Three neighborhood moms called a meeting with my mother and me…to accuse me of witchcraft. My being deemed the color of dog poo at recess. Decades-old memories resurfaced in the process: my father, eating khichdi kadhi with his hands, switching abruptly to the cutlery my mother would whisk his way in a silent diaspora dance of shame were someone to appear at the door. Years later, I’d reenvision that neither-here-nor-there space as the We Are Here of Born Confused. Contact with the motherland was via triple-fold airmail stationery letters that took weeks, sometimes months, to arrive, turning our mailbox azure with that distant longed-for sky.Īt that time, no people of our particular diasporic background were visible, audible anywhere-not on our streets, TV, in bands, magazines, on bookshelves. It was the 60s: no technology to stay in touch-a cultural and personal isolation hard to imagine today. Once in the US, my parents didn’t see or speak to their phoneless families for six years. Out-of-bounds love leading the unpaved way. Turning borders to bridges: in their blood. Their open-mindedness would be a boon for my brother and me. They’d broken ground prior, too-upon falling in Bollywood-love in med school in India, my apartheid-South Africa-born Gujarati father and Bombay-born Maharashtrian mother had an out-of-caste love marriage, and at a time their two states were at war. My pioneering parents were the first from both sides of the family to immigrate to the United States.
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