Being an immigrant doesn’t have to mean your feet are always on shifty ground. As a matter of fact, the resilience some naturally acquire bequeaths them with roots that seem aerial
In my memories, kites in the Mumbai of my childhood cost R2 and were made of butter paper and the kind of sticks you find in brooms. Representation pic/Ashish Raje
Over the last fortnight, I have had to reanimate my finger muscles to better ‘craft’ with my oldest. His birthday in February marks four years since he chose me as his mother. It’s been exactly a month since he began kindergarten, and while I am grateful for the extra time, I already feel an apprehension about the socialisation processes outside of our home — a world in which certain sets of behaviours are reinforced among boys and certain among girls, a gateway period into the notion of gendering or being gendered. It is not uncommon for boys to lose their softness and vulnerability during this phase, and to seek out only the company of other boys and see themselves as different from girls. Of course, I wish I had the resources to homeschool him… in many ways, I am his primary pedagogue — I’m the one who taught him colours, shapes, numbers, and letters. I’m the one who sits with him daily to teach him what a syllable is, and how to blend sounds in order to read, and how to hold the pencil to make an ‘x’ or to spot the differences between two identical-seeming images. The kindergarten pedagogues were clear that they only expose kids to uppercase letters. Our little one can recognise all the lowercase versions of the uppercase letters, and I do pride myself on his growing literacy. Kindergarten is mandatory here, if I am not mistaken, and as much as I fear what he may learn through osmosis, I also want him to learn how to be with kids who are either his age or a year or two older. So, I’m holding space for all possibilities while continuing to navigate parenthood through an intersectional feminist lens.
The most intriguing development in the last few months is his acknowledgement of me as ‘brown’ (like chocolate). This is important because we live in a primarily white town. He is easily the brownest person in the kindergarten, even if he is several shades lighter than I am. I often wonder what role his skin colour will play in his personal consciousness. When he sees Black people with their kids, he eagerly shouts, ‘Look, Mama, they are brown like you!’ I validate his insights. I like that he ‘sees’ colour. I like that he notices specifics that so many grown-ups prefer to gloss over. But in moments like these, I have to accept how vastly different his trajectory will be from my own — on every front, from religious to social to cultural. Just talking to him about my own memories of kindergarten reveals the enormity of the worlds that separate us… Growing up in Kurla West, the three years of kindergarten were spread over three different venues. The site of the earliest, ‘Clef Nursery’, is now occupied by a building — though the nursery itself has moved into the home of the wonderful (now deceased) East Indian Aunty who started it. Junior KG was in the convent within the school premises, and while I cannot remember the nun who was my classroom teacher, I do remember Rubina, who taught me in Senior KG and had the singing voice of an angel. By the time we got to school, we were already writing and reading. Our son asked me what toys we played with, and I genuinely have no memory. It’s quite possible we didn’t have that many, considering how many of us were in a single classroom. ‘We played with each other,’ I tell him.
I’m still struggling with the language I need to use to sensitise our children to the glaring differences between their childhoods and mine, without them inferring that mine was somehow inferior because theirs is unfolding in a first-world set-up. The more I think about this, the more I realise how underexplored this realm of the immigrant experience is — this gulf between generations. On Sunday, for example, I ended up at an exhibition in a friend’s castle in a room that had played host to a kite-making workshop. Visitors were free to attempt to make their own kites. I found a reel of fabric and a wooden model of a kite that I could use for scale. Then I found thick sticks that had to be fitted into the fabric with a plastic tube, which needed to be cut using an improvised saw. Finally, I rummaged around and found a thread. In my memories, kites in the Mumbai of my childhood cost Rs 2 and were made of butter paper and the kind of sticks you find in stick brooms. These were low-cost, low-effort, and flew crazy high. In this moment of making something that felt so familiar yet whose structure was suddenly alien because of the material and the scale, I felt the gulf between where I come from and where I live suddenly gape open, threatening to swallow me. In these moments, I feel a sudden affinity with my own mother, who grew up in Goa but raised us in Kurla in Mumbai. I realise that being an immigrant doesn’t have to mean your feet are always on shifty ground… The resilience you naturally acquire as part of the legacy somehow bequeaths you with roots that seem aerial. I suspect this might be why immigrants love to grow ‘money plants’ — the metaphor that most closely embodies their experience of the flourishing that comes from displacement. After all, the most luscious money plants are the ones grown from stolen saplings.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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