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

by Scaachi Koul

The India of this trip is not the one I remember from fifteen years earlier. Now, I find my preferred type of toilet rather than ones that force you to squat and, inevitably, pee all over yourself. (White people have a lot of flaws, but they did indeed master taking a leisurely forty-three-minute dump while comfortably seated.)

because a cabal of talking thumbs couldn’t avoid calling me a bitch for more than a single day.

Plenty of us are fighting for structural changes, but a firmer solution has more to do with correcting human behaviour in general. No one learns how to be mean at twenty-five. No one actually becomes a hardline racist in their thirties. These are beliefs and behaviours we inherit from our bloodlines, from the people who raised us, and the internet is just another way to put those beliefs to work.

“Who do you even talk to on Twitter?” Papa asked me after I told him I had rejoined. “Who could be so important there?” I thought about my family’s traditional Kashmiri last name, how any other Kashmiri can point us out in a phone book and know where we’re from. This has, literally, happened: when I was still living at home, a recent immigrant looked up our listed number, called us, and asked if he could come over to talk to my parents and get some help integrating. Mom made him fried vangan and Papa offered him chai and I was perplexed that my otherwise very private, very protective parents let a complete stranger stroll into their home just because he came from the same region they did. But they were trying to find connection, to talk to someone who understood them. I will likely have to tell you, here, that vangan is eggplant, but online, I can find someone in mere seconds who already knows that. Our worlds become a little smaller, we feel closer, we feel less alone. Eventually, that interaction won’t merit abuse online. It won’t result in a skinhead sending me a message about how brown people smell like shit, or how we should be thanking white people for allowing us to live here. But that pendulum doesn’t swing if you detach, if you refuse to play entirely, if you leave the room and try to play by yourself.

But the only way to do better, to have better, is to lose pieces of what was. It’s inevitable that you can’t bring everything with you, like carrying water in your cupped hands from one river to another. There are too many cracks, and if you’re so eager to move, you’ll just have to get used to new water.