Micro
Ma used to call my seventh-grade best friend, N., pakka—a Bangla term for which there is no translation in English, but means something culturally akin to “spoiled valley girl.” I didn’t understand the “pakka” label because N. was as dorky as the rest of us. She and I sat together on the school bus every day, sharing headphones. She bought around eight pop songs on iTunes and that’s what we listened to. I, iPhoneless, ate it up. We had “‘Moves Like Jagger’ Thursdays,” where she played the Maroon 5 hit over and over because it was her favorite song, and I refused to listen to it more than twice on any other day.
I now understand that N.’s pakka-ness, as perceived by Ma, was largely rooted in her desire to be “popular” and what it meant to be “popular” to N. was to be white. She claimed that our friend group—majority South Asian—was in the lowest social strata of friend groups at Karrer Middle School, the third tier of popularity. She never had first-tier-of-popularity aspirations, but after she fell in with her desired, predominantly white, second-tier-of-popularity friend group, we stopped talking. This didn’t break my heart or anything. In my Karrer years, friends just came and went and no one was so special to me that they were irreplaceable. Especially not N., because she was always mildly mean on top of being pakka. She told me once that her devout, Bangladeshi Muslim mother disliked me because I was outspoken and I encouraged N. to secretly change into shorts on the school bus when her family demanded she dress modestly. At the time I took offense to this dislike, but growing up and realizing that her mother was horribly abusive softens the blow. My friend R., whose parents are friends with N.’s, told me the horror stories. The worst I remember was that her mother wouldn’t let N. get her wisdom teeth removed, even after they got infected and her daughter was in pain, because she thought wisdom tooth surgery was a money grab that Americans were scammed into by the dental industry. I was horrified by this story but, knowing her mother, not surprised.
One day at lunch, I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while N. and I talked, and she abruptly asked, “Who do you think are the prettiest girls in our group?”
The question made me tense because I sat behind a girl named Olivia in science class and she once wore a crop top that showed off the clean line of her back, a sliver of neon pink underwear peeking up at the top of her jeans, at which I gawked. I wondered if N. could somehow tell and thought I was a lesbian. She once told me, “I think it’s mostly fine to be gay, but they shouldn’t legalize gay marriage because that would just encourage people.”
“Hmm,” I said, looking around the table. It certainly wasn’t me, with knobby knees and elbows like a newborn colt, my hair tied back in a low ponytail like a founding father. Not Lahari, who had luminous, thick blue-black hair and bright, expressive eyes, but also a unibrow that, at that age, she still was not getting threaded (earning her cruel nicknames from the kids on our bus). It wasn’t N. either, though I couldn’t name why yet. I just knew, even with her clear skin, big eyes, and shiny hair, that she wasn’t in the category of “beautiful” as I was taught to understand it.
“It’s Ella and Meghan,” I said with finality—the only white girls sitting at the table. The only girls with small noses and light hair.
“I agree,” N. nodded sagely. “Definitely Ella and Meghan.”
I once met a writer. A sixty-five-year-old white woman who retired from her intelligence job and is now pursuing a low-residency MFA. We met at a workshop in Italy, where she was looking to move permanently, because she was half-Italian and wanted to embrace her roots. She had us read a piece about her travels in Morocco, in which she described the brown men and boys who wanted to be her tour guide as “a pack of rabid dogs.” She depicted the women who then took her in as “exotic” and beautiful, “sensual, but innocent”—her saviors. To the best of my abilities, I pointed out the racism in the piece while masking my critiques in compliments and niceties, to lessen the blow—for her and me both.
“I’m sorry if I offended you with the italics in my story,” she said, referring to a comment I made about the heavy use of italics feeling exoticizing. She then went on, “You know, I am half-Italian and I’m not sure if you noticed but the people here are quite dark. The Italian side of my family has tan skin and black hair. I was always the ‘white sheep,’ with my blue eyes.” She grinned at me sardonically and I forced a laugh, not totally sure where this was going. “As a child in California, I had this long blonde hair down to my butt. But when we visited my cousins in New Jersey, my second cousin told me I had to cut it off, so they cut it short, and I cried in my room the rest of the day.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Why did they cut it off?”
She looked up at me with her big, sorrowful, cumulus cloud eyes. “Because they were so jealous.”
This is the problem, isn’t it? They always think we want to be them, are jealous of them. And I don’t want to be them, but isn’t there reason for them to think otherwise? To think, you wish you were me because I am better than you, and that’s why you dress like me and speak my language. Ma told me she didn’t want to raise me to be “too Indian” because “you’re growing up here, in America, not in India.” She never forced me to take Bharatnatyam lessons and let me respond in English when she spoke to me in Bangla. She grew up voraciously reading Nancy Drew books, idolizing her blood rust hair, but told me she found the Bengali literature lessons in school too depressing, so she never enjoyed them. They were always about our suffering, like the poetry of Sukanta Bhattacharya, who wrote during the British-imposed Bengal famine: “In the realm of hunger, the world is prosaic:/ The Full Moon appears as if a scorched bread.” When Ma explained this poem to me, she said “roti,” but the only version I can read of it is translated to English, so I must settle for “scorched bread.”
