One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Page 6
Or there was the woman who cleaned my Usha Bua’s house in Delhi, and how she always wore salwars in neutrals and beige socks that separated the big toe so that she could wear chappals. She made all our meals and seemed to be constantly wiping the floor. She ate her meals standing up in the kitchen while we ate in the dining room at a long wooden table. One afternoon, I was left in the care of Bua’s twenty-something son, who barricaded himself in his bedroom. I watched cartoons in the living room while this woman cleaned the house, just like she was always doing. When she passed through the living room one time, though, she paused to watch the show with me for a few minutes. When she caught me looking at her, she took off, but I had just wanted to see if she wanted to sit down with me. Her skin was dark and dewy.
The obsession with fair skin goes beyond what we look like naturally: everyone here wants to look a little bit lighter, particularly the women. Personal ads from parents looking for partners for their children often laud the “wheatish” complexion of their child right next to income and height. Aunties tell me how much I look like my mom, and I know this is a compliment, not just because my mom is beautiful but because she is one of the fairest in the family. Ann tells me that the week before I got here, Bua was rubbing her arm against Ann’s, saying she hoped some of the whiteness would come off. Bua does things like this all the time—she’s the most concerned about her whiteness, the whiteness of her children. Rohan, her son, is not that fair, but his wife is, so naturally she is a prize. Her daughter Sweetu is even fairer than I am, with slight facial features too, so she is perfect. Bua is not dark, she has never been dark, but I guess the argument stands that she could be lighter. She visited us in Canada once, and circling my face with her chubby hand, asked, “Are you using Fair & Lovely?”
Fair & Lovely is a popular brand of skin-whitener in South Asia, marketed with crummy little ads where a girl gets the guy after she slathers these chemicals on her face and turns into some ghost-like version of her former self. You can buy it for your face or your body, creams to remove “facial discolouration or brown spots,” or to lighten all the skin you have, one big body-wide brown spot. There’s even a skin-whitening cream marketed for your unacceptably brown labia. Ads show bright women with skin that looks like Cream of Wheat dancing with flowers whizzing around their heads, proof that being fairer will also make you thin, make you beautiful, make men look at you. “Everyone in this stupid country is obsessed with being white,” Rohan groans when I tell him about his mother’s arm-rubbing. “It’s not just her. But she is very invested in it.”
When I’m applying my foundation before the wedding—one or two shades lighter than Bua, a little more yellow than brown—she asks me if she can use some. “Sure, I guess,” I tell her, “but it’s the wrong colour for you.”
“But will I look white then?”
I tell her yes, her face will look very white, like that of a clown. She laughs and mumbles something in Kashmiri and pleats her sari faster than my mom and I can unclasp our respective bras.
I have never been this white anywhere in the world. I’ve never had the most obvious, the most useful kind of privilege as soon as I’ve walked into a room. This, though, is maybe what it’s like to be white. People who look like me in India are assumed to be higher class, in better socioeconomic standing, more educated. This is sometimes true, but only because the world here is built to benefit those with light skin and punish those with dark skin, much like the world at home. The caste system is largely defunct in the areas we visit, but that doesn’t mean that I and my family aren’t still benefiting from decades of racial advantage. The brown people in my family and the others we associate with are almost all wheatish themselves, and have filled my head with Kashmiri superiority, light-skinned dominance, while also suggesting it’s something that can’t possibly happen in North America. Darker-skinned Indians aren’t bad, per se, but aren’t we great? Aren’t we smart, and beautiful, and worthy? Isn’t that why we’re thriving in Canada, in the land of opportunity? The only difference between shadism in India and shadism at home is the level to which my family is served.
Circling the wedding venue throughout the week is a surly young man in his twenties who carries tubs of food back and forth from the venue to the upstairs kitchen. On his shoulders are these cauldrons, big enough to boil a human body, and he slugs them up and down stairs, wordlessly. We never do hear him speak. Or make eye contact. He wears flip-flops while doing manual labour, he smokes cigarettes in the parking lot, he has a smartphone ripping through the back pocket of his very skinny jeans. He’s handsome and furious, completely miserable, seemingly unwilling to be there.
I find this irresistible. I follow him around for a few minutes every day, trying to see what I need to do just to get him to look at me. He has a cute butt. Ann agrees, saying she likes his surly yet romantic silence, and posits what her husband or Hamhock might say if we brought this boy home with us. We crack a few jokes about turning him into a respectable man, My Fair Lady-ing him, getting him a suit, teaching him English.
This is funny until I remember colonialism.
—
Months after our trip, I visited Raisin and the rest of my family in Calgary. She had just turned six, and still had a few memories of the trip: what she seemed to recall the most was Nice Time, a coconut cookie she was being handed in droves while at the wedding. “Did you have fun?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “But I wouldn’t go back for a wedding.”
“Why not?” I worried here, because I want her to like it there, or at least to be indifferent about it the way you get to be indifferent about a home when you don’t realize you’ll miss it one day.
