August 2003

I am Indian ... or so my passport says. I was born in a large Indian city. My mother who had been married for less than a year then, wanted to raise me there for sentimental reasons, but my father landed a job in Kuwait, which as far as my mother was concerned, was many planets away.

I do not remember much of my first few years in Kuwait - only flashes of color, and faces of random people that pulled my cheeks. But one thing I do remember was that we were taught to fear Arab children. As kids, all of us were unruly, always had hair that was combed once in the morning and left to take many forms of untidy over the day, almost always had a piece of candy we bought from the bakala (the grocery store), and sticky faces from the dry heat that Kuwaiti evenings offered. The Arab children looked just as unruly and brown as us with the only difference being their footballs instead of our cricket bats. But our parents viewed their unruliness as different from ours. As my dad once put it, "They are MORE unruly!"

When parents are forced to pry their children from their natural habitats into large foreign lands with strange people, they feel forced to severely preserve their own culture in their children. As a result, I was put in The Kuwait Indian School, had only Indian friends (well, one Pakistani friend in my building - but she stole my Barbie’s shimmer evening gown and gave her a bikini instead. Her brother kept flipping his eyelids inside out just to see me run terrified.), went only to Indian cultural events, ate only Indian food, and was taught
to sing only Indian devotional songs. But what my parents did not realize was that there existed a whole different culture, language, and way of life on their daughter’s way back home. Everyday she was exposed to two recitals from the Quran from 6 different mosques-played on loudspeakers, she was exposed to broken conversation with the Arabic Bakala owner who had all the candy, and she was exposed to women in tight black scarves or full head dresses. Most of all, she was exposed to a plethora of questions that began with ’why?’.

We were growing and so was media. By the time we moved to Abudhabi, the next Arabic city my father was transferred to, everyone had cable television. Star TV revolutionized pre-teen life by replacing our few evening cartoons with American shows featuring extremely pretty women and temptingly delicious men. So now I was an Indian adapting to a new Arabic country while desperately trying to emulate an American way of life . My parents still insisted on regular cultural training- like I was forced to wear a bindi ( a dot on the forehead) and my elaborate gold earrings wherever I went. This seriously undermined my desire to be a bindi-free American woman, and I consoled myself by watching the Little Mermaid over and over again.

Cultural divides were so deep that when we passed a Pakistani or an Arabic school bus on our way back home, a kid in their bus would spit on our window, and a kid in ours would spit at their window. I don’t think any of us understood why. But my curiosity was slowly overwhelming my desire to keep my head straight and ignore the white gob of spit oozing outside my window. I remember examining the ooze once. Maybe we didn’t like them because they ate something gross.

My parents decided that it was time for their eldest daughter to be shipped back to her homeland to finish her education. So I was flown to India. The more time I spent there, the more I missed my weird Arab neighbors. Atleast there I knew who to avoid. Here, everybody looked the same, and my dad was wrong. I saw new levels of unruliness that he obviously missed while growing up. I did not feel like an Indian. I had been exposed to a very different culture despite my parents’ many efforts to protect me from it, and this was proving to be such a lonely experience. Nobody understood my jokes, no one had watched Beverly Hills 90210, everyone was jealous of my creamy kraft-cheese and bread lunch, and they all thought I was rich and spoilt just because I came from ’foreign’.

Eventually I learnt to leave my Kraft cheese at home, stop talking about Luke Perry, and dress up to look poorer. I made a lot of friends but was more confused than ever.

Two years ago I moved to the United States. I met Pakistanis, Arabs, and Americans. And no one spat at each other. This was great! A lot of freedom and a wide palette of friends made me slowly discover that I belonged to an entirely different culture. I understood myself a little better now. I wasn’t very Indian, I wasn’t very Arabic, and was too much of both to be very American. I like boys, but do not understand casual dating. I pray my but I do so in a church. I grew up a vegetarian Hindu but find myself saying "Medium-well" at a steak house. My best friend is a Pakistani.

I might be confused, but am learning to accept that too. And I gave up the bindi somewhere along the way, but still wear the earrings.