good girls don't
Sep. 21st, 2008 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenEarlier, a perfect moment: skimming down Donnington Bridge after nightfall, with dark sky above and dark water below, humming abstractly to the Indigo Girls' Galileo, which doesn't stop being wonderful with the passage of time. I was given the album as a gift on my eighteenth birthday, which was also the day George W. Bush took office for the second time. I mention this merely because I spent intervals throughout the day having impassioned conversations with my father about Sarah Palin and her moose-eating credentials. (It's nice, sometimes, that nothing changes; that my life has rolled onwards and around, but I like dark nights and politics and Amy Ray, and my father is still a quietly ageing former hippie, a little more aged.)
Anyway. I am not eighteen. I am not twelve, four-and-a-half, or any other age that involves your relatives patting you on your head and remarking on how much you've grown and does she still not eat aloo gobi for breakfast like a good Indian girl, and we always knew she was going to turn out strange, etc., etc., and all the other things I have been subjected to today by my well-meaning relatives, here for the first time from India and making my life somewhat more difficult than it usually is. I say this with some, limited, affection; they try to be nice, they really do, and sometimes they really are, it's just, yes. Difficult. They have views. Indian families have Views. In a couple of weeks, they will be having a family reunion, in which a vast corpus of various relatives will appear, and my mother has been not-so-subtly persuading me to come home for it for quite a while now. This, of course, I have no objection to. It might be nice to be home for a couple of days, Mum will need lots of help I'm sure, and there are lots of my relatives (and two in particular) whom I'm very fond of and do want to see.
The problem is, well, my mother said, in a burst of enthusiasm, "Why don't you bring [![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shimgray]?"
To which my immediate response was, did my mother just acknowledge I'm an adult human being who might want to introduce her partner to her family? Quite apart from whether I could in good conscience subject a fellow human being to my family, this is, I think, the sort of liberal modern Western thinking that ought to be encouraged. My parents, in other words, are not the problem. But when you add conservative aunts and uncles into the mixture, it gets difficult. I'm a good Indian girl, I've got to be good and chaste and pure. And the double standard is just horrific; one of my cousins is getting married this summer (they've "found him a girl", I was informed, simperingly), and another has just acquired a girlfriend (something I found out, in a truly horrific turn of events, from Facebook), but I.... well, I am a category error. I don't do That Sort of Thing. It's like an enormous blind spot they have about me; I'm not enough of a person. It makes me rather angry. Because I'm female, I don't have agency, is the continual subtext beneath all of this. "Time to get you married," they tell me, but note syntax; I can't do anything for myself.
And the worst part of it is, the day I do get married, if I do, I will become a person! Not my life experience, not my degree, not my life plans, not my being an adult and philosopher and lawyer and human being, but the fact of being married will transform me into an autonomous being in the eyes of my extended family. That really makes me angry; more than anything else, I think. It's eternally symptomatic of the wider problem, in that in the culture I belong to, I'm not worth particularly much; I'm a liability and a problem to be solved, rather than the wee princes who strut about being my male cousins, and the fact that I'm the only daughter of my side of the family makes it all that little bit worse. I'm nicely insulated from it by virtue of distance (both cultural and geographical; it's the fact of their being rather liberal people that made my parents emigrate in the first place, to some extent), but it comes out at times like this. Part of me wonders if it's something to do with the fact I've finished my degree - the last thing I ought to do before getting married.
My mother, I suspect, has a Machiavellian plan going on behind the scenes - I think she wants me to bring home my underdone pale white boyfriend (shock! horror! etc.!) in an attempt at a beautifully visual fuck-you in the direction of the worse of my relatives. (Who will cluck and tsk and say they always knew it would come to this, they always knew that girl was doomed to bring dishonour, and so on.) My mother on my side is a dangerous thing. And if there are people on my side, and besides in a few weeks all the relatives will have returned to whence they came and this whole period of angst will have come to a blissful end, I might suggest that it's not all that important, not in the longer scheme of things where I continue living here and baby-lawyering and, well, being me, but it does matter. It matters a whole lot, when you don't matter.
