Spilling the Chai

On Growing Up Indian in America

This semester, the penultimate assignment of one of my classes was to write a memoir. As I started to write, I was pretty clear on the fact that I was just going to give a chronological timeline of my life. Before long, I realized that I cannot encapsulate myself in the things that have happened to me. Who I am starts long before I was even an idea — it starts with my parents, my grandparents, and their parents. It starts with the country my parents left behind 30 years ago to pursue a better life.

Over the past year or so, I’ve experienced what I’ll call my personal cultural renaissance. Like any good zillennial (I understand that I’m not quite a millennial, but refuse to identify with a generation that eats Tide Pods for views), I try to keep myself up to date on current events and pop culture. Also, like most first generation immigrants, I did everything in my power to adopt as many aspects of American culture as possible. Although I grew up in a culturally diverse suburb, I didn’t see anyone that looked like me in the TV shows that I watched, nor the books I read. Naturally, what I saw on TV was the “right” way to present myself. My culture was just something I did with my family at night or on weekends. The extent to which I’d participate at school was hurriedly saying, “Happy Diwali” to the four other Indian kids in my class.

In 2019, the pop culture landscape looks very different than it did in 2003, or even in 2013. Two of the biggest movies of last year were Crazy Rich Asians and Black Panther, both movies featuring almost entirely POC casts. Priyanka Chopra married everyone under the age of 25’s childhood crush, Nick Jonas. Tan France is the gay Pakistani-British fashion god we all need in our lives, Jameela Jamil is speaking out about colorism, and Mindy Kaling is creating a TV show based on growing up as a South Asian-American teenager. Sure, I’m still explaining to people that Hindi is a language, Hindu is a religion, and that white girls with ॐ tattoos are deeply problematic, but progress right? I’m still regaining fluency in a language that I tried to erase from my vocabulary, but I’m embracing the fact that if some influencer can talk about her ayurvedic kitchari’s health benefits, I can eat my chaat masala popcorn in peace. This is the story of how I grew up Indian, and American, and how I’m finally learning to be Indian-American.

My parents both grew up in Andhra Pradesh, a Telugu-speaking state in South India. My mother had two outfits growing up — one which she was wearing, and the other which was being hand-washed with water she lugged from the communal pump. The entire family lived in a joint compound in Vijayawada, so when she wasn’t studying, she was playing with her cousins in the street. She was so smart that she ranked first in her class every single year — even her senior year, when her appendix burst as she took her final exams. My father, who grew up in the seaside town of Kakinada, hundreds of miles away, was the youngest of five. He tutored friends for free, just because he wanted everyone to learn. He adopted stray dogs, went on raithu bazaar (farmer’s market) runs for the whole family, and still found time to excel academically.

Both of my parents pursued engineering degrees, studying mechanical and civil engineering. My mother was one of three women in her class, and my father’s favorite past time was stealing mangoes from the groves surrounding the school. In the late 80’s, both of my parents earned coveted international scholarships. Leaving everything they knew behind, they both became the first in their families to come to the United States. For my mother, graduate school was mixture of black coffee in lab late at night, trips to Juarez to get cheap haircuts, and learning a lot about oil and the environment. My dad was once pulled out of a snowbank by Jerry Sandusky, and threw up from the sheer number of people the first time he went to the Nittany Lion stadium. He went fishing with his roommates, and wrote a thesis. They met in 1993, after some light prodding from both families, and after six months of weekend visits, letters, and phone calls, decided to get married. They married in India on February 25th, 1994 in an intimate ceremony of 2000 people. After returning to the States, they moved to Minnesota, where my father had a job working in aerospace engineering.

On September 24th, 1997, I was born in the midst of an uncharacteristically early snowfall. My parents named me accordingly — Hima Varsha, or snow shower in Sanskrit. According to my parents, our life in Minnesota was idyllic. My best friends were Terry, the next door neighbor baby, and Nicky, the four year old who always came over to play at the end of my afternoon nap. In 2000, our little family moved to California at the tail end of the dot com boom. I started preschool at Rainbow Montessori, and quickly made friends with this girl Monica, who was a year older than me. At pick-up that day, our parents discovered that they were from the same part of India, and made plans to go to to a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant. Over free chips and salsa, we made our first friends in California. Almost 20 years later, the group has swelled to seven families.