I think and dream and write in English. At her Catholic girl’s school in Kolkata, Ma was punished if she was overheard speaking any language but English. Ma’s subtext is always digestibility will save you. Assimilation will save you, but how little of me survived being swallowed like a pill. Sometimes, I watch videos to learn the Bengali alphabet, writing the letters in my journal, then give up and forget within the next week.
On my late Dadu’s bookshelf, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind sits next to Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. It all feels like some form of psychological warfare—emotionally crushing—like when I went out to lunch with some friends, all of us brown and Black, and the waiter kindly asked the table next to us if anyone ordered the eggplant, but came over to us and snapped, “Who ordered the eggplant?” in a tone so rude it made my hands shake, made each of us look at each other in panic, as if we were the ones who did something wrong.
I remember when a popular newsletter in which I published a piece couldn’t get in contact with me after missing my message that my institutional email was deleted, so they published my piece under the name of another brown writer in their system, and I frantically messaged the editor on Twitter, who told me that “sometimes these things just slip through the cracks.” I remember when a friend observed that my white colleagues’ sections of Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Writing filled up a lot more quickly than those of us with evidently foreign names. I remember when I interned at a trade publishing company and in a meeting someone suggested the word “Indian” be removed from the title of an Indian cookbook, a suggestion I saw they went with only when the book was published. All of this is for the sake of selling more books or making sentences more concise.
I mentally mark all the instances where journalists use passive voice to describe police violence, colonial violence, and hate crimes—the way in my own writing I, too, try to phrase things as gently, eloquently, and vaguely as possible to not come off as too angry. It keeps us in the margins, this avoidance; the refusal to call things what they are. I become smaller and smaller with every instance of it until I am a tight molecule of bitterness.
R. recently invited me over to have tandoori maach with her family, and after we ate, her mom took us and her little sibling, Nusra, out for ice cream. Driving back, she told us a grim story about a seventeen-year-old boy who drove his parents’ Tesla with too many of his friends in the car. Two of them had to sit in the trunk. He went 80 miles per hour over a speed bump and two of the kids, presumably the ones in the trunk, died. “He has to spend the rest of his life in jail,” she said grimly. Then, she paused and continued, “I don’t know how these white kids are raised. I used to worry a lot about you girls in college, when you hung out with those white girls who didn’t know how to act.” Nusra said, “Oh my god, Mom, we were fine,” while R. said, “Bro, I actually did sit in the trunk once with a group of white kids.”
I looked at her and went, “Oh, that’s fucked up.”
She laughed. “I wanted them to like me so bad so I did shit like that, but they never did. They never liked me.” Then she said, “To be fair, there were five people in the car. Someone needed to sit in the trunk. I volunteered.”
“Wait,” I said, “was it a sedan or a hatchback?”
“It was an SUV, like that,” R. replied, pointing at a large Cadillac. I was relieved, freed of the image of my friend crammed into the windowless trunk of a sedan, like a hostage or carry-on luggage. Instead, she was given a spot that was kind of still in the car, like our family friends’ goldendoodle when we went out with them and humans took all of the other seats.
“I am so mad at you, that you did that,” her mom said. “Don’t do shit like that.”
“Don’t worry, Ma,” R. said. “I’ve learned.”
But I don’t know that I have learned. Even now, I wonder if I would sacrifice my safety to be liked. If I would trade physical well-being for proximity to privilege. I still force myself to fit into spaces not meant for me for the sake of white people’s comfort—for some tenuous form of belonging that isn’t even worth it.
R. tells me that these days, N. goes by her dak nam and has a Bangla sticker on her laptop that R. and I assume she can’t read. Through my phone screen, I watch her grasp at dregs of Bengali culture barely within her reach, just as I do. By that I mean she has the Bangla spelling of her name in her Instagram bio so everyone knows her heritage. She travels the world and takes pictures with pretty cocktails, editing her face with heavy Instagram filters to the point that I thought she got a nose job—her big, Bengali nose melts to look almost dainty. She finally dresses the way she wants. That is, trendy and revealing. All her friends are beautiful—they have balayages, perfect makeup, and designer bags—presented to the world without a hair out of place. I imagine her taking a deep breath, closing her eyes, and lying prone in the trunk of her cool friend’s car, slamming the hood shut herself.
Monmita Chakrabarti (@monmita.bsky.social) is a writer currently based in St. Louis. Their work can be found in Joyland Magazine, The Audacity, Passages North, The Upper New Review, Ellipsis Journal, and elsewhere.