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

by Scaachi Koul

Do you know how many planes crash every year? Neither do I, but I know the answer is more than one, WHICH IS ENOUGH.

Travelling tells the world that you’re educated, that you’re willing to take risks, that you have earned your condescension.

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 was all in the service of keeping their daughter safe, but with the added bonus of making me afraid of nearly everything, external and internal.

When you leave the protective wing of your family for the first time, it takes a while before you learn that the only person now tasked with taking care of you is you.

Being afraid of the world, of unknown beasts, only makes you feel alone. Sometimes you just need to get on the plane and hope nothing bad happens.

But in truth, I just didn’t know if I was allowed to look like a “cute girl” if my body was bigger than the other girls I knew, if my skin was darker, if I was more sullen than sugar.

There will be something else to make me feel bad, inching up towards all the things I currently feel bad about, and no crop top made by small, underpaid, foreign hands can cure me—or you. 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.

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.

Then, in high school, I was repeatedly called the n-word, because racism doesn’t have to be accurate, it just has to be acute.

All of us struggle towards whiteness.

People I’ve worked with—predominantly white women—have told me to “watch my tone” or to be more polite, because a brown woman, any brown woman, can’t be too much of anything.

Teenage girls of all creeds and colours so often think their bodies are too big, or too small, or too misshapen to be acceptable—we are conditioned to hate ourselves and the ways we’re built.

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.

A place, any place, can be beautiful and perfect and damaged and dangerous at the same time.

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: throughout this trip, I tried to place people, where I had met them, how I knew them. I can’t remember anything anymore.

What was valued above all, despite how some of us used the site to be smart and clever, was our femaleness. We were girls, so it dragged attention towards us and then tried to make us feel bad for it.

For those of us who are not in a position of power—us women, us non-white people, those who are trans or queer or whatever it is that identifies us as inherently different—the internet means the world has a place to scream at us.

Why waste my finite fear and rage on what is, ultimately, something my cat can trap and eat out of her little pink paws?

Slay

It changes you, when you see someone similar to you, doing the thing you might want to do yourself.

We are deeply afraid of making marginalized voices stronger, because we think it makes privileged ones that much weaker.

“But you don’t owe anyone anything. You don’t have to be available to everyone. You can stop.”

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.

We love to talk about the web as if it’s a limitless resource, like the only barriers we put on it are what the government will allow, what money will buy, what manpower can create. But all things built by humans descend into the same pitfalls: loathing, vitriol, malicious intent. All the things we build in order to communicate, to connect, to find people like us so we feel less alone, and to find people not like us at all so we learn how to adapt, end up turning against us.

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

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.”

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.

Once, we drove past a church offering a free lunch, and he tried to persuade my mother and me to pretend being Christians just to get a sandwich. “Could save me a few bucks,” he said, chuckling and accidentally speeding past a traffic cop.

Bruh