Edited by: Janani Mahadevan
Introducing yourself to new people in college is somewhat akin to an elevator pitch. You’re essentially selling yourself – wrapping your heart and your soul with wrinkle-free paper and offering them up with a nice little bow for extra flourish. Strangely enough, most spontaneous first meetings in orientation week start off like scheduled interviews. They constitute seemingly pre-planned questions that you don’t think were brainstormed by all the other 500 students in your batch but everyone magically knows anyway. Here’s the golden list: “What’s your name?” “What’s your intended major?” – and my absolute favorite – “Where are you from?”
In my first week of college, I had about a hundred people ask me where I’m from and my answer would almost always be different. The first time I was asked, all my vocal cords could muster was a very intelligent “uhh”. Behind the scenes, this was what was going on in my malfunctioning brain: “My parents are Indian, so I’m Indian, but I’ve lived in Dubai my whole life, so I’m an NRI, but I don’t really feel Indian – I mean, I have an Indian passport but does that really make me an Indian? And Dubai’s basically like a mini-India considering the 3 million Indians that live here, but it’s not actually India, and I’m not a local Emirati either. So, what am I? Who am I? Where do I belong?”
On the second day of orientation week, I said I was from South India, specifically from Kerala, and elaborated no further. It irked me the entire day, niggling me while I had lunch, nagging at me while I tried to catch some shut-eye. Being an expatriate in Dubai is such an important part of my identity, and not speaking about it seemed like I had stripped off what really mattered to show the world a mere husk of myself. Not acknowledging the parts of me that had been irrevocably changed by my experiences as an expatriate living in Dubai felt like I was actively erasing a central piece of my identity.
The next day, I changed my reply to state that I was from Dubai. Aside from the inevitable barrage of follow-up questions – “Are you rich? You must have, like, 10 Ferraris.” “Do you ride camels?” “Do all women have to wear a hijab there?” “Do you know Arabic? Say something in Arabic, no?” – this answer did not really fit right. I am not from Dubai. I have no familial roots there, I don’t have a permanent address, and we’d have to pack our bags if my parents ever lost their jobs. Then again, did familial roots and permanent addresses translate to a sense of belonging? Even if I did say yes, the truth is that I will never truly be a part of this beautiful city as much as it is a part of me.
By the end of my orientation week, my answer had undergone several brutal rounds of review. I ended up telling people that my roots are in Kerala but I’ve lived in Dubai my whole life. This was technically true, but I felt hollow. Not once was I, in good conscience, able to firmly say that I was from somewhere. Not once was I able to say I belong here. Even though this particular response prompted a lot of unwanted attention into investigating my identity – and my irrelevant financial status – it was the one that brought me the least grief. The lesser of many evils, you may say.
The question, “Where are you from?” is a time bomb, an identity crisis waiting to happen, practically imperceptible because it’s dressed so banally. For some, it’s an easy question to answer, but for people like me, it reveals a fast-moving spiral from some deep corner of my mind, made of turmoil. As far as I know, it does not even have an answer. Sometimes I wonder, is the spiral necessary? Should I even let this question be so powerful that it invokes a spiral? And I’ve realized that though it may seem unhelpful, the spiral does raise important questions about why we feel the need to belong, and even just what it means to belong somewhere. For if it’s not your passport, your ancestry, or where you’ve lived your entire life that assures you a sense of belonging, what will?