One day, a girl named Swapna asked if I wanted to join a dance she had choreographed to a song from the movie Devdas. She was a grade above mine, so we didn’t know each other well. She needed one more person for a performance at the local Hindu temple, she said. I missed performing Bollywood dances and I wanted desi friends. I knew that you and Papa would approve. I said yes.
Swapna was the unlikely combination of smart, kind, and mellow. Her calmness drew me in. At dance practice, I met her friend Adya, a tall, light-skinned Gujarati girl who went to a neighboring private school. She was Swapna’s foil, the bubbliest person I’d ever met, bursting into laughter over the smallest comments. The three of us had an instant chemistry.
Dance practices spilled into hangouts, which rotated among our three homes. At school, Yush befriended Swapna’s younger brother, and we absorbed the boys into our group seamlessly. We told one another jokes and stories, mostly, like about the time an uncle gravely cautioned the boys to drink water during a garba, as if the festive folk dance were a marathon: “It’s nonstop dandiya! Stay hydrated!”
We laughed, but then Yush couldn’t stop laughing. He laughed so hard at the thought of intensely hydrating for dandiya that he fell onto the floor. Then I started laughing harder, until I, too, was on the floor. This is what our time together was like. You asked fewer questions about what I was doing or where I was going when I was with Swapna and Adya, which was good for me, because their parents were far less strict than Papa.
Most Indian kids I knew felt pressured to pursue engineering, medicine, or law, and most Indian kids I knew planned to carry out their parents’ wishes. But Adya wanted to become a fashion designer. Swapna wanted to become a novelist. Their parents supported their ambitions. At a time when virtually no South Asian artists, entertainers, or writers existed in mainstream American culture, finding Swapna and Adya made me feel like less of a misfit. Watching them chase their dreams made me believe that maybe I could one day pursue mine, too.
In my senior year, Adya laid my head on an ironing board and ran a clothing iron over it. I struggled to keep my head still as I heard a loud sizzle and felt the steaming-hot metal next to my ear. She insisted this would make my hair pin-straight and shiny: white-girl hair. I put on heavy black eyeliner and mascara, exaggerating my big brown eyes – my best feature, inherited from you. Adya draped me in one of your black georgette saris. We were going to the temple for some event called Parents Appreciation Day, but that was just the excuse for something else: meeting Drew.
Drew, who was now in college, had been one of Adya’s good friends in high school. I had met him at a house party the year before, and he’d mentioned to Adya that he thought I was cute. He was tall and blond, with a body cut like the side of a cliff. Boy-band hot. Unlike the other hot boys, however, Drew was nice. And he didn’t know that I wasn’t cool, because he had attended a different high school. I had been bugging Adya to set us up, and now, tonight, it was happening – well, sort of.
We stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and Drew dropped by to meet us. Within a few minutes, Drew told me I was very pretty and then Adya gave me a look of excitement, and I blushed, but thankfully my brown skin did not reveal how flattered I felt. Adya blurted out, “You know, Prachi doesn’t have a date to prom,” and I shot her a look that said, Stop embarrassing me! but also Thank you, I love you, and Drew said, “Oh, really? Well, I would like to go with you,” and that was it. Suddenly I had a date to senior prom.
I had tricked Drew into thinking I was pretty, but I knew that beneath the makeup and clothes, I was ugly. For the past two years, I had been studying “hotness” – the ability to blend into whiteness. I bought makeup, hair products, and other tools to mute my loud ethnic traits. I wrangled my wild curls into barnyard straw with a flat iron, tacked on a heaving bust with silicone-padded bras, and tweezed my lush forest of brows down to twigs. At night when I was supposed to be studying, I started accounts on Match.com and RateDesi.com, a HotOrNot for South Asians. I A/B-tested my assimilated appearance and flirty new personas with adult men. After months of positive feedback, I knew that my efforts were working. I felt brave enough to face Drew.
Manoeuvering dates with Drew was difficult because I was not allowed to date. I would tell you I was going to Adya’s, and then I’d go to Drew’s house. On our first date, he drove us to Red Robin. We shared a sundae and went to the movie theatre to watch Taking Lives with Angelina Jolie. I felt insecure because I was ugly and Angelina Jolie was one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. I was sure that during the movie Drew would come to his senses and realize that he could have been out on a date with someone who looked like her.
When Drew picked me up for prom a few months later, I expected Papa to interrogate him. But Papa barely interacted with him. Later, though, he asked you, “Why would he want to go out with Prachi?”
I think you passed on statements like that as a way to tell me I was always being observed. “Log kya kahenge?” – what will people say? – turned into “Log yeh keh rahe hain.” This is what people are saying. When Yush and I took tae kwon do lessons as children, I “kiya-ed” with my whole body, screaming louder and for longer than Yush or any of the boys. After class one day, you mentioned that the moms at the studio had gawked at my loudness. You didn’t tell me to temper my voice, but in relaying this to me, you said that my noise embarrassed you. I never kiya-ed that way again. This was usually how we conveyed feelings, too, rarely speaking about them directly and instead telling each other what someone else had said about us, monitoring our emotions and actions based on how we imagined that others perceived us.
I understood why you told me Papa’s thoughts about Drew, and I understood why Papa said it. Papa knew what it meant to grow up here. He could have shown Yush and me how to love ourselves in the face of whiteness. But he could not teach us what he did not know himself.
In the bathroom at prom, one of the popular white girls asked me, “Is he your boyfriend?” and I said, “Yeah,” even though I wasn’t sure of our status. I could tell that I now held an esteem in her eyes that I had not before, like she was reevaluating everything she thought about me. I learned that when I was seen as the object of desire of a tall white man, suddenly, I mattered. I became visible. People who had overlooked me – including my own father – now noticed me.
Soon I relied on the boost I received when such a man wanted me, even if he could not fully understand me, even if when he saw me, he saw conquest or submission or exoticism or domesticity. For a long time that didn’t matter to me, because I was using him to perpetuate a fantasy, too. But as one such white man in college told me bluntly: “You’re pretty for an Indian girl – but Indian girls can only be nine-tenths as hot as a white girl.” Despite my best efforts to fit in, I could never fully belong. Instead, every time I submitted to the fantasy, I strengthened the power of my insecurities. Every time I submitted to the fantasy, I deepened my belief that I had to hide my true self in order to be desirable.
Excerpted with permission from They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us, Prachi Gupta, Simon and Schuster.
