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.

But I don’t know what we were all fucking crying about because Sweetu returned from her husband’s home a laughable seven hours later.

Pretty much exactly what my 'bidai' was like, except no one was crying from anything other than exhaustion and relief that the long circus was almost over!

When white people set movies or music videos in India, they often depict the spring festival of Holi, with coffee-skinned people throwing powder at each other while wearing white. In some regions, this does happen, but there’s something odd about other people using depictions of this holiday with no thought to when it actually takes place. Imagine if brown people kept making movies in which people were celebrating President’s Day for no discernible reason.

Men watch women at the gym, at work, on the subway: in any space occupied by men and women, the women are being watched.

Hair is a statement, but mine, mine is louder, darker, always less willing to go away. It says too much about me to be affected by mere trends.

My mother and I shared a furtive glance because this is something he says every few months, anytime something reminds him of home: Maybe we should move to India? Plenty of the baby-boomer men in my family have said this: hit sixty and decided it was time to return to a place they left thirty, forty years ago. They never follow through, though, because what they’re missing isn’t the place, the way the sun hits the palm tree outside your window, the way that hot weather always makes the air look reddish, even at night. What they miss are people who are long gone, a version of their lives where they were ten and dipping jerry cans into a canal, and brothers and sisters still lived together in the same house without children, needy goddamn children who don’t speak Hindi or Kashmiri and don’t even know what a kitab is when you threaten to hit them with one. Old world, yes. So old it’s unattainable. I suspect that even our relatives who stay in India miss this too.

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.