3B
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 // The Statement
The weight of bubbles and boxes
by Anisha Nandi, Daily Staff Reporter
I
sat beneath the weight of a three-letter acronym and I
felt unknown. For all the countless hours spent to mold
and mend my mind into standardized testing, I had no
answer for the very first question in the crisp, white booklet
in front of me. I fidgeted as the clock ticked deafeningly. I see
the physical boxes on the paper in front of me and it’s sharp
edges cut sharp corners in my round mind. They simply do
not fit.
“Race/Ethnicity.”
A few identities swirl and surface before I shove them
away.
“I’m half Trinidadian, half Indian; I was born in England
but I grew up in New York.”
There is no box to check off there, no bubble teems to the
surface. At the very best I am “other.” My identity, with its
colorful exuberance and undiscovered parts, with its proud
history and fierce defiance, is crammed and shoved imper-
sonally into that small box.
Those boxes become most dangerous when we find the
need to fit into them. Before I turned seven, I moved around
half a dozen times within the tri-state area. I counted rosa-
ry beads in a Catholic school but silent Hindu prayers ran
through my mind as each rough, red bead slipped through
small fingers. I ate rose-colored candies and homemade soda
bread with our fair, Irish neighbors and their beloved bea-
gle, Mickey, with his watery, all-knowing eyes and ears that
swept the floors. My big brown eyes lit up my small face in
preschool when my mother agreed to “plait” my hair in two
long braids just like my Jamaican friend did her wild locks.
I climbed on countertops with knocked knees and a wicked
smile to find “that thing,” my favorite Indian spice, before my
grandmother pulled me down and sat me on her lap — the
folds of her saari taking me to visit all the rich smells of her
country, my country. As I entered middle school, I learned
torah verses as I attended more bar and bat mitvahs (and a
few b’nai mitzvahs) than I can count on my hands and feet.
In my high school years, I filled in many bubbles. From
that sea of multiple-choice questions, I dove and somehow
swam ashore in the Midwest — a place I, at the time, associ-
ated with cornfields and windmills, yet one that has brought
me more cultural clarity than I ever could have thought. In
a single day, I cross paths with hundreds of students, their
story traced across campus as they run to class or schlep
begrudgingly through the snow across the Diag. I learn from
and about them, whether it’s laughing through my tears
with my best friend in her room at 2 a.m. or making brief
eye contact with a student in the first floor of the Ugli. Each
day as I brush elbows, my cultural index grows. As I arrive
home, the promise of New York City with its jagged buildings
across the eternally lit backdrop stirs awake all the cultural
magnificence there is to see. Traveling between the multi-
cultural dichotomies of the University of Michigan and New
York City provides me with endless opportunities to open my
mind to the backgrounds of others. I always compare them
to two different “worlds” intersecting that I hardly believe
exist outside of myself.
***
I now trace my way through my heritage. My mother is
fair skinned with light eyes and naturally wavy black hair
made for the summer heat of an eternally sunny island. It
puffs and swells in the humidity as if trying to capture the
salty sea air. Her high cheekbones sit beneath the shadows
of long eyelashes, catching the low light as she laughs, one
of the most reserved of her boisterous family. My father is
frozen at a permanent state of youth. His eyes glint a perpet-
ual glee, one never subdued by the weight of the world. His
trademark salt and pepper moustache sits atop an eternally
lit smile refusing to bow to the bulky world.
My mother grew up the second youngest of seven, in a
well-respected, well-off family in Chaguanas, Trinidad.
Her medical school experience was filled with homesick-
ness as she travelled across seas away from her family. My
mother is from a ferociously proud breed of polouri-loving,
cricket-watching “Trinis.” Trinis underline their lives with
the emboldened red and black of their flag, never failing to
showcase their pride in their country — one with less than
the population of Manhattan that still manages to boast
Nobel Prize laureates, multiple Miss World Titles, World
Cup qualifiers and Olympic gold medalists.
My father, halfway across the world, grew up in New
Delhi. At age six he saw a blind man in a rural suburb of India
and, in the endearing hopeful charm of a young child, he
swore to himself he would become a doctor to help him. He
sewed his own repairs on his primary school uniform, hem-
ming to the hums of the crickets in the high grass and bee-
hives in the trees and studying to maintain his scholarship.
He read voraciously to quench an undying thirst for knowl-
edge of all kinds, tucking away information like gemstones
in an encyclopedia of jewels. His hands helped his mother
around the house, feeding cows dalpuri and creating jars of
pickled spices, while his mind wandered over fields, across
seas, through amazons, to the depths of oceans and heights
of fighter planes.
In Pondicherry, India that Trindadian challenged that
New Delhi native with her quiet strength. Something about
their meeting spurred three decades of marriage. They
moved to England for their residencies and eventually to
New York. My mother retains her strong sense of pride in
Trinidad and often chance takes us to warm beaches or to
the smell of doubles and polouri in Queens. Nothing quite
compares to the lackadaisical days of hammocks drifting
between tall coconut trees.
From plastic surgery to cardiology to published research
to wound healing, my father invested that six-year-old’s
promise in his passion for medicine. His upbringing in India,
surrounded by immense medical resources in contrast to
some of the most earth-shattering illnesses, was a major fac-
tor in his success today. He often dreams aloud of his desire
to reground his roots upon the rocky hills of Rishikesh or the
busy, rickshaw-filled streets of New Delhi with all the color
and culture that flutters beneath his eyelids. He tells me time
and again that all that man needed was a few pills of vitamin
A and he would be able to see those same colors.
If I were to sit there with my pencil now on that ACT
exam, I would not want to fill out “other.” All of our back-
grounds are to be embraced, to be celebrated. Not just the
complex ones or the misunderstood ones, but each individ-
ual’s heritage. The conclusions and boxes we jump into, we
often create for ourselves. To take a moment and consider
that somebody may have an interesting story is to recognize
your own. Standardized tests are just that — standard. Yet
we can decide to set no limits on the vibrancy of our cultured,
colorful realities.
ILLUSTRATION BY JAKE WELLINS