What Sexual Assault Taught Me about Being Indian
2021 Note: I wrote this series before I understood or made sense of my caste and class privilege as an oppressor caste/savarna, upper-middle class Indian-American. While my trauma is very valid, my story is missing critical perspectives that inform most Indian femme experiences. I leave this story up for accountability and to assist anyone who identifies in ways adjacent to me. If you choose to read any part of my story, please also read this piece as a short introduction to caste-based gender violence in India.
Part One of Three: My Trauma, My Culture, and My Body
It mightn’t be super fortuitous to kick off a Medium account with this story, but it’s one I’ve been wanting to tell for a long time. As April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, now feels like the time to share with the world what my rape gave me: renewed insights into my identity, trauma, and how the people around me helped (and hurt) my healing. And, who knows, maybe you’ll learn more about me and the way I see the world than an introductory post could ever tell you. Not least in part because this story is not one post, but three (first lesson about me: I’m wordy af).
Here it goes.
My Trauma (Trigger Warning)
While working abroad, I was assaulted in a bathroom by a man I was chatting with at a bar. I was drunk, but not drunk enough to not scream “No, it’s not possible” alternating between two different languages — neither of which he chose to understand — when I realized he’d followed me in. That’s about it for the actual assault part.
The stress I felt afterwards, however, haunted me for the next few years from the days I spent chewing parsley right after to bring about a delayed period to the months later when I rushed frantically to the university health center begging for an emergency HIV test to months after that when I struggled to convince myself that I deserved to be alive. Today, it still gives me the creeps to say “No, it’s not possible” in either of those languages. I still remember the name of my rapist and think about how I could have reported him. And in the less than fleeting moments of self-awareness that pass through my mind, the identity label of “rape survivor” almost always comes up first, even though I know that I am (and always have been) so much more.
I remember every detail of this event in slo-mo stark mental playback, but they don’t need to be retold here, mostly because no part of this precipitating event or its fallout described thusfar is particularly unique. Rape, sadly, has become so quotidian that the narrative has all but lost the gut-punch effect it needs to have. It’s the reason so many who aren’t rape survivors think their opinions about rape (from blaming the victim to redeeming the rapist) actually matter: they know the story so well, they think they understand it.
My Culture
The narrator, however, is still their own inimitable agent. Yours truly is your one-of-a-kind narrator right now: an unabashedly intrepid and fiercely sensitive explorer of cultures that are and aren’t her own. And she just happens to be an Indian-American Hindu acutely aware of and in love with the significance of her skin and the generations and power dynamics that made it over centuries what it is today.
What I realized moving through the world post-assault was that said culture which I loved, like the spices we lace into our foods, is all-pervasive and inextricable from recasting and reevaluating my sexuality and personal, bodily autonomy. How could it not be when it was always written onto me: When I was a tiny, shy-but-brash child, I once wanted so desperately to be white that when my teacher asked who in the class had blonde hair, I raised my hand. My non-Indian peers called me “smelly” (making fun of our spicy food) and “afro” (making fun of my thick hair via insulting African-American culture, because kids can be awful). From then even until today, I’ve always noticed when -despite my disarmingly awkward charms- white-Americans do not acknowledge my existence/my smiles/my greetings and close me out of their spaces. I cannot even count the times I’ve been assumed to not speak English or know anything about America (including, on one occasion, what ZIP codes are). I have stories aplenty — this ain’t my first rodeo, not least because I was born and raised in Dallas, TX and have been to multiple actual rodeos.
As I grew older, I noticed how the proliferation of Indian culture became mainstreamed almost entirely through physical forms: bindis, pretty, sparkly fabrics, chandelier-esque jewelry made their way to perfect white bodies remarketed as “boho” (short for “Bohemian”, derived from Bohemia now in the Czech Republic) and “tribal” (short for “fuck your culture, brown people”). The prints that I avoided in order to look like everyone else were now becoming in vogue. Sadly, I still didn’t look like everyone else. Spoiler Alert: It’s because - as another Indian-American put it to me — “[w]hen they do it, they look cool. When you do it, you look like a FOB.”
My Body
So you could say that my relationship with my chubby, short body has been additionally burdened from the start. In some ways, I think my headstrong love of Indian culture motivated mostly by my study of Indian classical music and Indian religions (from Hinduism, the religion I was raised in, to Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism) made me embrace my roots before I could learn to see my body as an extension of them. With the help of POC’s, Body Positive feminists, Indian-American reclamations of their space and culture all over the world, and all-around fantastic people in my life, I learned to love my thick Punjabi thighs (from my mother) and wavy-coarse Telugu hair (from my father). Moving to a chill city for undergrad and surrounding myself with loving, culturally-aware, not-always-unproblematic-but-happy-to-respectfully-discuss people helped me put on my Indian jewelry, bright colors, dupattas, heavy kaajal, and an unabashed love for our visual culture. I was told I was beautiful, and for the first time in my life, I started to believe that.
