When you are little and your brother announces at the dinner table, in full earshot of your parents, that your room is filthy, it doesn’t take much to reply, “Yours is filthier.” If he proclaims that you’re an idiot, it is a perfectly appropriate and acceptable, even recommended response, to say, “The one who says it, is it.”
Now replace your brother with an Indian colleague, the dinner table with an open-plan office in Singapore and parents with other non-Indian colleagues. What is the appropriate response when the Indian colleague declares, out of nowhere, that Delhi is the rape capital of the world? As a Delhiite, do you remind them that their Mumbai is the world’s biggest slum? When the same colleague announces that all Indians are misogynists, my childhood training behoves me to say, “Takes one to know one. Like whenever there’s an office celebration, you leave all the organising for us women.”
Accurate, appropriate, amusing. But what would this response achieve? Who am I calling filthy, a jerk, but one of my own? By trading home truths with a fellow Indian in a foreign land, how long can I stay unsullied myself? And what show are we putting up for our onlooking hosts? I might win the battle, but this war of making ourselves look taller by stepping on others was lost the moment it started.
There were many surprises when I entered the Singapore workplace, fresh off the boat from India. The locals mostly kept to themselves, their only point of interest in me being whether I could make ‘curry’. I grew up in the North, studied in the East, worked in the West, married in the South and nowhere in the vast stretches of my country did I come across this famous dish called curry. Add to that my being vegetarian, that too by choice, and my irrelevance to them was complete.
Then there were the ‘ang mohs’. It wasn’t so much the ‘ang mohs’ themselves—most of whom were expats like the rest of us, similarly qualified and experienced—but how they were revered. I had expected, naively, that our shared colonial history would cast a shorter shadow in a developed country, and was sad to see an all-too-familiar awe of the white-skinned here, too.
But the surprise that was the hardest to digest was the realisation that we Indians didn’t exactly jump for joy when we saw each other at the workplace.
It happens in a flash, over before you realise it: a wariness that surfaces the moment there’s another brown person in the office. A bristling. You can see it only if you are looking. I realise this is the very definition of make-believe and I dredge up memories blocked far, far away to convince myself that this is not something I make up. It’s a quick SWOT analysis to peg them in the right rung in the hierarchy, to ascertain if they are a contact worth cultivating. We are all in a race to someplace bigger and better, and it matters who we run with (or against).
I was raised on an unhealthy dose of karmyog, the notion of action unattached to the consequent fruit. Anyone familiar with the Bhagavad Gita would know this shlok:
“Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana,
Ma karma phala hetur bhur ma te sango stv akarmani”
The literal meaning being:
“You have every right to work but none to expect the fruits of it,
let the focus be not on the fruits and never be inactive.”
It never sat right with me.
As a child, this was the stick that was used to keep us walking forwards, preparing for exams, races, competitions. It was used upside down though, because the focus was solely on the fruit: being top of the class, better than everyone else, never mind actual learning or the joy of the sport. Kiasu wasn’t a term I knew then, but I wept for joy when I learnt that Singlish had a word that came close to this thing I grew up with. Any accomplishments at school were met with silent acknowledgment and a reminder to keep going. There were only two vocations worthy of pursuit (engineering or medicine), only so many decent colleges and then only so many good jobs. Outdoing others was a matter of survival.
Obedience was our ticket to approval and acceptance, a word that my own third-culture children were blissfully unfamiliar with, and upon explanation, found wholly amusing, for their main mandate growing up has been to find their passions and aim for excellence. Back home, with both parents working, love came on Sundays, in the form of dewaxing our ears, pinching out lice from our hair, practicing multiplication tables and other improvement projects. Cousins and neighbours were piled with generous praise, the implicit message to us being “you’re not good enough”. Teachers would only give 99%, withholding that last mark for, if nothing else, then handwriting. To this day, the highest rating my father will give for a dessert that I lovingly prepare for him, just the way he likes it, is nine on ten. Because he had a Physics teacher who would only ever give nine on ten, and my father adored this teacher.
We fell in love with our sticks.
The stick is not without its merits. We did well in school, left our small towns and went to big universities in big cities, got one degree, then another, leased our lives to MNCs, fattened our bank accounts and eventually left the country to explore the shiny shores of Singapore.
As I tried to recall incidents from the workplace, some memories came to the surface, vague on detail, accurate in the hollowness they still induce in the pit of my stomach.
