Hair

In 1990, at the age of six, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and howled in pain while she brushed my thick black curls with the futile hope of making my hair tame and presentable. Her shoulder-length light brown hair was perfectly set on her head thanks to half a can of hairspray she applied each morning, the scent burning my nostrils as I suffered nerve damage to my scalp. My mother worked the brush from the top of my head down to my split ends. She took sections of my hair in one hand and brushed, her fair-skinned hands disappearing in my long tendrils. I saw my mother’s reflection in the closet mirror, her mouth slightly open, her brows furrowed, a face that expressed surprise and wonderment at the mane she tried to beat down, astonished this kid was biologically hers. My hair color and thickness came from my father. In his expired Indian identification papers, his long black hair was wrapped in a bun just north of his forehead. The red cloth of the Sikh turban covered the bun. His current driver’s license displayed black hair cut short and gelled back with a side part. He combed it in the mornings post shower, while a small silver radio blasted tinny songs in Hindi on his bathroom counter. On this morning, my father was absent from the house, already making rounds at the hospital. Anxious to be outdoors, I squirmed under my mother’s hands. “Hold still,” she said, and she pressed her fingers to my temple to make me face one direction. Ignoring my whimpering, she brushed more aggressively in places with the most resistance. “Are you almost done?” I asked. A frustrated sigh blew through her mouth. A glitter-ball hair tie lay on the ripples of the quilt, looking like the number “8” with a large sparkly purple bead on each loop. My mother gathered all of the strands around her thumb and middle finger, and then she pulled the hair tie around the thick trunk now set high on the back of my cranium. The lavender brush on the bed had accumulated a cloud of dark brown hair, the part of me that my mother removed from the bristles and threw in the trash.

I let my eight-year-old legs dangle over the leather salon chair seat, while I overheard my mother make a request to Antoinette, my stylist and early ’90s cultural icon. My mother specifically wanted my hair cut much shorter and therefore easier to brush. Antoinette nodded, her

short, spiked reddish-brown hair barely moving. She took out my glitter ball tie and pulled front strands over my face. “Look at this beautiful hair!” Antoinette said as she caught my eye in the mirror and smacked her gum. With ice-blue eyes and dark, dyed locks, her appearance channeled Madonna. Each strand of her gelled hair fell perfectly around her heart-shaped face—edgy, cool, effortless. On the salon floor, my chopped hair became tumbleweeds, rolling away as Antoinette worked a blow-dryer and barrel brush through my shoulder-length do. My hair fell silky straight. I touched a small, smooth clump, understanding what the girls in my class felt when they absentmindedly ran their fingers through their hair. And bangs! My new hairdo included bangs that flowed down my forehead and stopped at the top of my pastel-pink glasses. Each strand came straight down, a curtain over my forehead. Antoinette unhooked the black styling cape, and I inched forward in the salon chair, turning my head and watching my hair fan like I was in a shampoo commercial. Back in the car, I pulled down the visor to make sure my salon hair wasn’t an illusion. The next day though, it was gone. Like Cinderella’s magical makeover, my smooth, silky hair disappeared after my morning shower. I held a lock and random strands plucked out every which way like broken strings on a violin. And yet, between my mother and me, detangling sessions were less strenuous. I no longer yelped as if a dislocated shoulder was being popped into place. Not long after the haircut, my mother came into my bedroom with clothes wrapped in clear plastic. She told me to put them on. I tied the buttercup-colored drawstring pants around my waist while my mother bunched up the matching-hued tunic. She guided the shirt through my outstretched arms. The fabric felt snug around my chest, a size too small. There was embroidery on the front of the long shirt with embedded small mirrors. My grandparents from India sat in the living room talking with my father in a foreign language. The clinks of their teacups echoed down the hallway. The clothes came from them, a gift. My mother smoothed out the shirt and its obvious fold lines. I whispered to her that it felt itchy. “Well, you just have to show Beeji and Papaji, and then you can change,” she said. She then helped my younger sister get into hers, a similar outfit, a salwar kameez. I picked at the cuff of my shirt while I stared with envy at my sister’s dress, a deep eggplant. With our mother touching our backs, we were paraded into the living room like we were in special costumes for a theatrical performance. If that were the case, we brought the house down. Once our grandparents saw us, they

