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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scaachi Koul
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November 10 - November 13, 2017
He says he’s pre-diabetic now, so every morning starts with a spoonful of fenugreek seeds, which I tried just once—they tasted so strongly of death that eating them seemed more like an omen than a cure.
Mom sucked marrow out of a lamb bone with shocking fervour, then stuck her tongue through the hollow to tease me about how truly, deeply gross I found it.
She yelled at me with unbelievable bluster, threatened to murder me in such a subtle fashion that “no one will know” or with such flare that “everyone will see.” She’d chase me around the house with a wooden spoon, threatening a whipping if I ran my mouth one more time. None of it led to much of anything. I was never in danger. 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.
she called and warned me to stay away from the ocean: “You’ll get arrogant and a wave will come and just get you.”
What was the rationale in choosing the country you are going to. Is it some sort of getting back at me. You know that I will be up for all the period that you will be gone. Your brother did not go anywhere this exotic. What did I do to you. I did exactly what you wanted to do in terms of your post high school education. Is this Hostel that you are going to be safe. Do you have to share bathroom. What other places are you visiting. I know there is nothing I can do except stay up nights and days while you are away. No other kid has done this. Why, why. May some heavenly force be your
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I watched in awe as they proceeded to stuff suitcases with a five-pound bag of almonds (“I need to have almonds every day and what if they don’t have almonds there?”),
Is this an Indian thing??
Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we’re taught anything, we’re taught to hide.
I had a funny name, and teachers and the parents of other kids always asked: “Where are you from?” I learned fast that the correct answer wasn’t “I take the E bus and I’m the second to last stop and that’s where I live,” but rather “My parents are Indian immigrants.” With that answer, their faces would light up and they’d say, “Oh, I hear India is amazing! Does your mom make curry?” Then I would shrug and say, yeah, sure, I guess she does, but isn’t that like me asking if your mom boils water?
Papa told me we were Kashmiri, which was good, because we were from the north. He told me we were of the Brahmin caste, we were descendants of pundits, literally meaning we were smart and educated and worthy, cultural history that wasn’t necessarily true but was certainly felt. He never outright mentioned that we were also some of the fairest in the country, and how our privilege was largely related to the sheer dumb luck of being lighter, but I’d figure that out soon enough.
Then, in high school, I was repeatedly called a nigger, because racism doesn’t have to be accurate, it just has to be acute.
In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they’re bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he’ll try to bond with me over the trouble with “the blacks.” All of us struggle towards whiteness.
I don’t know what came first, the class differentiations or the shadism, but they are inextricably linked.
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. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we’re punished, as if we’re speaking badly of an elderly relative who can’t help but make fun of the Irish. The white majority doesn’t like being reminded that the cultural landscape is still flawed, still broken, and while my entry into something like Canadian
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In some ways, things will be easier for her, and in others, much harder, because you can belong even less when you come from two separate factions. We struggled towards whiteness, and soon she will have to develop her own definitions for the complexity of being two things at once. I want to stamp brownness on her, but in a way that protects her rather than exposes her. I can’t have it both ways.
But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working.
I thought my body would make more sense here, that I’d find people with my hips, my arms, my thighs, my ever-expanding neck. My body was being wedged into this country at odd angles, shoved in where it might have never belonged in the first place.
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.
People allow India to exist only in two versions. In the first, everything is too beautiful to be encapsulated, women are swarthy and hippy, shoeless boys play soccer in dirt roads, elephants roam the streets, and temples are merely there for your enjoyment. In the second, India is a country lurching forward awkwardly, suffering a rape epidemic, incapable of a feminist movement or proper health care, a place where people shit and piss in the streets, where the caste system has ruined entire generations, where poverty is so rampant and depressing that you’ll hardly make it out with your soul
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That’s where India becomes a place she was from and not a place she lives. That’s where her roots get pulled out.
So much of immigration is about loss. First you lose bodies: people who die, people whose deaths you missed. Then you lose history: no one speaks the language anymore, and successive generations grow more and more westernized. Then you lose memory:
These men who harass women online were all owed something very simple at one time—respect, love, affection, the basic decency of living upwards and not curling inwards, a humane education—and someone, along the line, failed them.
It’s so obvious that when these men yell at me and try to get me fired and threaten to have me killed they’re angry at both the entire world and specific people, people I don’t even know, people I have never met, people who did far worse things than my mere existence could ever do. It doesn’t make me feel better about it, it doesn’t make me like it, but it does give me an answer.
Knowing what complete strangers were comfortable saying to me was one cruelty, but not knowing, and pretending that it didn’t matter, was a worse kind of distress.
“There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation,” he said when I told him about my Twitter account burning down before my eyes. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to play.”
But no one on the internet is actually a person; they’re just an amalgamation of human parts, like a robot made from all the components of a person but missing the essentials, like a brain or a lymphatic system. It sounds like a person and, sometimes, looks like one, but it’s not. It’s an idea. You can’t get mad at ideas as if they’re people. An idea isn’t going to hold your hand. Ideas don’t owe you anything.
The troubling part is not that there are people online who feel comfortable—vindicated and strong—in calling me a cum-bucket. What scares me is that those people go out into the world, holding these convictions secretly or otherwise, and exist around me physically. I see them at the bank and they go to my dentist and I might end up working with them. What they say to me online is the purest distillation of the rage they feel—statements that would get them fired or arrested in real life but get them a moderate fan base or begrudging attention online. Maybe they consider their online presence a
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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? People told me countless times how dangerous it is to be a woman and drink near men, how careful you have to be, how it’s your fault if you let something happen.
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
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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.”
The intersection of rape culture and surveillance culture means that being a guarded drinker is not only my responsibility, it is my sole responsibility. Any lapse in judgment could not only result in clear and present danger, but also set me up for a chorus of “Well, she should’ve known better.”
But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn’t a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security.
while a man’s face near my clitoris was unheard of, the idea was made even worse by the sight of the shorn pussies I saw in pornography, girls that were smooth and rosy, looking more like Hostess treats than real girls. They barely had skin, never mind hair, every inch of them looking the way a woman was supposed to look, like a candy, something you might let roll around in your mouth.
How nice it must be to feel so free, so unburdened by the politics of your hair, that you can do whatever you want to it: shave it, cut it, dye it, or just let it exist, worry-free.
the only way to do better, to have better, is to lose pieces of what was.
I continued to date him after that, possibly because I had low self-esteem but more realistically because he felt like home. “Falling in love” sounds so passive, but it did feel unintentional, like tripping into a pit that happened to be filled with downy gold.
Our story was delightful in its mundanity: we met, it worked, we’re trying.
It’s hard to encapsulate years of your partner quietly waiting for you to take action, of them sitting next to you and though they hold their tongue about the brown elephants in the room, you can hear the constant buzzy hum of them wanting more from you.
I wanted him to defend himself and get angry and a little mean because fighting is the only way I’ve learned how to be in love.
see how bad I could make this, see if I could ruin everything from the inside out. Maybe if this relationship was weak, weak enough so I wouldn’t have to make the eventual, impossible choice between my father and my boyfriend, then the universe could just do it for me. We would break and we could move on. Like most things, it just needed some pressure.
Papa’s sun is the brightest, so when he decides to set, it makes for some very long, cold winters.
Rebellion isn’t my strong suit, neither is love, and now I have to perform both.
can wait for the inevitable, because it is inevitable:
Thank you for struggling for comfort with me.
“What is a schlemiel and how is it different from a schlemazel?”
