Scaachi Koul

There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop.

Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure.

If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from __un,_ trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from __acation._ When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I__ have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you__e going to India to see your family, you__e not going to relax, you__e not going to have a nice time. No, you__e going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you__l visit again. You are working.

When Sweetu wasn__ being reduced to merely existing as a bride, as a piece of meat to be handled and prodded, to have decorative contraptions stuck into her skull, her interests were otherwise unexpressed. She rarely complained, hardly asked for anything, and maybe that__ because Indian girls grow up going to weddings and we watch the procedure and we know our roles: be demure, don__ complain, cry but don__ scream, get tea for anyone older than you, and calmly meet expectations.

Fear always reaches a breaking point and turns into anxiety or rage, and I don't have enough storage space for more fear in my life. Namely when it involves people I've never even met.

The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn__ premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you__e drunk and you run into a girl who__ also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you__e being accused of something you__ never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn__ a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don__ notice when someone__ watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink.

Do other dads not end their phone calls with existential despair? Because that's what my dad does. Papa ends most of his calls with me the way you might close a conversation with someone you want to menace. "Anyway," he'll say, "I'll be here. Staring into the abyss." Or, when I have given him good news, "The talented will rule and the rest will perish in the sea of mediocrity." Or, when I have given him bad news, "I am for for everything that happens to you, as everything is my fault." He never ends with anything that couldn't one day be construed as a tragic yet comic last word.

I peeled the shorts off my sweating skin and stepped into the skirt. It slid up my body, resting on my waist, and I pulled the zipper up towards the lord. It didn't just fit. No, it did more than that. It melded to my body, beautifully, as if it had been cut specifically for me, to mask and smooth and elevate. I would be better in this skirt. The dream was happening! I had the all-knowing smile, my hair was suddenly more luxurious, I felt thinner, more acceptable. Girls who had been mean to me in high school would see me in this skirt and think, "Is that Scaachi?" and I'd say, "YOU BET IT IS, YOU DUMB BITCH" and then punch all their boyfriends in the teeth. (I have not thought this fantasy through; just let me have this.)

You know what would be fun,_ our school__ administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. __hat if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?

She used to call me on the phone and scream, __ LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.

I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package!

Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. "Why not try it?" she thought, instead of "This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism.

I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.