When I was seven years old, my parents bought a house in West San Jose, and I started second grade at the local public school. This was the start of my intentional cultural erasure in presenting myself to the outside world. Six years as an only child had made me a voracious reader, and having access to the school library was my wildest dream come true. I tore through Junie B. Jones, Geronimo Stilton, Harry Potter, and secretly, the Babysitters Club books. I learned that I was supposed to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and pasta at dinner. Food wasn’t allowed to have a smell, as I learned during my “lunch box moment,” a term coined by NBC Asian America, meaning the moment that a child’s ethnic foods are mocked at school. The aromas of garam masala and yellow turmeric stains were a death sentence, and I outlawed Indian food in my lunches. After a particularly traumatic playground experience of a boy telling me my coconut oil-slicked braids smelled weird, I began hiding in my closet when my mom pulled out the blue Parachute oil bottle.

My one concession? The Dilworth Elementary School talent show. 4–8 girls, 4–8 moms, and one choreographed Bollywood dance. These dance practices in the spring were the highlight of the year, because they meant playdates that lasted for hours as our moms stayed for “just one cup of chai.”

Middle school wasn’t very fun. Like every kid, I was bullied, but I didn’t even realize it at the time because I was so desperate to call them my friends. I sat through a week on ancient Hindu civilizations in Social Studies and endured my ignorant teacher’s mispronunciations of Lakshmi and Varanasi. Dionysus was very easy to say, for some reason. I took a wood shop class, and made a spoon that still makes makes me smile when I use it to stir something on the stove. I swam, I played piano, I earned a black belt in taekwondo, I did Kumon, and I did dance — everything that every other kid did. I continued to go to Chinmaya Mission Balavihar, my Sunday School, learning about the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and dutifully memorizing chants from the Bhagavad Gita. I learned about the original role of the caste system, as written in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures, and how that reflected in modern day India. After class, I joined my dad behind the concessions stand which was called Tiffin Seva. Seva means service, and with together, we served our community, dishing up samosa chaat and $1 Krispy Kreme donuts to the throng of kids and parents trying to get their Sunday breakfast.

By 2015, I was a senior in high school, and by all accounts, I was thriving. I had an incredible group of friends, I had great relationships with all my teachers, and I felt like I was born for my role in student government. My friend Hana and I loved discussing the latest plot twist in the Mindy Project during our leadership class. For me, it wasn’t so much about the storyline. I was just so excited to see a dark-skinned woman of South Asian descent on screen. It didn’t bother me at all that even her character rejected her Indian culture — I saw myself in her. I started to get into fitness and cooking, and spent an hour doing Blogilates videos in the garage after school. I became obsessed with protein and tracking calories, and once again rejected Indian food, even at dinner time. I would pretend to enjoy slabs of baked salmon with giant salads, dressed in only balsamic vinegar, ever tempted by the delicious smells wafting over from my family’s plates. I was left at the kitchen table long after they had finished, choking down my vinegar-soaked greens as my brother laughed at me from the family room for being a coconut — brown on the outside and white on the inside.

When I started college at the University of Southern California, things were different. I was suddenly not in a minority majority space anymore. My family had always been comfortable financially growing up, but I was no stranger to combining coupons and scoffed at paying more than $10 for a meal. USC was different, to say the least. On one hand, many students in my dorm were the first in their families to go to college, and on the other, I knew a girl who took her friends up to San Francisco on a private jet for the Weekender, the annual Bay Area football game. I applied to four clubs and got into none of them, a significant blow to my inflated high school ego. My favorite past time was meeting up with my friends at the dining hall over french fries. When I went home for Winter Break, I realized that I had spent a little too much time making french fry friends, and not enough time making fitness friends. I resolved to become a morning person and started waking up at 6:30 every day to drag myself the quarter mile to the gym. I began documenting my gym excursions on an Instagram account that Monica and I had started in high school, but abandoned when she started college. At the beginning, the account was strictly for me to monitor and document my own workouts — the only person that knew about it was Monica, and I kept it a secret from my friends at school and at home. Throughout my sophomore and junior year, I became more active on the account as I documented my journey learning to cook. At some point, a couple friends found the account, and before I knew it, people were asking me to teach them how to cook, and my banana bread was the reason I had friends.