clapped and beckoned us to their side for hugs and more words with funny vowel sounds. My father translated. They thought we looked beautiful. Mom pulled out her Fujifilm plastic camera, snapped a photo, and then cranked the wheel for the next one. My grandmother wore a similar dress in cotton but not covered in embroidery. Hers felt soft from wear and washes. Once my mother ran out of film in the camera, she brought us back to our room. “Can I change now?” I whined. I pulled at the collar and tried to get the itchy embroidery off of my skin. “You can get back into your regular clothes,” she said. And with that, I tore off the “irregular” clothes that came from the other side of the world.

In 2001, twelve college application papers covered the mahogany table in our rarely used dining room. My math teacher once said that clear handwriting displayed the writer’s confidence. With a sleek black pen, I filled out the general information with careful loops and dots: name, address, birthdate. At the next section, I came to a full stop, the portion with the title “Race/ethnicity.” The instructions said to check the box that most appropriately describes you. One box, singular, yet upon scanning the list, two options seemed equally feasible: White and Asian/pacific Islander. I had seen this question before, back in my Catholic elementary school on standardized testing days. Before we started the test, we completed personal information and learned how our individual identities were nothing more than a conglomeration of filled bubbles on paper. The categories were the same as these college applications, one box for White, one for Asian/pacific Islander. The instructions on the tests said to check one. As a nervous elementary school student, I pulled at a piece of my shoulder-length hair and twirled it between my index finger and thumb. I didn’t dare raise my hand and ask my white teacher or any of the white students in my class. I had enough anxiety about standing out among my peers, because they all knew one of my parents didn’t attend church and wasn’t even Christian. While staring at the box, I agonized that I’d mark it incorrectly and incite an investigation hearing, a lamp shining in my face. Some years, I filled in White. Other years, I filled in Asian. Then other years, I filled in Other. And after the teacher scooped up the tests, I forgot about my identity marker. No one said anything. No investigators, no bureaucratic pencil pushers set to determine my race fluctuation. This led me to the conclusion: no one cared. But the university had to be more meticulous, surely. These papers ushered me through the doors of higher ed. Hearing my mother in the kitchen, I called for her help. She appeared in the entranceway, still in

her teacher’s clothes: a long evergreen skirt that matched the vest over her cream-colored blouse. I explained my predicament and the options. She put one hand on the doorframe while she listened, her face showing no signs of surprise or reflection. Perhaps she’d already thought about this conundrum before, at a time when I was younger and running away from morning hair brushings. I imagined her at a chalkboard, writing out complex formulas involving letters and Greek symbols and coming to the conclusion she would now share. “Oh, just put White,” she said, like the choice was something to shrug off, a rough estimation where you round up from half. I glanced back down at the boxes and chewed on the inside of my lip. I raised my head to dispute her instruction, but the entranceway was empty. Under my high school information, I jotted down the small private school my parents had enrolled me in, a pre-k through twelve school in Southern Maryland with a mostly white class demographic. My parents decided it was more academically rigorous than the Catholic school I’d attended since kindergarten. In seventh grade, I walked into a new school hoping the small class sizes meant students would clamor to be friends with the new kid. But middle school meant groups of solidified cliques who shot a dirty look in my direction and returned to their clan to murmur. Not long into my stint, I discovered one classmate referred to me as the “Mexican with zits.” Another girl came up to me while we changed in gym asking what tanning bed I went to. When I explained to her that I was Indian, she gasped, asked me what tribe, because she had some fraction of Cherokee in her blood. As these memories replayed in my head, I stared at the list of ethnicities. How could I check the “White” box when white kids constantly pointed out how different I was? I didn’t tell my parents about these incidents. The few times I had confided in them, my parents told me to just ignore other’s comments. Neither of them understood what it was like to walk into classrooms looking different from the rest of their peers. To them, the best way to avoid race was to not bring it up. Don’t see color. Perhaps in not making it an utterance within our house, the social construct of race would cease to exist in the world. But my parents and I lived in Maryland, the first state in the colonies to have anti-miscegenation laws in the books and one of the last states to finally remove those. Neither of my parents were from Maryland, and yet they raised my sister and me there, a place that allowed interracial marriages only a few years before my parents’ wedding. Even with the changed laws, racial mixing was barely visible, and racial groups around me mostly stayed within their categorical