It all changed after I was raped: I remember thinking I should set my dress on fire, the red and blue one with threads of silver embroidery that hugged my subcontinental curves too tight. My hair felt like a seductive vanity I needed to get rid of — in the moments I liked it, I felt guilty. My always-lined eyes, I felt, must have been too flirtatious- I stopped wearing kaajal. I even turned down immediate medical attention thinking if there was something wrong with my body, I wouldn’t have been able to work an extremely physically demanding job. I didn’t want to get sent back home because I couldn’t hoof it, and climbing the gorgeous mountains around me seemed like it could be done even while I felt an alien presence in my nethers. I tried to separate and sublimate.
As luck would have it, I couldn’t do either. I was in a country where Bollywood has immense cultural cache — men and women would tell me I looked beautiful because I was Indian. Because I was fat and had an ass. Or not beautiful because I was dark. Co-workers who had lived in America took advantage of this conflict of beauty standards: they enjoyed fat-shaming me and slut-shaming me for the same body. I was fetishized, excluded, othered just as much as I was in America.
The brownness had followed me, and, along with every part of my build, my style, and my mannerisms, it became inseparably and universally disgusting to me.
I remember watching my weight balloon as I gained twenty pounds in less than six months (a lot on my small frame). I began throwing up my food. I saw myself getting less attractive while I desperately clung to any attention that would make me feel desirable and thought I was a slut for doing so. My period didn’t come for a long time (likely due to stress). I pulled hair by the tens out of my scalp. Antidepressants made me scratch my face, chest, and stomach until I bled. I rushed back and forth between the health center, therapist, classes (when I could make them), and my bed unable to avoid the fact that my body was dying along with my love of it.
A man who went on a date with me two weeks before I Googled the easiest way to go still admits that he has a crush on me. That I was and am beautiful, a compliment that I have to work even harder to believe and somehow resonates for ages when I want to believe it. And he doesn’t believe it when I say that in that moment, if I hadn’t gotten professional, medical help, I would never have thought I was worth the space I take up. A nurse had to hold my hand and pull me away from the edge a mile away to safety. Every time someone thanked me for not following through, I felt like I was being placed gingerly in the sparsest parts of a crowd and learning to understand that my body was not an inconvenience to anyone, least of all myself.
But occasionally these days when people at work look the other way -for whatever reason — when I smile and say hi to them, I assume the worst — that my presence offends them -, close my office door, and pretend that I don’t matter and shouldn’t exist.
It has now been a solid few years ago since my hardest brush with PTSD. I am writing this feeling happy for the first time in ages having lost ten of those twenty pesky trauma-pounds and ironically feeling more entitled to the space that I know I deserve at any weight. Somehow, I’m managing (have managed?) to feel like my body is no longer subpar and symptomatic. It only occasionally feels like a space that was violated, a space that wasn’t once mine.
I think that the way I felt about my body must be a thing I shared with all sexual assault survivors. I healed not through my Indian-ness but in seeking proper treatment, therapy, safe situations, and alerting my loved ones that I might need everyone to be gentle with me. In some ways, the body is a universal human vessel — we share it in a most basic sense, and that helps us learn to understand each other.
But as it is important to note that as the differently-abled are far more prone to sexual assault and unable to express their trauma for a huge variety of systemic reasons, POC’s — whose bodies have been scrutinized and appropriated beyond belief- also are differently prone to assault, mental illness, and healing therein. The struggles we all face learning to love ourselves in the face of the kyriarchy are multifaceted, ongoing, and painful. They are physical and they are constructed: if the same precipitous fall from self-love is experienced by every sexual assault survivor, imagine that fall from a mountain you had to climb with more hurdles, more challenges to accepting your body, and the prospects of a more impossible-seeming re-ascent with a desired-and-undesired violated body in tow.
I can say with some confidence now that for the most part, I’ve re-learned to love my Indian body again in all its many layers. I rock Desi-chic streetwear that would (and should) put Kylie Jenner to shame, and I take selfies when my mane is in full swing #slaykween. The struggles with my body pre- and post-trauma taught me that millions of POC’s/differently-abled persons will face an incredible uphill battle to healing and reclaiming the bodies and spaces they’ve already had to fight for autonomy over their whole lives. This is why I will passionately dispute that my body and culture have no connection, that they together do not mean anything to my healing the most physical violations.
My body has a story that must be understood like every other. My Indian-ness and my other-ness gave me the grounds to learn, voice, and be proud of exactly how badass it is.
It’s why my smile stays strong and my door is learning to stay open.
