One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays

by Scaachi Koul

Nothing bad can happen to you if you’re with your mom. Your mom can stop a bullet from lodging in your heart. She can prop you up when you can’t. Your mom is your blood and bone before your body even knows how to make any. *

(It is, indeed, easy for us to think Mom is weak. She absorbs everything from the rest of us, her ungrateful, dissonant family.) She took on the responsibility for being afraid for everyone. And if you spend that much time thinking that something is going to happen to you, it’s likely because once in your life, something did, and you just don’t want it to happen again.

But despite this hatred of shopping, I have faith in clothing, in its ability to transform you into something or someone better. At our cores, we are all swirling masses of infectious disease, pulsating orbs of pus, moist tubes filled with piss and shit. But maybe if we put on a nice suit or one of those giant statement necklaces that suggest we have more money than we do, someone else will think us clean enough to touch, to go to dinner with, to greet without flinching, to introduce to their parents.

This was the same year I discovered Lord of the Rings weenie Orlando Bloom, a crush that would last twenty-four months and spawn more than one fan club.

Been there girlfriend

even now, as a tense, uncomfortable adult, I forevermore aim to be “chill.”

or maybe I would wear it with a big floppy hat and a trench coat at Parisian cafés, waiting for a parcel from a mysterious stranger. (I am Carmen Sandiego in this fantasy, like I am in most of my non-sexual, non-food-related fantasies.)

(in this version of the fantasy, I am perpetually in a commercial; don’t worry about it)

Girls who had been mean to me in high school would see me in this skirt and think, “Is that Scaachi?” and I’d say, “YOU BET IT IS, YOU DUMB BITCH” and then punch all their boyfriends in the teeth. (I have not thought this fantasy through; just let me have this.)

Clothes are ephemeral: they fall apart in the wash, you lose them at a friend’s house, they rip and crumble and go out of style. You’ll forget about them and buy new ones and then start the cycle again. But your insecurities, the ones that make you go hunting for something to make you feel better, to love yourself more, to give you a renewed sense of self or greater esprit—don’t you even worry. Those will last you a lifetime.

Like farts and the incorrect retellings of classic literature, racism is a lot cuter when it comes out of a little girl.

(White people love skiing; they’re always doing weird shit with snow.)

And while Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding hands 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.

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!

She used to call me on the phone and scream, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.”

Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or the children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you’re in.

(For the last six years, I’ve been in a heated argument with my former editor and current nemesis, Jordan, over whether it’s spelled woah or whoa, with me championing the former. He might be right, but frankly, I’m in too deep and I would sooner die than let him think that whoa doesn’t look fucking ludicrous.)

Alcohol is the great equalizer. Alcohol makes you brave. Alcohol makes you beautiful. Alcohol makes you fall in love.

Women can’t be fun all the time, can’t drink without consequence. Frankly, few people can, but who feels the consequences of their otherwise harmless actions quite like women?

Your life’s greatest heartbreaks are so often your friends: dating isn’t always built for permanence, but friendship often is.

(When a guy asks to buy you a drink, suggest he buy you a snack instead and see how that goes over.)

Surveillance feeds into rape culture more than drinking ever could. It’s the part of male entitlement that makes them believe they’re owed something if they pay enough attention to you, monitor how you’re behaving to see if you seem loose and friendly enough to accommodate a conversation with a man you’ve never met. He’s not a rapist. No, he’s just offering to buy you a beer, and a shot, and a beer, and another beer, he just wants you to have a really good time. He wants you to lose the language of being able to consent. He’s drunk too, but of course, you’re not watching him like he’s watching you.

And yet, being surveilled with the intention of assault or rape is practically mundane, it happens so often. It’s such an ingrained part of the female experience that it doesn’t register as unusual. The danger of it, then, is in its routine, in how normalized it is for a woman to feel monitored, so much so that she might not know she’s in trouble until that invisible line is crossed from “typical patriarchy” to “you should run.”

There’s something so carnal about pulling little parts of your body off or out of yourself.

But of course, the secret to Indian hair is merely to be Indian, to have decades of systemic racism, and fear of the other, and beauty anxiety, and fetishization, and repulsion woven into your roots.

Raisin is at that perfect age when she isn’t occupied with her own beauty because no one has yet told her to be.

The home we grew up in was a big get for my parents, proof that they’d succeeded in achieving the immigrant dream, so of course they filled it with memories of another home.

It’s the same home I knew as a kid, but, frankly, better. Like all things you leave but can’t forget, it somehow gets warmer, sepia-toned, and unattainable in your memory.

These sounds don’t feel the same. They don’t feel as comforting, because they are mine, are my responsibility, while the ones at home are my parents’—the promise that everything is fine, consistent, safe at home. *

Who was I to say no to an interested boy, like some caucasian.

Our choices were always between family and freedom. Neither, frankly, were all that easy to walk away from.

wouldn’t want to do anything to upset you,” he told my dad, while I stormed off upstairs to lock myself in my room, cry in my pillow, and maybe let out one tortured scream of, “BUT IT’S NOT FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIRRRRR.” Just one of the classics.