Month: September 2017

Little girls in America are taught to dream about their perfect wedding day. The big white dress celebrates purity. Their favorite girlfriends in perfectly matching dresses, with perfectly paired groomsmen, stand in a cul-de-sac around the couple, eerily patterning the false perfection of our suburban childhoods.

I never seriously thought to daydream about my own wedding. Mom and dad have a mental guest list of all the aunties and uncles who invited us to their kid’s weddings and I suppose are waiting for their invitation. A mountain of  paperwork is waiting for us at the consulate so family from India can finally visit Am-ree-kah.

With a tired voice I explained to my girlfriends, Indian brides wore red and weddings are more like the chaos of sound, color, and lights of Indian traffic and less like a cooling stroll through Taj Mahal.

If I do it right, my wedding would probably be hosted in a suburban hotel that has room for a white horse in a parking lot. We could host the dinner at India House, a once grocery store, now Indian ballroom, perfectly tucked in a strip mall with endless parking and curbside drop off for women in saris.

They have the lucrative monopoly on the Indian wedding parties in the Chicagoland Area. Who else can do pure veg samosas and a chocolate fountain on the same bill? All I can hope for is an open bar, so some Indian kids with uni-brows and hairy arms can have their first drink before college.

I started answering the wedding daydream question a little differently when I got to college. “I’m not really sure. It kind of depends on who I marry,” which seemed like a perfectly logical answer if a wedding was about partnership.

My girlfriend’s eyes light up. I can see the idea of bright gems and colorful patterns swirling in their head. “You have to get married so I can go to an Indian wedding!” This is their only chance to experience a real live Indian wedding that will be soooooooo fun. I have to get married.  I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave to get married. I have to get married so they can come. Does Crate and Barrel’s wedding registry have a checkbox for down payment of a house?

“I hope it’s small. Or maybe I won’t have one.” which disappointed my friends. My ideal guest list got shorter and shorter as I got better at boundaries with my mom.

But I give her a lot of credit. As I got older, she realize my wedding might not happen in Chicago, where she lives. “We’ll have to get a tour bus so everyone can see San Francisco.”

My temperature shoots to 100 and I think steam must be blowing out of my ears like a Looney Toons character. What everyone? What wedding? What groom? What city? Who’s we? What if his family has their own wedding traditions? And a coach bus? The backpacker in me dies a little.  None of this is a factor.

“Sure,” I respond. It’s finally my mom’s chance to daydream about her daughter’s marriage. The idea of a virginal bride at an Indian wedding is kind of silly. What else would she be?

I vividly remember the first black man I kissed. We met on a melting hot summer afternoon in Capetown just before New Years. He grew up in a white neighborhood in Botswana and went by the name Sydney. He had an African name but didn’t respond to that other than at somewhere like the DMV. Sydney had soft full pinkish brown lips. They were the same color as mine. I liked his booty and he liked my hips.

He tasted different than other men. Maybe it was just the lager beer. There was nothing else to drink there. Not on a graduate student budget at least. The kiss was short but intense. We were in a bar on the third floor that felt like a bungalow. Capetown was alive at night, the air was thick and hot. Our hands and arms stuck to the red plastic table cloth with floral tropical print. My friend and travel companion had gone to the bathroom so it seemed like there was only one other obvious thing for us to do while we waited.

He sat across from me with a charming and cheeky smile. We both got up and kissed from across from each other. I had to press myself up on the table to reach him. Our teeth met a little because we were smiling. His hand softly pet my kinkless hair.

Sydney and I didn’t kiss again. We never needed to. But the three of us hung out the next few weeks while in town. We talked a lot about skin color and race and hair. We talked the most about hair. The conversation was not overly academic or about politics, culture, or the Apartheid. We just talked about the way things were.

In Capetown, I’m a white girl.

“How can that be Sydney? My skin is exactly the same color as yours,” I said pressing my forearm against his. My skin got so dark after a few days in the sun.

“Darling, Nina. You have straight, shiny hair and oval eyes. Being white is not about the color of your skin.” And even more confusing and later enlightening is to learn in Botswana I was mixed race. Of course I explained time and time again my mom and dad were both born in India and all of our ancestors were from there too. My soft cafe face and lightened cheeks with a bit of pink meant, I looked more like Rhianna and less like Mary J. Blige. Rhianna was on every other Billboard in Bostwana. She was their Beyonce.

I felt like a queen traveling in Africa. My curvy body, soft thighs, carmel skin, loving eyes, and naturally shiny black hair with soft waves was the ideal. I was always moved to the front of the queue, served drinks first, and treated with a little extra grace. It didn’t happen once or twice, it happened everywhere. I was labeled by my place in society, and the names were defined by color. I was white because I wasn’t black.

I was only seriously proposed to for marriage only once while traveling around Africa. I’m still connected to the guy. I met this suitor through Sydney’s childhood best friend who then lived in Jo’burg and now a DJ in Seattle and father of two.

The African admiration I felt wasn’t so much validating as dumbfounding. I had never walked into any bar, restaurant, club, airport, or travel agency, and got treated as a first class citizen other than fine establishments where it’s in the training manual. I wondered if this is what it was like to be skinny, white, and blonde somewhere like New York.