One colleague took visible pride in explaining to our non-Indian colleagues how we North Indians are descendants of Europeans, hence the fairer skin and the occasional light eyes. What they left unsaid, but clear from their smug smile, was, “hence superior to the rest of India”. I wanted to ask my colleague what made fair skin any measure of aesthetics. More importantly, must our looking ‘good’ be predicated on our Southern compatriots looking ‘bad’? Still? Even here? But I smiled back. Fake solidarity was more comfortable than real confrontation.
A week before I was due to give birth, my paid maternity leave was revoked. Backed into a corner, I was seething with helpless anger when my Indian colleague popped over and complimented me on taking the news sportingly. In retrospect, that was the perfect moment to concede the “all Indians are misogynists” claim, with bonus points for gaslighting. I said, “Thank you for your kind words, see you in two months.” Being seen as a sporting trumped standing up for my employee rights.
As children, we were no more than the sum of our achievements. After completing school, when I put forth the outrageous idea of pursuing English, I was sat down. I was told, again, the story of how in the mid-1940s, my grandparents left their possessions, their houses, their lands behind in what later became Pakistan, and came to “this side”. According to my grandmother, they lived in a haveli that had more rooms than she could count and wore juttis embroidered with gold. While there’s no way to verify this, this was how she remembered it. This was the measure of what she felt she had left behind.
The story goes about how my parents rebuilt their lives in partitioned India on nothing more than paltry government grants and grit. How they never got to pursue their passions because practical choices had to be made, because mouths had to be fed. How pursuing English was self-indulgent, suboptimal (I was good at Math) and therefore, immoral. Hard work had led them to their new life, their salvation, so obviously, it would lead to ours. Like a good girl, I accepted the stick that was handed to me without complaining. I swallowed it. I became my own stick, forever striving, forever looking for the next challenge to prove my worth.
On another occasion, a headhunter set up a job interview with a CEO. I braced at the prospect of interviewing with an Indian in a senior position. It turned out worse than I feared: less of a conversation to assess my fit for the role, more a sermon on how unsuitable my CV was for their organisation. They were pretty convincing. But my father reserved sole rights for such talk! Something about being a mother gave me the permission to feel what I was really feeling: anger. Would they have spoken the same way if I were a Singaporean woman or ‘ang moh’, or better still, an ‘ang moh’ man? When the headhunter called back to check in, I asked if there had been a purpose to this ‘interview’ other than to trash me. She called back later to say her client apologised, gushing over the graciousness of her client, expecting me to be similarly overwhelmed and was quite offended when I, unmoved, said, “Apology accepted.” Needless to say, that was the last I heard from her.
Was the satisfaction of having called out a head honcho’s bullying worth closing the door on the industry’s largest employer? Wouldn’t it have been professionally expedient to grin and shut up? Perhaps. But this constant grinning was beginning to hurt.
It took many such incidents over many years before I could make sense of this brown bristling. Although my compatriots and I had made it to Singapore, we were still running, jostling, trampling. We didn’t particularly want to associate with those we had left behind. If the workplace brought us face-to-face with our countrymates, we distanced ourselves from them and sidled closer to the other side.
I’m aware this is not everyone’s story. I have friends who make thriving friendships wherever they go. These are happy, confident people. Also less critical and more forgiving than I am. Neither were all of my Indian colleagues dull reminders of my past. There were those who were curious and kind. They looked at me neither as a stepping stone nor a roadblock, but as an individual. An individual who came from India and happened to be a woman, but who was more than both those things. We spent good times together, working, discovering an aloo paratha place tucked away in a sleepy building on Parliament Street. We scratched our collective heads figuring out what ‘curry’ was and smacked our heads when we realised it was none other than the ubiquitous onion-tomato-ginger-garlic gravy that flavours most North Indian dishes. It was under our noses all along, we just hadn’t tried hard enough to understand.
As I grew as a person and became surer of who I was, regardless of how much I had achieved and how I was perceived (or thought I was perceived), I started to put my stick down (briefly, before picking it back up). Other people, especially my own folk, were neither an opportunity nor a threat, they were a window for connection. I met them with curiosity and respect, helped them with their job searches, took them to Saravana Bhavan, warned them about the crowds at Mustafa, invited them over for home-cooked meals, tried to become the kind of Indian I would like to meet. It’s a tall order. It takes time, thought and effort each time, and often I falter. I wish I could say I’ve been successful or that I do so without expecting anything in return. For now, I’d give myself a nine on ten.
Nidhi was born and raised in India, spent a decade in Singapore and now calls London home, but far prefers to inhabit the world of fiction. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies such as QLRS, Cha, Singapore Unbound, Muse India, Popshot and more. She has also written two books for children. More at nidhi-arora.com.
