BROWN GIRL IN THE… DELUGE?

The struggle to belong

(All content on this Substack is subject to copyright and may not be reproduced or used in any form without the consent of © Rilla Jaggia)

Let me start with a confession. I have never fit in.

Oh, you noticed!

Well, I used to try, so very hard.

Growing up biracial or bi-cultural anywhere can be bewildering at the best of times. Can confine you to a lifetime of identity-confusion, heartsick yearning, and icy-black loneliness.

Right from the start, long ago, in rural India, I had it dinned into me how terribly different I was. My mother was American, something that, in those days, encompassed not just her nationality, but her race and culture as well. She was what made me different.

Not until I was older, could I understand what it might have been like for her living there, the sole Westerner in a very non-Western setting. Did she try to fit in?

With a vengeance!

Here is an excerpt from my mildly autobiographical YA novel, Sandalwood and Stone, as to what that moment of realization felt like for me.

I stare at her. And it’s like I’ve never really seen her before. She’s just been my amma. But now, on the couch, sits a foreigner. Her skin is so very pale despite nineteen years of south-Indian sun. The inferno that is her auburn hair would consume her face, if it weren’t tamed by the tranquility of those emerald-green eyes. Her sari is elegant, draped to perfection in an appeal to let six yards of starched fabric hide just how out of place she is here.

I am such an idiot. Honest to Goddess, I’ve never considered how hard she works to fit in. She does it with such grace.

So, as I mentioned, the above is fiction. You’ve seen my mother’s pictures…

…she doesn’t have auburn hair. The rest, though, is pretty spot on. My mother grew her hair to put it up in a bun like an Indian. She wore saris or, since we lived in the north, then, a salwar or churidar kameez (long side-slitted shirt over either baggy harem style or skinny, leg clinging pants) like an Indian.

My mother in the 1960s in Northern India © HWB

But most of all, she learned Hindi. Fluently. Better than most Indians. So well, in fact, that she developed her own adult literacy method and manual and would go out into the village after the farmers had returned from their fields, with a portable chalkboard, and flashlight if necessary, set up under a tree, and teach them to read and write their own language.

My mother teaching illiterate farmers how to read and write © HWB

Often she traveled to teach in remote tribal areas.

My mother teaching villagers to read and write their own language--Hindi.© HWB

Fitting in was what she worked at to perfection, just like everything else she did.

You could say that in real life, I had the ultimate role model. But unlike her, I didn’t have a singular racial, cultural, and national identity to root myself in. She knew where she came from and where she wanted to go. And of course, she’d chosen this path.

Me? I’d had no choice in the matter when I was thrown in the deep end of an ocean of incomprehension without any notion of how to stay afloat, let alone swim. I rose sputtering to the surface and thought I knew who I was. Indian. Having never known or been anywhere else. But everyone around me stubbornly insisted otherwise. Apparently, I didn’t look the part. My coloring was wrong. Here’s another excerpt from my YA novel manuscript about that teenager, suspiciously similar to me, spending the evening at her best friend, Priya’s, cousin’s wedding, painting portraits for the guests.

Some relative in a shimmering turquoise sari leans toward Priya. “Who’s the foreigner painting portraits?”

I cringe at her whispered words.

“Aunty,” Priya says. “Saras isn’t a foreigner.” She turns to me and mouths, “Sorry.”

The woman nods, knowingly. “Anglo-Indian, then.”

“No, no. Her amma’s American. But you wouldn’t know it. She’s like more Indian than you are: wears saris, speaks Urdu and Telugu. Saras has only ever lived here; totally one of us.”

“Oh-h. Half-American.” The woman is still whispering. “That explains it.”

“Explains what, Aunty?” Priya says loudly, hoping, no doubt, to dissuade any further conversation. Dear, dear Priya.

“You know.” The woman is definitely not dissuaded. “Her odd coloring.”

A snort bursts from me. I’m so tired of the consternation over the provenance of…my complexion. It makes no difference that I know nothing about America. …as a half-breed, I’m a foreigner in my own home.

But here’s the thing, if I were to be colored wrong, I should have at least had some say in the matter. I mean, seriously, couldn’t my coloring be all wrong with gorgeous jet-black hair and shimmering green eyes? Did I have to be stuck in Pantone’s weird color choice of the year—brown? OK, they call it mocha mousse or whatever. But brown by any other name is still that. And I was drowning in all that mocha mousse with my brown hair and brown eyes and tanned brown skin.

© HWB

I’ll hand it to my mother; she did try on one front. When she was pregnant with me, she made my father promise he’d bequeath to me his beautiful curly hair. (Since my dad was bald as long as I knew him, I’ll just have to trust her on that one.) She tried. And for a wild couple of days after I was born, thought she’d succeeded, in a manner of speaking. My hair was jet-black and so frizzy it stood up on my head in an un-tame-able peak.

Me and Mom and my un-tameable tuft © HWB

My godfather was so amused when he visited us in the hospital he ran right out and bought me my first birthday gift—a hairbrush.

But for all its seeming rebelliousness, the peak didn’t last. Curiously, it crumbled, giving up the fight and falling out in handfuls, to be replaced by mousy brown strands, straight as a ruler.

Me and Mom with my hair straight as a stick © HWB

And I was stuck. Not just a mongrel, a nondescript one, whose very brown-ness, in a strange twist of fate, made her conspicuous.

Until I left home and started to travel around the world.

Suddenly, brown was in, my coloring just right. Even before Pantone decided on it. Suddenly, I belonged… to a bewildering array of identities, not one of them my own.

I’ve had people speak to me in Arabic and Farsi, Spanish, Italian, and French, and more languages I don’t even recognize. They approach me in airports with a sigh of relief, a look of recognition as if to say—there, a compatriot, someone I can talk to, who can help me…

And I am suffused with the warmth of a sense of belonging, of being wanted. It is short-lived of course. Over in a split second when my wide-eyed incomprehension gives me away and the person realizes their mistake and retreats disappointed.

So, what am I to do if I don’t match any single identity or culture or country?

Why celebrate my uniqueness, of course. And while I’m at it, streak my hair purple and teal, colors of the galaxy, to proclaim I firmly belong somewhere in the universe.

Me and my Javelina, from my art series Beautiful Hybrid painted for my town’s mascot — one of fifty artists chosen to paint the town mascot for a fundraiser © Rilla Jaggia

(All content on this Substack is subject to copyright and may not be reproduced or used in any form without the consent of © Rilla Jaggia)