As I became more involved in the wellness space, I started to notice a couple things. The wellness space is almost entirely white women. I was happy to learn how to make buffalo cauliflower from anyone, but not “superfood too-mare-ic lattés with aaashwagaanda,” as a particularly big influencer started posting. Suddenly, India and Indian culture was trendy. Other food bloggers I followed posted recipes for chana masala, did ayurvedic kitchari cleanses, and showed off their pH balancing tongue scrapers.Yoga was suddenly essential to live a healthy, balanced life. And khichdi? That was the hated road trip meal my parents would bring along to save money when we went skiing or got back from a long trip with no food in the house. When I went to yoga classes, I happily joined the rest of the class in flowing through supta baddha konasanas into chaturangas. My stomach turned a little every time the teacher bowed to the class with a “Namaste,” explaining that it meant “the light and teacher in me honors the light and teacher in you.” I never said it back, because in India, Namaste is simply a respectful greeting, as in, hello! Coachella was a sea of influencers wearing bindis, boxer braids, Native American headdresses with zero regard for the communities of color they were profiting off of. My culture was being co-opted, whitewashed, and fed back to me by the very people that had mercilessly mocked it 15 years prior.

I was livid, but realized that if everyone was suddenly going to become enamored with Indian culture, I already had a platform to share it. I could change the narrative, and instead of being mad that Cafe Gratitude serves a $16 bowl of daal, I could show people how to make a week’s worth for $5. I could share how everyone’s beloved turmeric lattés were the active ingredient in the Indian mother’s medicine cabinet — the first resort when a child had trouble sleeping or complained of a stomach ache. I began to share more on my Instagram, and was absolutely blown away by how receptive people were. I talk about my own experiences learning to cook Indian food, and about a disastrous chana masala occasion when I poisoned myself. I encourage people to learn about the trendy ingredients they are buying, whether it is ceremonial matcha from the Asian grocery store, or a tincture of Chinese digestive herbs for digestion from Erewhon Market. As Priyanka married Nick in what can only be described as the craziest wedding of the decade, I built up the confidence to wear jhumka earrings with jeans. When Hasan Minhaj went on Ellen and talked to her about properly pronouncing his name, I found the courage to respond to a professor who remarked that I was lucky my Indian name was short.

Recently, my best friend’s Dadima (grandmother) lost her battle with breast cancer. I was driving when I saw the text pop up, and pulled over immediately, my vision already blurry with tears. Like my own, Guneet’s Dadima had lived with her family in the US on and off throughout our childhood. I was always so impressed that she could drive when she picked us up from school, and I loved her rajma with rice. She was always so happy to see me, and called me by my mother’s name every time I greeted her with a Sat sri akaal and a hug. My Ammamma and Nannamma loved her too, and despite speaking completely different languages, were able to communicate without words. When I was growing up, I was always reluctant to talk to my grandmothers when they were in India. I never made the effort to call, claiming that I didn’t know the phone number, although it took me all of three minutes to memorize a credit card number. My brother calls them every few days to regale them with stories of his life, but I would only talk to them when I was home from college. Dadima’s passing made me realize that time passes whether we want it to or not, and I need to take advantage of the limited time we have left. I want to record their stories, to immortalize their struggles and triumphs, and to cement the strongest link I have to my culture.

I grew up hating what made me different — the bright colors of Indian clothes, the harsh vowels and flowing consonants of my mother tongue, and my unruly hair that rebelled against my attempts to flatten it against my head. As I learn to love these very aspects of my culture, I’m thrilled to see the world starting to embrace them as well. Today, I see more of myself represented in the media. I’m making a conscious effort to support artists and business owners of color, and I’m educating myself on my own biases. I’m learning how to listen to and to uplift marginalized voices. I’m proud to support South Asian-led incredible nonprofits like Pratham USA, alongside my parents, who inculcated the important of service in my at a young age. I’m having conversations with other first generation kids about shared experiences, and vocalizing what I kept to myself for so long. My ancestors did not fight the British just so that I could assimilate into another former British colony. Here I am in America, with my thick eyebrows, mahogany skin, and head full of curly hair. I take my chai with lots of ginger, and my kombucha diluted with water. I play the occasional Bollywood song in my spin classes alongside Taylor Swift and reggaetón. My heart swells with pride at the Indian national anthem, and I tear up at football games when the Star-Spangled Banner plays. I am finally proud to be Indian-American.

Disclaimer: “Spilling the Tea” is a phrase coined in black drag culture. I originally heard this phrase on Code Switch, one of NPR’s podcasts, which does in fact have black hosts. When I titled my piece, I had intended it to be a nod to the US’s, India, and Britain’s history with tea. I didn’t do much more research, and so I didn’t realize this significance. I regret this now, and I think it’s a good reminder to everyone that much of pop culture is appropriated from black and queer culture without credit.

In an effort to stray from cancel/erase/perfecting culture, I’ve elected not to change the title, but to add a section describing the history of the phrase and attributing it. Thank you for reading!

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