I am who I am

Across the world, when people run out of things to say, they discuss the weather. In India, you are asked where are you from?

Or maybe it’s a Delhi thing.

Now I am from Delhi (much against my will.) My parents grew up here and I was born here and I have also spent the last 10 years of my life here after traveling across most of North India as an Army kid and spending six of the best years of my life in boarding school.

After years of being interrogated by autorickshaw drivers, travel agents, monks, teachers and colleagues, I have finally reconciled to the fact that the first question I’m going to be asked whenever I’m introduced to anyone here is — ‘where are you from?

But what I just can’t comprehend is WHY does the question not stop at that? 99.9 per cent of the time after I answer ‘Delhi,’ I’m asked again ‘no where are you really from?’

Now what does that mean?

It probably means:

1. You don’t look Delhiite enough to be a Delhiite (whatever a Delhiite looks like) so don’t pretend to be one.
2. Please tell me that you are from Honolulu so that I can pile on the next time I need a holiday.
3. I’m doing a doctorate on the ethnic origins of the Delhiite and you seem a good case study.

Well, I can tell these people where I ‘really’ am from but it will take some time.

My maternal grandmother is from Shillong. Her father was half-English and her mother was Khasi from Cherrapunji. She married my half-Chinese grandfather (Cantonese links) and my mother was born in pre-partition Lahore. So my mother has Khasi, Chinese and English blood in her and some would even call her a Pakistani.

If that wasn’t complicated enough, she married my dad, a Goan who never lived in Goa (though in all fairness, I must say he is working hard to remedy that.)

So that makes me a ‘Chink’ (as I was referred to in my last workplace) who can’t speak either my mother or father tongue (neither can dad), with a surname most people in this side of the country have only heard of in Bachchan movies of the seventies and maybe the recent Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

To top it all I have an Irish first name which not many people can pronounce. (People please… it’s Colleen… ‘call’ as in call someone, and ‘lean’ — as in what I’m not.)

But much to my exasperation, I’m mostly a punctuation mark for some and a window cleaner for others.

Maybe that’s why people want to know where I ‘really’ am from.

(First published in the Hindustan Times, Delhi sometime in 2004)