What I have in Common with a Muslim Gangster in Mumbai
'American' Part 3: Nothing is as they think it is | Chapter 13
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You are about to read the namesake chapter of ‘American’, a short book chronicling my life in spite of and because of my culture and circumstances. This chapter may alternatively be titled ‘American?’.
2005
In the second grade in New York State, we learned about the Civil Rights Movement. One day, we watched a documentary about Birmingham, Alabama. I was sitting next to my best friend, Rina. Rina was a bit of every part of the world. She was the first person to talk to me on my first day of kindergarten, and we had everything in common in our minds, but absolutely nothing in common in our lives. We called each other almost every day to share morsels of elementary school academics with each other, always in competition to be the smartest student in the class. We were so close that our teachers assigned us seats as far from each other as possible, and eventually assigned us to separate classes.
That is why her words hit me like ice down the spine that day in second grade, when we learned about little girls dying in a church bombed in Birmingham. Rina announced to no one in particular “I hate white people.” And how could I blame her? I expected the film to end, and for Rina to stand up without looking at me, walk away, and never speak to me again. I thought that I had been exposed as some kind of monster, a menace to each of my classmates, and that life for me must be over, at the ripe age of seven. But nothing changed - Rina and I went back to our giggling nerdy duo as soon as the movie was over, and I figured I must not be one of the white people she was referring to.
Nonetheless, nothing felt normal for me after that. All the big words I had known only as confusing abstract concepts suddenly held very real meaning: Latino, Caucasian, African American, Native American, Asian. I don’t know if my difficulty grasping them was the product of my childhood or my whiteness. My friends told me their parents were from places called Puerto Rico or Nigeria; the world map in my young mind held those as some part of the distant land of Massachusetts, which is where all foreign entities came from. I thought Africa was a city in Kalamazoo. How could I have understood one label from the next when the whole world was one pot of alphabet soup always stirring in my head?
2008
Two years later, my mom told me we would be moving to Alabama. I cried and told her we couldn’t move there because there are no black people in Alabama. We arrived the week before my tenth birthday. At our new church, I met a new type of white people. They wore only pastels and pinstripes and boat shoes, and they all lived in big houses in a half-mile section of the historic district.
We rented a small house across the boulevard - on the wrong side of the boulevard - from them, and I knew very quickly that I was not one of them, and I would never be. They were hospitable enough, but I always felt like the token poor child in the youth group, if only because I’d been told so by more than one of the other children there.
It was the era of Neutrogena face wash commercials, and as pre-pubescent acne began to run rampant across my forehead, I could smell grapefruit radiating from the spotless pores of the other church girls.
On the first day of school, I discovered that there are a lot of black people in Alabama, and they were not happy to see me. Of eighty students in the fifth grade, three were white, none as white as I, and I was the only white student in my particular classroom. The rest of the white kids in the neighborhood attended one of two private schools, the only ones “worth” attending out of the many in the city. The district for my school included all of downtown, where a poor black neighborhood and a rich white neighborhood existed side-by-side, back-to-back. The kids at my school had only ever seen the pastel-pinstripe whites, so I - a public schooler living on the fringe between neighborhoods - was a violation of their laws of the world.
I made friends and lost friends quickly that year. The classwork was boring to me, since the curriculum in New York had covered the same lessons two years before. The other kids thought I was smart because I was privileged; the reality was that they had never been given a chance. The public elementary schools in Alabama were far behind those in the North. At the end of the year, I walked away with most of the academic awards, which, though earned, felt like loot in my arms, as though I’d bamboozled my fellow students.
After one year of living in Alabama, I’d found no common ground with anyone except the sky, which often threw lightning across the horizon and poured monsoons onto the rooftops.
The next year, I started middle school at a magnet school which drew students from all over the city. I met another type of white there - strawberry blondes with freckles. There were about eight of them in my gym class. I’d never once met a strawberry blond before, and it took me two years to tell them all apart. They were instantly friends with each other, all wearing the same type of bow in their hair.
At the far end of the mall, there was a store with pink walls that sold these bows and nothing else except monograms, friendship bracelets, and other such necessities of a popular twelve-year-old girl in the Deep South. I would saunter in as a loathing onlooker without any means to ever buy anything, scrutinizing whether every item in there was the wall between me and the Southern Belle I could be, or the slippery slope on which I would lose my identity.