perimeters. While my mother’s solution for me was to pick the side most visible on my skin, the locals didn’t agree. The sound of oil sizzling in a pan came from the kitchen and brought me out of my memories and back to the application papers. Down the cluster of boxes, I checked “White.”

I returned home for Thanksgiving during my first semester at college. After getting off the Amtrak train from New York, I found my mother in the kiss-and-ride section of the New Carrollton station parking lot. Rubbing her gloved hands in the car, she looked up, and when she recognized me and the oblong suitcase I dragged, she jumped out of the car for a hug. “What’s going on with your hair?” she asked. In my first semester in college, I had a low-maintenance hair routine down, applying a dollop of electric-blue gel into my just-showered hair, which hardened into a crusty crown on top and flowed into corkscrew curls by my shoulders. “Mom, let it go,” I said and rolled my eyes. As we careened down Route 301, my mother talked and occasionally reached for the gear shift. Though we spoke on the phone weekly, my mother had hidden away some stories she decided were better relayed in person. So she did. At my mother’s job at an all-girls Catholic high school, a black student had accused her of discrimination. My mother gave more context: that the girl was a moody freshman in her homeroom who complained constantly. Being that this girl was a pill, my mother dealt with her in the same fashion she would with her own daughters—she ignored her. The student, seeing that my mother wouldn’t give her the time of day, believed she was the victim of prejudice. I stared at my mother’s profile in the car while she narrated the story. When I had visited the school in eighth grade, I witnessed the tumult of students opening and closing lockers, chatting, laughing in the bricklined hallways, a diverse student population where the majority were black, followed by white, and then a smattering of other ethnicities, all donning gray plaid skirts and burgundy polo shirts with the high school crest on the corner. These students took U.S. History with my mother, her classroom decorated with the chronological order of the presidents along with posters of the founding fathers. Outlining our nation’s longstanding racist laws was an integral part of her class objectives. I tried to get out words but felt choked. My mother kept her hands on the steering wheel, looking out the windshield, occasionally shifting gears after passing a bend in the road. “So, what happened?” I asked. She flicked her wrist that it was nonsense. The administration set up a meeting with her, the accused student, and the student’s mother. The

administration found no wrongdoing from my mother and closed the appeal. I nodded, the tightness in my chest diminished. Out the window, lone farmhouses and corn fields passed by. Our car sped past the forest of trees, leaves all gone, a dense forest of skeletons. My mother continued reflecting on the whole thing: the meeting, the investigation, the offended party. “She felt I was racist, and I thought, ‘Really? The woman who is married to an Indian is racist?’” I mumbled in agreement. The flaws in that axiom would come to me only later, piece by piece, when I finally understood racism to be like a spot on the floor people covered up with a rug. In the car, I was more awash in relief her trouble was over. I didn’t stop to think how my mother’s defense contradicted how she’d long handled my identity. How could she be married to a nonwhite person and have an all-white kid?