“ ’Cause you gotta eat the same thing every day! And you hafta wear those outfits, they’re so itchy and they never fit! But we can go again, just for fun.”
Raisin didn’t seem to remember that she thought Indians were all poor—the opulent temples may have convinced her otherwise—or that they all smelled bad—in fact, everything smelled of condensed milk. To her, it was a vacation, and it was a Nice Time, not an identity crisis. She didn’t notice skin colour, heritage, or casual racism because she hardly notices her own face. (Though, on this visit, I point to her nose and then to mine and say, “We have the same nose.” She loves this and adds, “And the same eyebrows, and when you’re grumpy you look like me when I’m grumpy.” I’m relieved.)
“Do you think you’re brown?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m half brown. You’re all brown.”
“Do you tell your friends you’re half brown?” She is passing, always passing for white, and for some reason, I want people to know that she isn’t, that we at least tried to have some say in it. I tried to force myself out of brownness at her age, but the older I get, the more I tuck myself into it. My jewellery is almost all gold now: my grandmother’s bracelets, her wedding ring, my mom’s earrings. When I’m bored, I sometimes draw three dots in a triangle formation on my hand, the same design my mother used to draw in eyeliner on my chin when my Indian dance class had a performance. It’s the only place I feel comfortable now.
“Some kids know,” she said. “I don’t need to tell everyone.”
When I talk to Papa about the microaggressions I deal with in my city (“The lady at Starbucks thought my name was Vissagi, and now she keeps writing ‘Vissagi’ on aaaaaall myyy cuuuuups”), he rolls his eyes because he’s seen worse. My dad can’t pass for white—he is the darkest in the family, with the most Indian nose—so my coffee-cup issue is hardly a problem for him. As a kid, when I went to him complaining about the casual racism I noticed at school, he shrugged. “How do these kids even know you’re Indian?” he asked me. “You could be anything.”
Which is part of my privilege, though not the whole story, because while you may not be able to pinpoint where I’m from, you know I’m not from here. And while Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding ha
nds and cops are handing out ice cream cones instead of, say, shooting black men, our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we’re punished, as if we’re speaking badly of an elderly relative who can’t help but make fun of the Irish. The white majority doesn’t like being reminded that the cultural landscape is still flawed, still broken, and while my entry into something like Canadian media, for instance, hasn’t been an easy ride, it has been made more palatable for other people because I am passable. I’m not white, no, but I’m just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I’m not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don’t make you nervous—at least not on the surface. I’m the whole package!
The racism I noticed as a kid, overt insults said to my face, attempts to demean me and rob me of my humanity, have taken a new form in my adulthood. Now, I’m either ignored or, if I get loud, framed as the stereotypical hotheaded Indian woman screaming and waving a wooden spoon in the streets. People I’ve worked with—predominantly white women—have told me to “watch my tone” or to be more polite, because a brown woman, any brown woman, can’t be too much of anything. I benefit, and yet I suffer in the same breath: bouncers at bars won’t reject me out of fear of letting an outfit “get too brown,” as has happened to my darker relatives, but airport security will pat me down with extra care, a magazine will hire me to write about Indian issues and nothing else, a boy I like will tell me I’m attractive “for a brown girl.” Someone who doesn’t like my work will call me a sand-nigger in an encrypted email.
So it infuriates me that I am relieved for Raisin in this way, that I know her experience of my hometown will be different not only because she’s of a new generation but also because she is passing in a way that none of us ever could. My brother was fair, sure, but he had immigrants for parents and a Hindu name. I wasn’t as dark as my dad, but my name was a clear giveaway, and I had thick hair all over my body. Raisin is our only outlier for now: her mother is white, she lives in a white neighbourhood, she eats white food, she listens to white music and goes to a white school. In some ways, things will be easier for her, and in others, much harder, because you can belong even less when you come from two separate factions. We struggled towards whiteness, and soon she will have to develop her own definitions for the complexity of being two things at once. I want to stamp brownness on her, but in a way that protects her rather than exposes her. I can’t have it both ways.
During that last visit when I saw Raisin again, she held my hand in the back seat of her mother’s car while we drove to the Calgary Stampede, the whitest event in the history of white people doing stuff near horses and Ferris wheels. “Can you spell?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “J-a-k-e.”
“Who’s Jake?” I asked.
“He asked me to marry him,” she said. “I think I will.” She listed Jake’s many accomplishments (can tie his own shoes, can read, can hang from the monkey bars, once fell off the monkey bars and “now knows the pain of biting his own lip”), and I asked if I could come to the wedding. She said okay.
“You should be happy about this,” Ann said from the driver’s seat.
“Why?” I asked. “They could break up tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” she said, handing me her phone with a photo of Raisin and her husband-to-be, holding each other and smiling widely. “But Jake’s brown.”
Papa
You children are getting on my nerves. The problem is very high expectations.
Scaachi
What would you like us to do?
Papa
Treat me like a demigod. Not a full-god, an in-between god. Pay homage to me every time you see me. Do exactly what is in my mind.
Scaachi
What is in your mind?
Papa
I’ll think of something.
