These questions are not as good-humored as they seem but are fixed instead to my tendency for self-scrutiny, activated long ago when I came to understand my sense of belonging—my who-ness—as two-pronged. The beautiful dilemma of being first-generation and all that it means: a reflection of theirs and mine, of source and story. A running start toward blending in among mostly white childhood friends who were rarely curious about my olive-brown skin, the dark shine of my hair, my chestnut eyes. We were kids, after all. We were one another’s chorus, encountering parents—and the elsewhere that entailed for me—only in consonant environments: a birthday party, ballet recitals, rides to the movies in my parents’ burgundy Toyota Previa.
In terms of family, this elsewhere—my parents’ who-ness—was abundant yet imperceptible. It was my home. Where I ate and slept, and wore big T-shirts to bed, and watched TV, and played Parcheesi, and fought with my brother, and savored the leeway of a Saturday morning, and where I would get scolded for tossing my jacket on the divan, or be corrected for answering a question with “I don’t care” instead of “I don’t mind.”
And, come summer, I reexperience with particular clarity these accumulations of a home, not merely through memory’s piping but in actions. Despite New York City’s stifling weather, how the air distorts into a muggy mass, I drink hot tea and eat hot soup. It cools me down. Because in that sly way science naturally alloys with what we inherit, I’ve been told since childhood that hot liquids provide remedial chill. This slight reprieve on especially sticky days, I like to imagine, is a discreet reminder that my parents are not always but sometimes right. That the knowledge they’ve imparted to my brother and me is not purely an expression of love but firm testimony of their own provenance, and how what keeps us close reveals itself not just in facsimile but, over time, in what kindly amounts in kernels. An everyday tip, a turn of phrase and its unusual construction, reminders to not sit on my bed with “outside clothes,” for instance, or how in the summer my body yields to the season’s balm with what I’ve come to regard as heritable agency.
Those beads of sweat that collect on my nose are entirely my Mama’s. The annual, deep-healing effects of humidity on my dry skin; that’s hers as well. If friends come over to my apartment and I offer them “some tea,” those two words conjure my father’s anticipant inflection on scorching weekend afternoons when he sits on our porch having proudly just fixed something without needing to replace it, like the broken nozzle of our gardening hose or the loose legs of a chair.
In my case, inheritance has never simply been what trickles down through traditions but is also the work required to disallow how those traditions fade. To recover the various genetic dispatches like those from my grandfather Felix, whom I met once, long ago, in Kolkata, in a kitchen, I think, of which I remember little except for the color green. A tablecloth, maybe. A moss stain on a concrete wall. Perhaps the whole memory is enameled green because for no discernible reason some colors naturally coat nostalgia with geography. India, for me, has always been protected in a layer of green.
There is also my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, and his wife, my grandmother Thama, whom I did. And there is my other grandmother, who died when my mother was a teenager. Her skin was far darker than mine, a trait I noted as I studied one photo album in particular, confusing the musty scent of protective parchment sheets with what I imagined she herself might have smelled like. I remember foolishly wondering as a child if my much lighter skin was an outcome of brown girls growing up in cold climates. A discordance that epitomized how split I felt between life at home and life outside, overcome and enamored by my white friends and every so often experiencing waves of assimilation met by lulls of wanting nothing more than to seek lineage, move backward, claim the brownness of my skin as I only knew how: through family.
I became more aware of my skin, as most of us do with our bodies, in adolescence, and especially when summer arrived. Halter tops. Shoulder blades. Crop tops. Sweat stains. Denim skirts. Shorts. A growth spurt marked by how my knees now knocked my bike’s handlebars as I pedaled to the park. The many ways we learned to twist and tie our T-shirts so they’d ride up our stomachs or whorl around our waists. Bathing suits. Boys. The convention of boys in the summer; how, suddenly, they memorialized the season. Still, I became heedful of the sun’s currency on my body. The sun’s signature on my skin and how the contrast of tan lines carried merit. That I was expected to feel virtuous was strange to me. I tanned fast. Brown to dark umber in a matter of hours. But what struck me was this: it was as if my white friends were wearing their tanned skin—bathing in it—as opposed to living in it. The thrill of becoming temporarily dark was, for them, an advantage. It would take me a decade or so, longer even, to consider or be faced with what dark skin means in the world and how my relationship to my skin is further complicated by how fair it is and the access it allows me, and oh, what a luxury to be allowed a decade or more of girlhood in the first place.
The level of excitement among my New York friends, in the summer, has now hit a fever pitch and results in one thing: plans. So many plans. An incessancy of plans. An ambush of them, really. Unspent from winter’s reserve, these nascent leisure hours develop into a vague inertia where we sip slushy tequila or inestimable glasses of rosé, or where I park myself on a roof in Brooklyn and characterize the faraway hedge of buildings as “a view,” and where I squint at my phone or the same paragraph in my book and feel indebted to the car passing below blasting that song.
And let’s not forget the beach. Here, among families and unaccustomed sounds like splashing water and seagulls squawking, we zone out, obscure the sun with shades and funny hats, nap in quick spells, signal over friends and scoot over to make room on our towels and blankets. Summer is many things, but it is, certainly, the season for scooting over. Plans and scooting over.
As new–to–New York adults, living here without history but with the audacity to claim space, these mini migrations from rooftops to small stretches of sand, to the fire escape at sunset where we climb out and gawk and attempt the impossible—to acquire the sky’s display in a few inches of touch screen—somehow constitute spending time.
Now picture what happens when my skin tans. When it doesn’t. When over the years my white friends have lathered themselves with Hawaiian Tropic and announced with a sense of crusading enterprise their plans to “sit out and bake.” When they’ve spent long weekends at a wedding in Palm Springs or a house on Fire Island, coming back to the city with burns they bemoan, only to quickly and quite airily reevaluate: Well, at least now I have my base layer.
Trace back to high school and then college, when my white friends would return from spring break, from all-inclusive resort vacations or a week at their cottage. Without fail, the most common occurrence—one that has persisted through adulthood—is this: my friend will place her arm next to mine, grow visibly thrilled, and exclaim that her skin is now darker than mine.
The things I’ve heard: I’m almost as brown as you. I’m darker than you now. We match. I’m lucky I tan easily. You look like you tan easily. You don’t even have to work for your tan.