Despite the shocking integration of this new species into my life, I found safety in middle school, playing the clarinet in a band full of other pre-teens that didn’t belong anywhere else. Band carried me through the next seven years, ushering me into the company and confidence of every type of Southern “oddity” - mormons, Indians, kids of criminal parents, kids who are criminals, kids who wanted to be famous, kids who didn’t want kids, rich black kids, poor white kids, one Jew, runaways, bad kids with good parents, good kids with bad circumstances, autists, addicts, geniuses, and other kids who had moved from across the country and had no understanding of this new social order.
Band was a refugee camp for singularities, for students who didn’t look, think, or live like other students. It kept us, for the most part, out of trouble (and in shape - we had to do pushups every time we broke a rule). I had a place in the world in those years. Ten years later, I remain the only person I know who wishes I could go back to high school.
All the public high schools in Mobile County have an expansive repertoire of great fist fights, but my school’s were the most entertaining. Each lunch session was guaranteed one fight a day, and students would gather under the flagpole to watch. An announcement would come over the intercom “All male teachers, please report to the flagpole.” No further details were necessary, everyone knew what it meant. Twice in my four years there, an administrator had his arm broken while intervening. The choir room had a balcony overlooking the courtyard, and the teacher would often herd us onto it to cheer on the fights. Most days also brought a bonus non-lunch fight, which would usually unfold in an empty, echoing corridor outside classrooms full of bored students. By senior year, the police had a permanent parking spot in front of the school gates - it may have been the only police car in the heart of the city that regularly saw any action.
My sophomore year of college, I got a message from my friends back home. They had drawn a map of our high school campus and were marking a red “X” on every spot where they could remember a fight, along with a trademark descriptor of each fight; highlights such as “Hold my baby,” “Flying saxophone,” and “You’re not my girlfriend.” It took years after graduating for me to stop habitually saying “hold my earrings” in moments of joking anger.
Those who walk the sleek halls of nationally acclaimed high schools where every student’s parents attend PTA meetings might look down on us as barbarians. But honestly, it was an enhanced curriculum; a strange freedom that can only be understood as such by the people who have experienced it.
2023
“Well, good meeting you.” We hug goodbye, and I delete his number as he disappears down the malodorous steps of W. 4th Street Station. On the platform below, he takes a train back to Brooklyn, types out a courtesy “It was nice talking to you” text, and deletes my number as soon as it sends.
It was a pleasant enough date. We talked about his parents being academics, his good relationship with his sister, and his love for winter sports. We also talked about my childhood associations with homeless people, my constant sense of being watched by God, and my belief that street fighting is the best sport.
There’s nothing wrong with him except that he is a member of that class of Americans that elude me in their lifestyles and beliefs. Both of us are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) by blood, but his blood landed in the thirteen colonies and stayed there, breeding generations of nuclear families, each one more educated than the last. Meanwhile, my blood married into a family of big-hearted Appalachian hillbillies who all raised three kids for half the cost of one New England child. Our similarities ceased when bluegrass mountains tore through the common ground in our ancestry.
I never really catch the eye of a man with skin as white as mine. The dates always start with “I wanted to talk to you, because you just seem… different from other girls.” They all end with the man scrolling through the apps under the table, searching for girls who are less different - different because they passionately recycle or they love spicy food, not because they were raised in some strange intersection of worlds that renders them part of no world at all.
I’m outed as un-American. My life, my existence, is a defamation to their memories of t-ball games and family Christmas and fraternity parties, all of which are likely chronicled in framed photographs on their parents’ living room wall.
Yet, I feel more American than all of them.
2016
My college education came with a new list of vocabulary words. While “microaggression” was a popular one, “micromanaging” didn’t make the list. If it had, maybe I wouldn’t have spent four years having my life story edited, censored, and disbelieved by the ‘more worldly’ students from superior states like Massachusetts or California, where people are taught the truth about our country. Or at least, where people are taught that their truth is the only truth in this country.
If ever there was a diametric opposite, an arch-nemesis, a born antagonist to a white girl who grew up lower-class and religious in a world of many colors, it is the average north eastern liberal arts student.
Many students remarked how diverse our campus was, yet the student body was about sixty percent white, making it twice as white as the whitest school I’d ever attended previously. For these students, this petri-dish of wokeness was their first impression of the world beyond their home, and the campus sensitivity trainings gave them the laws through which they will always see the world. These are laws that say “This is how disadvantaged groups in our society want us to talk about them.” Thus the groundwork was laid for these students to know everything about adversity without ever having to see or experience it up close.
