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

by Scaachi Koul

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.

Every time he asks me, I want to collapse into him a little more. I want to beg to come home, where I can keep an eye on them, and they can keep their eyes on me. Maybe we won’t die if we’re constantly looking at each other.

Nothing bad happens when you’re with your mom.

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.

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

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.

No one deserves your attention, but no one has earned your withdrawal.

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

women are being watched.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.