I am half-Sikh. I will not ever hide that, because there is not anything to hide about it. But for a very long time, I did not think of it. It is very easy to erase yourself when you can silently join the throngs of young bombay women walking down a street- all seemingly the same. It is even easier to erase yourself when you can go home and see no trinket of your identity other than the ghee infused in your mother’s rotis, and the loud phone conversations in punjabi.
My grandfather wears a turban, my mother’s brothers used to wear a turban, my very young cousins wear a turban, and my slightly older cousins wear on their heads a spiraling debate on who they want to be, a debate which on one side has guilt, and the other stigma. I am glad I do not have to pick which side wins. I do not have to be anything at first sight, but they all do. At first sight, even before they are human, they are Sikh. I could conveniently forget this until I left the confines of Bombay to visit them all. The first sight, even before looking at my Nana walking over to hug me, was his turban perched with pride.
Yet, our culture made me forget this pride. Remember all those Santa-Banta jokes in our news comics? the dim-witted turbanned friend in every 2000s movie? the loud sikh aunty in the tv ads? I do, and I remember laughing with them, not wondering what I was laughing about. Who I was laughing at?
Before 1984, the Sikh identity and visibility were not debated, but on October 31 st 1984 following the assassination of then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a Sikh genocide was sparked. As one of the members of the assassination team was a man with a turban, his ethnic identity was clear and the deaths of over 10,000 Sikhs paid the price. The pride I saw in my Nana’s turban was used at one time as a mark of a human deserving of violence.
I never wanted to talk about this identity, I did not even consider that my mother was 16 at the time of the riots, and that my uncles cut their hair and gave up their turbans in exchange for safety- their hair still grows the way it did when it was adorned, like a weed that will not let them forget. I did not want to remember that my grandfather and his brothers were hidden by their Hindu neighbors for days to prevent harm, and my great-grandfather had seen this happen to his people twice now. That farmlands of Punjab were burned. That my family wondered if they might hear back from our relatives in the north ever again. That we had accepted misery into our pores, just like last time, and the time before.
My mother refuses to talk to me about 1984. We have tried a few times and it ends with her in tears fairly quickly. Sometimes she says she does not remember, and I say it is because it is too recent. I tried to talk about it to my grandfather once, but he asked me if I wanted any oranges from the shop instead. I have started to wonder if my Sikh family is focused on the joys of music, food, festivals, and stories from the neighborhood, because the depths of 1984, 1947, 1919 are too heartbreaking for our dhol songs.
We have mixed grief, loss, and pain into our beloved butter that we overuse in our curry- in that way we can get rid of it. Or pass it on. I am thinking about how my Nani would sometimes remove a vegetable I did not like from my plate so that my meal could be as perfect as she dreamed it to be.
I think we have removed our anger from the plate we have presented. I think we have removed history from the plate we have presented. But as you see the world around you, history catches up with you, even if lovingly excised.
I am half-Sikh, I am not sure what it means to me yet. But I am sure as hell, it means something!
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postcolonialmigrant 