And as such, I shall spend the rest of the week steadfastly not answering my phone, I think. And I will go home for the family reunion and be sweetness and light, but it will continue to rankle that I spent this morning clearing my room of condoms and antidepressants, because. So there. I have no point to make here beyond the standard, classic, it's not fair, it's NOT FAIR, it wasn't fair when I was small and brown and lost, and it's not fair now.
Anyway. I am not eighteen. I am not twelve, four-and-a-half, or any other age that involves your relatives patting you on your head and remarking on how much you've grown and does she still not eat aloo gobi for breakfast like a good Indian girl, and we always knew she was going to turn out strange, etc., etc., and all the other things I have been subjected to today by my well-meaning relatives, here for the first time from India and making my life somewhat more difficult than it usually is. I say this with some, limited, affection; they try to be nice, they really do, and sometimes they really are, it's just, yes. Difficult. They have views. Indian families have Views. In a couple of weeks, they will be having a family reunion, in which a vast corpus of various relatives will appear, and my mother has been not-so-subtly persuading me to come home for it for quite a while now. This, of course, I have no objection to. It might be nice to be home for a couple of days, Mum will need lots of help I'm sure, and there are lots of my relatives (and two in particular) whom I'm very fond of and do want to see.
The problem is, well, my mother said, in a burst of enthusiasm, "Why don't you bring [
shimgray]?"To which my immediate response was, did my mother just acknowledge I'm an adult human being who might want to introduce her partner to her family? Quite apart from whether I could in good conscience subject a fellow human being to my family, this is, I think, the sort of liberal modern Western thinking that ought to be encouraged. My parents, in other words, are not the problem. But when you add conservative aunts and uncles into the mixture, it gets difficult. I'm a good Indian girl, I've got to be good and chaste and pure. And the double standard is just horrific; one of my cousins is getting married this summer (they've "found him a girl", I was informed, simperingly), and another has just acquired a girlfriend (something I found out, in a truly horrific turn of events, from Facebook), but I.... well, I am a category error. I don't do That Sort of Thing. It's like an enormous blind spot they have about me; I'm not enough of a person. It makes me rather angry. Because I'm female, I don't have agency, is the continual subtext beneath all of this. "Time to get you married," they tell me, but note syntax; I can't do anything for myself.
And the worst part of it is, the day I do get married, if I do, I will become a person! Not my life experience, not my degree, not my life plans, not my being an adult and philosopher and lawyer and human being, but the fact of being married will transform me into an autonomous being in the eyes of my extended family. That really makes me angry; more than anything else, I think. It's eternally symptomatic of the wider problem, in that in the culture I belong to, I'm not worth particularly much; I'm a liability and a problem to be solved, rather than the wee princes who strut about being my male cousins, and the fact that I'm the only daughter of my side of the family makes it all that little bit worse. I'm nicely insulated from it by virtue of distance (both cultural and geographical; it's the fact of their being rather liberal people that made my parents emigrate in the first place, to some extent), but it comes out at times like this. Part of me wonders if it's something to do with the fact I've finished my degree - the last thing I ought to do before getting married.
My mother, I suspect, has a Machiavellian plan going on behind the scenes - I think she wants me to bring home my underdone pale white boyfriend (shock! horror! etc.!) in an attempt at a beautifully visual fuck-you in the direction of the worse of my relatives. (Who will cluck and tsk and say they always knew it would come to this, they always knew that girl was doomed to bring dishonour, and so on.) My mother on my side is a dangerous thing. And if there are people on my side, and besides in a few weeks all the relatives will have returned to whence they came and this whole period of angst will have come to a blissful end, I might suggest that it's not all that important, not in the longer scheme of things where I continue living here and baby-lawyering and, well, being me, but it does matter. It matters a whole lot, when you don't matter.
And as such, I shall spend the rest of the week steadfastly not answering my phone, I think. And I will go home for the family reunion and be sweetness and light, but it will continue to rankle that I spent this morning clearing my room of condoms and antidepressants, because. So there. I have no point to make here beyond the standard, classic, it's not fair, it's NOT FAIR, it wasn't fair when I was small and brown and lost, and it's not fair now.
