When I was growing up, I spent summers in my parents’ native South India. In the mornings, I’d sit on the veranda of my grandparents’ house as clusters of little girls in blue jumpers, starched blouses, and stiff pigtails walked past me on their way to the village elementary school. They’d stare (Who’s that girl in the foreign clothes?) and I’d stare right back (Who are those girls with the bright ribbons in their hair and the shiny tiffin boxes swinging on their arms?).
The experience was disorienting. Watching those girls was like gazing into a mirror that should have been. The mirror that would have been if my parents hadn’t moved to America.
Now, decades later, I still experience this disorientation. My world feels too thin—or I feel too thin in it—and I think: I could have been a village housewife, raising chickens, milking cows, and drawing water from a well. I could have been a woman who doesn’t write, speak, or think in English. How is it that I wear jeans, not saris? Sport highlights, not headscarves? Why did I become this me, this American me? I could so easily have become another.
