive tub of mini-chocolates: a Tupperware filled with Kit Kats and Dairy Milks. When I tore open a wrapper and took a bite, the chocolate disintegrated into some chalky formula, like a dried Tootsie Roll. We looked closely at the wrappers and saw that they actually said Kit Kit and Dear Milk, a hardly convincing facsimile of something that reminded me of home. Whatever this off-brand chocolate was, it was terrible, but a group of children my age were watching me revolt at what was a pretty significant treat. Even I resent myself in this scene: some chubby, well-fed, fairer-skinned tourist retches at the taste of locally produced chocolate while four other kids watch. I gave them the tub. They took it and ran. I was an asshole.