By Divya Ravindra Menon
As an Indian child growing up in Hong Kong, my basic appearance made my status as a foreigner self-evident. I was brown and most others were not, and though this seems like a small difference in retrospect, it made a big impact on my reality. Growing up, I imagined living somewhere I didn’t stand out, where my ethnicity wasn’t the first thing attached to me. As I grew, I slowly learned to embrace my identity, and for much of my life I felt that I carried some sort of banner for my ethnicity.
I was The Indian, and amongst friends I positioned myself as some sort of authority on all things originating from the subcontinent. Even at college in the States, where the pool of Desi students expanded exponentially, I managed to find a group of friends where I was the only one who identified (somewhat misleadingly) as Indian. I liked being different but I always wondered what it would feel like if I wasn’t.
After college, it seemed natural to me to head ‘home’ to the motherland. I had spent so many years talking about India without really having lived there. I had always felt like an alien in every place I had lived, always navigating through the finer points of a foreign culture, and essentially faking a familiarity that was never completely there. But I always felt wholly Indian, it was something that informed so much of what I did and how I acted that I figured it was time I put my money where my mouth was and experience the ‘real’ India.
To my surprise, settling into life in Bombay was far more difficult than I imagined. Things that seemed simple to me would take days to sort out, from fixing the refrigerator to getting a bank account. Looking back, I realize how naïve it had been for me to rely on my rudimentary understanding of how things were done in India. I was often incredibly frustrated by aspects of life I was used to having complete control over and it took a while for me to learn that all I could do was sit back, breathe, and realize there was indeed a reason why yoga originated in the subcontinent. I wondered if the innate “Indianness” I had purported to possess my entire life was completely bogus. With my coarse Hindi skills and a total lack of understanding of the intricacies of life in my supposed homeland, I spent many days struggling.
Fortunately, certain other aspects of life were much simpler. I made many of my first friends in India because my cousin introduced them to me. I still find it bewildering that I was adopted into a world of strangers based on one single point of reference, but I am unquestionably thankful to my cousin, and to the lovely people who are now some of my nearest and dearest. Despite my excellent luck in this regard, making friends who were one hundred percent Indian only highlighted how different I was, culturally. Rather than being The Indian as I was in my previous life, I was now The Foreigner – a mantle I was less happy to accept.
In the day to day, my foreignness was highlighted in ways I found disconcerting. For example, at first my heart would bruise any time I was approached by one of the scores of street urchins. However, I realized quickly that doling out 10 rupees upon every solicitation would a) make no difference to their situation and b) add up to an unsustainable level of charity on my meager salary. Although it isn’t politically correct to say, I realized I had to harden myself to the endemic poverty and turn my head when it approached my car window. Many of these things took a while to get used to, but as I realize now, settling in anywhere requires a certain amount of adjustment, and it was impractical of me to think that India would be less so.
More than anything, when I’d first moved to Bombay I had anticipated a feeling of homecoming. Despite spending most of my life on foreign soil, I always felt like Bombay was in my bones. In actuality, the city was a place I was only vaguely familiar with, in the same way living in cities like New York or London always felt natural to me. The home I had hoped for didn’t magically exist, and I realized I would have to make my life and my home in Bombay, as I had done in other places. Now, after almost four years, I can say I have made a life and settled into my homeland but I have also, without a doubt, given up the idea that my brown skin has too much to do with that.
