You’re Indian. You may not carry an Indian passport, you may
never have lived there, or even ever set foot in the country, but by virtue of
your brown skin, you’re Indian. India to you is the place your parents came
from, a small part of the complicated tapestry that you’re dying to illustrate
every time someone asks you “where are you from?” But India is more than just a
place for you. It is the invisible nametag on your shirt. If your school has
students from a hundred countries, you are known as “the Indian kid”. If your
school only has kids from a single neighbourhood, you are still known as “the
Indian kid”. You are always the “Indian kid”. Never a Hong-Konger or American
or whatever else you may be.
You visit sometimes. You eat the Technicolor versions of
foods that you’ve only eaten before in grey scale. You politely decline tea
(and nevertheless have it forced upon you) in the homes of people with whom you
share little more than blood. Your ancestral village (you’ve only just escaped
having it as part of your last name) is more alien to you than Diagon Alley, a
place that exists only in your bookworm imagination. You finally learn to
accept that “going home” isn’t the perfect putting together of puzzle pieces
that you had imagined. You console yourself with the thought that even you are
not familiar with your homeland; at least it is familiar with you.
Every face is a variation of your own. The first day you
join an Indian school, you are unnerved by the profusion of brown faces before
you. Later, as you learn to push the boundaries of punctuality, you’re relieved
that your teacher cannot immediately point you out in assembly. You begin to
count on the brown ocean to embrace you, a shield you never knew you needed.
After a couple of years, you begin to pride yourself on your ability to blend
in; to temporarily try living without the hyphen that you’ve been carrying
along all these years.
You’re not fooling anyone. The
hyphen isn’t going anywhere. The first time it happens, you’re at your state’s
most famous tourist attraction. As you gaze up at the filigreed stone, at the
buxom woman forever contorted into a Bharatanatyam pose, both pride and wonder
fill you. “This exquisite art belongs to my
state”, you think.
“Madam.” A little boy is hovering
around you. He looks a little bit like your second cousin. You turn hesitantly,
expecting him to peddle a tourist guidebook that you know is half-price outside. But he has nothing in his eyes except
curiosity. He drops a bombshell. “Which
country are you from?”
Which country are you from? “I’m from here! Can’t you see that?”
You want to yell. “I’m from Bangalore,”
you say instead, in what you hope is unaccented Kannada. Who knows, you could
be wrong on that count too. You sit down on the hot temple steps in a daze. You
know you don’t look “exotic” (horrid Orientalist term), never keeping people
guessing about your ethnicity. Your hair and eyes are dark, and in matrimonial
ad parlance, your skin is a firm “wheatish”. In your eyes, and in the eyes of
all the foreigners you’ve ever met, you’ve always been “the Indian kid”. In the
eyes of a “real” Indian kid, you are ambiguous.
It happens again and again. The
words leave your mouth as Kannada but reach people’s ears as English. You pay
local entry fee at tourist sites and watchmen ask you suspiciously where you
are from. Twenty other Indians have just
crossed the gate without incident. Conversations invariably switch to English
when you enter them.
Sometimes you feel proud. You’re
sick of blending in. You’re relieved that such a big part of your identity refuses to hide itself. But mostly you feel weary. Looking, thinking, living differently from everyone else
has left you with an ache you never knew you had. And being “the Indian kid”
has transformed from burn to balm. You cling to the thought that once you
return to India the label that once set you apart will show you where to
belong. You come here and realise that everyone, and therefore no one, is “the
Indian kid” in India. You shed the nametag you’ve been wearing your entire life
and learn to accept a new one – “the foreign kid”.
