To Find Our Way Home: a Rediscovering of Race, Identity & Belonging

I have discovered so much in my twenties about my country, my culture and, in turn, the beauty of who I am.

Not how I look, what I achieve or how likeable, interesting or successful I can be, but of my very essence, worthiness and value as a human being.

The same beauty we all possess-of just existing in the world as exactly who we are, without any masks of pretence.

I buried so much of who I was in order to fit in and be liked the first twenty years of my life.

To be blunt, that meant a lot of what it was to be different-my Indianness.

Being a minority brown kid in the early 2000s surrounded only by white, euro-centric beauty standards, a corresponding hierarchy of popularity, and endless portrayals of the loser Indian kid, the scary Muslim bomber, the stereotypical ridiculed brown family who lacked any real nuance in mainstream media, meant the urge to dull down anything that made you feel 'other’.

It was an instinct of survival-to feel safe, blend in, be liked, not mocked.

It was feeling ashamed of feeling shame.

It was belonging to both but, really, to neither.

No one draws you a roadmap as a person of colour trying to find your place in the diaspora.

So, for many of us, that meant losing parts of ourselves as children and finding our way back to them in adulthood.

The most blindingly obvious thing that travelling has shown me is that the beautifully gritty, meaningful, stay-up-all-night-to-find-out-about-each other relationships, are only born out of the differences between us.

This night, the same brown skin that made my ex-boyfriend feel ashamed to be seen with me was proudly on display in a lehenga which I loved-one I certainly didn’t need any man to tell me was worthy of his gaze or not.

This night, the same centuries-old, classical Bhartanatyam dance form that was mocked and laughed at by my brother’s friends at nine years old was danced proudly with my mum as our feet hit the stage and we felt the bells of our anklets; the sanctity of our art form.

This night, the same hands which were branded disgusting for touching food, which locked the door of the toilets to eat my lunch in shame, were proudly used to peruse endless stalls of South Indian food-the kind so good you can’t stop thinking about.

And so, if someone told me today what they said to me back then, I would simply tell them just that-

that I am so proud.

Their words, opinions and judgments would have no power over me.

Because I am so proud to be exactly who I am, with every single piece of what makes me so.