In June 2008, when I was twenty-four, I sat on a stiff bed next to my mother, sorting through photographs. An old motorcycle drove by the house, loud and in need of a tune-up. Normally, I didn’t opt for cleaning or organizational tasks, but we were in India, my father in the other room talking to my grandmother in the language I’d never bothered to learn, not that anyone in my family had encouraged me to do so. My mother, sister, and I pulled out the piles of dusty photographs from the shelved cabinet in the guest bedroom and figured out which ones were worth keeping. The blurry ones went into the trash pile. The rest were put aside. I fidgeted and looked around the room for something else to do. My book sat on the side table. I wanted nothing more than to recline on the bed and read while my mother and sister occupied themselves with this pointless categorization, supposedly meant to help my grandmother clean out her closets. My mother brought a photo to my face. “Look at this,” she said. It was a group shot of people in a banquet hall the color of a sunset, taken during my first trip to India at age ten. The celebration was the fiftieth birthday party for my uncle, held in an event space at the foot of the Himalayas. My uncle and his immediate family stood in the center, followed by the deluge of relatives, us included. Holding the photo, my mother’s index finger hovered over the image of her face. Her hair a frizzy halo because her curling iron melted two days into that trip. “You know, I never considered Indians to be a different race,” she said. For the past few years, my racial identity had been an ongoing argument. As I progressed through college and graduate school with a better understanding of being mixed, my mother would shut me down,

telling me Indians were considered white, and therefore I was white. After every confrontation, I left with a sense of emptiness. She was my mother, and without her approval, I couldn’t stand on my own. She was an intelligent woman and an educator. And while I didn’t totally believe her assertions, what I dreaded most was identifying as mixed and then learning I was mistaken. Nothing frightened me more than being seen as a disillusioned girl desperately adopting a race for attention. But as the window unit air-conditioner hummed in the house, my mother gave a start at seeing her white complexion stick out among the sea of brown faces. “I guess this means you are biracial,” she said. I shrugged and threw more photos down in the pile. What should have felt like a satisfying redemption of my identity rang hollow. I visited the country where my father had lived until he was thirty, and instead of exploring, I isolated myself in the house and watched American DVDS. I was ashamed. I didn’t feel Indian. Every night, I happily got into bed, relieved that another day had ended and that I was closer to departing. My biracial identity never felt like the bridging of two worlds—more accurately, it was divisive, forcing me to choose a side.

A mound of exam book essays sat on the futon next to me—the physical manifestation of my weekend plans. A headache formed at the bridge of my nose. In 2014, I had acclimated to a position as an adjunct professor at a community college in Southern California. “Like mother, like daughter,” people said to me. But I hadn’t gone into the profession thinking I wanted to follow in my mother’s career path. Still, I pulled out my cell phone and contacted her, telling myself it would be a conversation about pedagogy and therefore a form of professional development rather than procrastination. Without saying hello, I vented about my college students and their poor performance, how my carefully constructed lessons weren’t sinking in. My mother and I compared notes and cracked jokes, which dissolved my anger. We conversed as adults, as equals. But while talking, I referred to myself as a woman of color and the tone shifted again—she asserted herself as my all-knowing mother, and I regressed into the disciplined child. “Don’t say that,” she said. “Why can’t I say that?” I asked. “Because a person of color means something else,” she said. “What does it mean?” I asked. “Well,” she paused, “a person of color is . . . colorful.”

I laughed. The holes in her arguments became clear to me. I stood in her blind spot. Checkmate in three moves. “What does that even mean?” I asked. She struggled to respond. “I don’t think about race, because it never affected me,” she said. I thought to myself, But couldn’t you sympathize with the fact that it affected me? I got off the phone with her feeling agitated. Though I was thirty, she could still make me feel like the seventeen year old among the mess of college applications. There lay something maternal in her denial of my racial identity, a need to stake her claim on me. She’d told me that race hadn’t entered her thoughts when she married my father. But I wonder when she held me for the first time and saw the mess of black hair covering my scalp, hair that looked nothing like hers, if she realized the journey ahead, the day-to-day chore of proving I was hers. Perhaps there was a protective instinct about her that subconsciously hoped she could convince me to “be white” and therefore obtain the privileges that went with it. Whatever it was, we had far from resolved things. And much like when I’d come home despondent that my students didn’t understand the lesson, I hunkered down and reassessed. The next holiday rolled around, and I flew to my mother’s. We found each other in the airport, and she sang my name as she pulled me into an embrace. As she released me from the hug, she tugged at one of my locks. Her fingers released, and the strands sprung back into a corkscrew curl. “I love what you’ve done to your hair,” she said.