Take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. There’s a veil of bitterness, perhaps justly earned, upon the memory of my fellow students. After all, many of them came from a life of suburban comfort that I have no understanding of; in the same way that they assume I must be a country bumpkin who kisses my cousins and thinks people of color are exotic, I assume their moms packed their lunch every day, and they all play lacrosse, and that they think people of color are exotic. Both of us are, in each other’s eyes, the problem with this country. I can only tell you accurately how I felt, which was that every time I would say “but what about poverty?” the response was, “what do you know about it? You’re white.”
I was homeless in spirit yet again. My schedule was bulging at the seams while I did my best to avoid the chasmic feeling of being misunderstood that would overwhelm me when I was alone. There was no discretion to be found there. My room, my bathroom, my meals, my story - all of it was under someone else’s purview.
Senior year, the world finally let up, and I found more nooks and crannies to squeeze my soul into: my work at a cafe, the church I sang at, and my relationship all lent me solid ground. The common factor between those three things was immigrants - the cafe was run by a Bolivian and patronized by people from Greece and the Balkans. My church congregation was largely Caribbean and African immigrants. My boyfriend’s family, who took me in like their own, moved from Italy a few years before he was born. Somehow, I had found more in common with people from all over the world than I could with anyone in the tiny snowglobe that was my college campus. Maybe I embraced them so much because they never suspected that I was anything short of a perfectly normal American.
Students would often ascribe my differences to my being from Alabama. But I wasn’t born there. I moved there when I was ten, and most of my family stayed in New York. My parents aren’t even from the South at all, so how can all of our differences be because of that? Still, people tend to point to my years in Alabama as the dividing factor between us, though I’ve now lived nearly two decades in New York State and less than one in Alabama. In the South, my friends chock up my oddities to my being from the North. I am a splinter in the finger of either region, neither fitting me comfortably into its skin.
2020
Hell is a place that you need to take a ferry to get to. If you are running on time, the ferry will leave early, and if you get there early, it will leave late. When you get to the other side, you’ll miss your bus and wait thirty minutes for another bus that will never come. You'll look up alternate routes, but there won’t be any. There will be one train, running only on one shore of Hell, and you can’t get from that train to anywhere else, because Hell was built on a steep incline, so you would have to walk hills upon hills upon hills to even make it a few feet inland.
In Hell, you might experience a moment of beauty and solitude. Then, out of nowhere, a meth addict will ask you where Bay Street is, and you’ll say "we're standing on Bay Street.” He’ll persist: "can you point to it?” You'll point to the ground below you, yet he won’t believe you, so he’ll keep asking clarifying questions; there’s no one around to bear witness and no end in sight.
You walk to your destination, because the buses aren't running. Just as you see your destination in the distance, the bus you needed thirty minutes ago passes by, empty, because no schedule whatsoever was communicated to the people who depend on it. The bus will go around and around and around the island, vomiting toxins into the air, stopping for no one, only to serve as a reminder to every reluctant pedestrian that this whole island is against them.
In Hell, infrastructural improvements lead to asbestos blowing through the wind and a deep underbelly of trash posing as green space. Hell has cancer rates high enough to singlehandedly feed the fat heads at the top of the pharmaceutical industry. In Hell, everyone works so they can afford a car to drive to work. No one ever sees each other, because they spend all their spare time looking for parking.
Hell is a place called Staten Island.
I live here.
I have to get out.
Autumn 2023
Among that long list of college vocabulary words is “gentrify.” If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find it to be a term of economic weight. If you ask any New Yorker, they’ll tell you that it means “a white person lives here now.”
The trees are the same color as the taxis, and they’re hanging over my street, covering up the sins of the sidewalk with fallen leaves. 141st street looks good all year round, except for when the dogs first violate the snow after a blizzard, the owners too cold to be bothered. I’ve been here three years now, which makes it one of the most consistent homes I’ve ever had. Much to the chagrin of many people, it’s a delightful neighborhood.
Harlem is much like every neighborhood I have lived in, and I look just as out of place here as I always have. I am now 5’7” and 121 pounds, which is half an inch and six pounds more than I was twelve years ago, in seventh grade. The extra six pounds have been an even split between my thoughts and my butt; but it brings me no closer to blending in.
Every neighborhood in this city is barren compared to Harlem. On Sundays, I can hear cathedral services in Spanish and the tiny Baptist church belting out songs at its sidewalk gospel service. In the afternoon, a group of elderly degenerates blasts oldies on the corner outside the laundromat. In the evenings, cigar smoke wafts over my building from the lounge below. At 2 a.m., men play dominoes in Johnny Hartman Plaza.