Aus-piss-ee-ous
There are two types of people who insist that Indian weddings are fun. The first are white people, who are frequently well-meaning but stupid and enjoy things vaguely different from themselves by exoticizing them. Do not talk to me about how you love the “colours” of an Indian wedding—the main colours come from blood and shit, not necessarily respectively.
The second type are any people who have never actually been to an Indian wedding in India with Indian people. Or, at least, have never been to the entirety of an Indian wedding, the full five to seven days, the multiple outfits, the familial requirements that forfeit your time and independence. No, these people swoop in for the ceremony and reception, they eat some pakoras and talk about how “cute” it is when little girls have unibrows, maybe they show up early for the henna ceremony and ask for a lower-back tat, and then we never see them again. Indian weddings are a lot of things, but “fun” has never been their purpose.
My family was in Jammu for my cousin Sweetu’s wedding. Thanks to an Indian online dating service—Shaadi.com, which means Wedding.com because we as a race are hardly trying—Sweetu’s parents were able to arrange her marriage to a nice boy with well-manicured stubble and a good job in America. It’s the dream.
If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from “fun,” trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from “vacation.” When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working.
My parents were in Jammu to give blessings to Sweetu, to send her into her new life accordingly. They arrived with crisp, bank-fresh rupees and red velvet pouches filled with thick gold bangles. My brother and his wife, Ann, were there to show off Raisin, the latest addition to our family, the first grandchild of my father, the eldest son. As for me, a girl and therefore my mother’s joy and my father’s responsibility, I was there to prove my parents are a success. I was among the first to be born out of India within my extended family, proof positive that my parents moved to a faraway prosperous land for good reason. Look at me, I will say merely by showing my beatific face. I am fair-skinned, of average weight and height, my hair is long and shiny, I am university-educated and respectful of our customs and traditions. I know I don’t speak the language, but you can see here on my nose the indent of what was once a nose ring, thus the mark of an authentic but modern Kashmiri girl. The Kouls are thriving in the West. Feel free to signal your approval with a satchel or two of gold.
—
After we dropped off our bags at the hotel and after I had a hearty twenty-minute argument with my parents, who neglected to book a separate hotel room for me and were expecting that I would, for fifteen days, sleep sandwiched between my sixty-six-year-old father and sixty-year-old mother (I stopped short of screaming, “I REFUSE TO SLEEP ON THE SAME SURFACE AS YOUR RESPECTIVE GENITALS” before they made up a cot for me on the floor next to their bed), we headed over to the wedding venue, a fifteen-minute auto-rickshaw ride away.
There were already more brown people inside the venue than I had seen in the last five years combined. Nearly all my father’s family was there: his father’s last remaining brother; his sister who is actually his aunt (possibly not by blood) but she’s younger than him so he calls her his sister; his mother’s brother; his actual sister; her son, Rohan, who got married in Delhi a few years earlier with a thousand guests at his reception (I did not go); his daughter, E, the same age as then-five-year-old Raisin; and my dad’s cousin, my Vee Masi, my mom’s friend who helped arrange my parents’ marriage.
If this sounds con
fusing, that is because it is. Brown people rarely explain how anyone is related to anyone. You’re simply told that these people are your family and to treat them as such. My parents do not discuss the fact that one of my “aunts” is actually my dad’s aunt, or how my mom’s many “sisters” are not her sisters and are sometimes merely childhood friends. It’s rude to ask what would otherwise be a very reasonable question: “Hey, Mom, why do you have forty sisters? Was your mother a sea turtle? Is that why she cried so much?” So the question of “how” is maybe less important than the statement of “this”: This is your family. You will hear a platitude about how much you look like them even if this is not true. You will smile. You will feel warm. Behave.
The venue was a three-floor home with a sprawling lawn for the receptions, a pyre for the ceremony itself, an indoor hall, and multiple rooms for out-of-towners to change and put their children down for naps. In one of the many bedrooms was Sweetu, sitting on a bed with her hair in tiny braids as is customary before a bride’s wedding week. (Did I mention Indian weddings last seven days? There are prison sentences that run shorter than Indian weddings.) Sweetu is my actual cousin, her mother being my father’s younger sister. This I am pretty sure about, because we look too similar to not share blood. Her hair is long and thick like mine, we have the same nose, same fair and yellowish skin. She’s sarcastic and dismissive, somewhat of a hothead until she knows she has to pull it together for the sake of her mother, whose body will literally grow hot when she’s angry. Sweetu laughs when everyone gets upset over auspiciousness, a term used nearly constantly at Indian weddings. The accents here also pronounce the word as “aus-piss-ee-ous,” fragmented and somehow even more dramatic. The wedding date? Must be aus-piss-ee-ous. The pairing itself? Must consult the stars and ensure it is an aus-piss-ee-ous union. The placement of napkins, the volume of food circulated, the darkness of the bride’s henna? Let us all be sure this is the most aus-piss-ee-ous of aus-piss-ee-ous days. No one, English-speaking or not, knows what this fucking word means, but it is important that we observe it.