Sitting in a temple room full of brown people of many ages, I would find myself zoning out as the priest chanted hymns and mantras that translated as gibberish to me. I never grew up knowing what those holy moments meant, nor did I have any idea on how to appreciate the Hindu sector of my culture. At the same time, watching white people at football games cheer or groan while I have zero idea what is happening also granted me the same feeling.
That detachment is a strange space. I grew up being told I am Indian. My skin is brown, I speak a foreign language and I celebrate Indian holidays. Yet the second I step into a room full of people from my motherland, with my broken concept of foreign language, Western cadence and a lack of history, I am instantly labeled as “foreign” or “whitewashed.” I don’t fit into the mold that expected me to carry down generations of tradition without fault. So, I learned to sit quietly on the sideline of my own heritage, feeling like an outsider to the very thing that is supposed to define me.
Ironically enough, I am not fully American either, even if I have grown up in the U.S. for the majority of my life. In Western spaces, my brown skin, home life and background are still enough to set me apart. My skin feels like a taint in a room full of American people. My stutter on a word, my unfamiliarity with an idiom, my questioning of a tradition makes me exist in a gray zone, caught directly in the middle of two worlds that both treat me like a guest. Visiting India doesn’t fix it either because the moment I open my mouth or move through the streets, locals spot the American in me immediately, and judgmental looks follow shortly after. I am too foreign to belong back home, but too cultural to completely blend in here.
This divide leaves so many kids like me searching for a sense of home that doesn’t really exist on a map. Realizing we belong nowhere completely can be isolating, but it also creates a unique identity of its own. We aren’t failing at being Indian, nor are we failing at being American. We are just navigating a middle ground that forces us to define culture on our own terms, even if it means constantly tiptoeing on the line.
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