The cigar lounge is my favorite place in the neighborhood. I’ve never been inside, and I’ve never spoken to anyone there, but it is my evening farewell and my nightly welcome home. I know it is spring as men gather in lawn chairs and exchange greetings of friends who have been long separated, various smokes entangling in the air over their heads. I see it is summer when the cigars are held by bare shoulders and the chattering starts late and stays late, as music plays deep into the night, each apartment sweltering and too hot to entice a timely return. I sense autumn as the sun sifts through thick smoke and the air clears at dusk, the wind off the river ending each evening early. Winter is bare; there are no folding chairs, no midnight music; the festivities retreats behind the closed doors of the lounge, and no one dares to open them at the risk of letting in the cold; there is only my own breath materializing in the brisk air, a mockery of the smoke of other seasons.
There’s a tacky lingerie shop down Broadway and I snicker in disapproval when I pass. My blood is Puritan, after all. The next block features a billiards bar boasting displays of poorly clad, busty women in the window. I've never trusted a busty woman. I’m sure they don’t feel the same towards me, or think of me at all.
Byron, the superintendent of the next building down, used to say hello to me every morning, when I still worked in the mornings. A homeless man, also named Byron, comes into the cafe where I work to dance to the music. Then, he tells me he saw me in that movie in 1968, and in 1959 he called me the n-word on the street. I have to escort him out before he starts doing past-life readings on all the customers. Each time we revisit this ritual, he asks for a cup of milk first, then says “thank you for the nourishment,” and proceeds to mix several packs of sugar into it. Before I get him out the door, he always tells me “Don’t kill yourself. And take care of those babies.” Then he goes to the Chinese take-out place a few doors downhill and uses all of his collected change to get sweet and sour chicken with rice, which he often eats in the cafe bathroom, leaving droplets of red sauce across the sink. If it weren’t for that last part, I’d let him hang around more.
Walking down 144th Street on my way to work each afternoon, a woman shoots up on the stoop of an abandoned brownstone. She is missing half of her right butt cheek, and is always wearing a skirt that doesn’t quite make it to the bottom of her hip. She looks at me forlornly as if asking my forgiveness for having seen her this way. One beautiful Saturday, she followed me down the street and called me “mother.” As I turned the next corner, a group of men called out “mami.” This is the closest I will ever come to being accepted here.
I am two hundred pages into an epic tale of Mumbai’s corruption, and thirty pages into vivid descriptions of deaths and torture committed by gangs and policemen alike. A goon of D-Company - a crime syndicate greater than Cosa Nostra could ever have dreamed of being - speaks nonchalantly about being unwanted in the world he was born into, a Muslim in Hindustan. He loves his home; his employment as a menace to society is his only means to a stable life there. He avows that he would die for his country, even as his own people have been asked, told, and forced to leave by whatever means necessary - even as he works for the opposition, classified as a terrorist.
I relate to him, as only a white girl can - with blissfully dumb sympathy, and parallels to my own life of far lesser gravity. I too am a menace, just trying to keep my roots where they’ve been planted. I don’t kill people, or smuggle drugs, but to some, I am the face of havoc, a tide in the tsunami of hard times.
There’s a whole generation of “mission babies”—my children (you) and those of my co-workers—born and raised while we worked at the Rescue Mission. These children had front-row seats to homelessness, though none of them lived it personally. Instead, they grew up watching their parents serve the mentally ill, poor, homeless, and addicted, often at sacrificial wages and without regret.
We chose lives rooted in purpose, not profit. Despite the financial strain, we always managed to create beautiful homes—many of them fixer-uppers. Once restored, they made us feel privileged to live in them, even if true privilege might have meant never settling for a home in need of repair in the first place.
I see the “mission babies” now as well-rounded, compassionate adults who intimately understand the weight of sacrifice. That understanding has shaped them. They saw their parents juggle countless responsibilities—keeping the balls in the air, so to speak—and they witnessed the daily tension between passion and practicality. Over time, they’ve watched their parents (us) reach a kind of parity with their higher-income peers, but they got there through ingenuity, resourcefulness, and resilience.
These mission babies know what it means to stretch a dollar. They recognize the absurdity of losing thousands while trying to scoop up pennies—yet also the reality of moments when even a single dollar means everything. That kind of clarity isn’t taught; it’s inherited through experience. And it has made them wise because they were born into it, lived it, and learned to do it a little smarter than we did - by investing the resources they were given and learned early on into adulthood.