The Brown Girl World

About Deepa

Deepa is a writer and mother who sometimes masquerades as a lawyer as well. She believes in friendship, forgiveness, champagne, and laughing at yourself at least once a day. Her favorite writers are Rushdie, Atwood and the geniuses at US Magazine (which she doesn't read). Deepa fashioned "Brown Girl Guide" to be an atelier of sorts for all things Brown style. Featuring the original comic "Brown Girls" as well as advice on everything from the best way to score a deal on the most flattering jeans for Brown Girl bodies; to which red lipsticks really work on non-white skin; to how to deal with that pesky Auntie who thinks that "fair equals lovely" (come on now!) -- Brown Girl Guide is a one-stop lifestyle resource for the Brown Girl World. Coupled with "Devis with Babies," a place for randomly Brown moms to randomly muse, "Brown Girl Guide" is part of Deepa's effort to provide meaningful and entertaining content to underserved Brown Girls everywhere.

Romeo and Juliet (Indian Style)

By Deepa Sood

I never expected to marry an Indian American, regardless of the fact that I am Indian myself. Born and raised in Michigan (yes I do that thing where I put up my right hand and show you where I live on the "glove"), we really didn't grow up with an extended Indian community. In college, my parents called me the United Nations of daters. They jokingly lobbied for me to give India a chance, but they were extremely supportive of my choices in boyfriends, trusting, I hope, that they had raised me to look for values they would consider "Indian" if not necessarily an Indian person.

As I get older I realize that values I considered "Indian" as a child I simply consider pro-social and beneficial as an adult. Mores such as respecting your elders, believing in the sacredness of marriage, understanding that family comes first. I also grow more and more in awe of my parents who bucked tradition and entered into a "love marriage," despite the fact that each of their siblings went the "arranged marriage" route. My parents had to truly fight to be together. It was the stuff of Romeo and Juliet, in the suburbs of Bombay. Believe it or not, my dad even had to literally scale walls in order to spend time with my mom. My sister and I jokingly ask if cheesy background music played as he performed such feats but, secretly, we love the grandiosity of our parents' love story. My mom's family was of a higher caste than my dad's, but that was less important to my grandparents than the fact that my dad was the first-born son. They believed that if he married outside of his community, he would "ruin" the prospects of his younger sisters. But my dad didn't give up. He loved my mom. He scaled the wall in between his house and hers to see her. And after they graduated college, they moved to the United States. At this point they were just friends but one year later, my dad called my grandmother to say that he was going to marry my mom. She said no. He said it was Lakshmi or nobody, playing his trump card--what Indian mother is going to foreclose the idea of grandchildren from her first born? But my grandmother surprised everybody and called my dad's bluff. My parents were married nonetheless, but my dad's parents did not attend.

Fast forward to now and this is all proverbial water under the bridge. Everyone gets along and my grandmother somewhat sheepishly tells my dad that my mom is her favorite daughter-in-law. Yet, the events have not gone away. They are part of the patchwork of heritage and family folklore that inform my sister and I to this day. In many ways, in addition to the many "Indian" values my parents have passed onto us, they have taught us the importance of true love, and of choosing a partner who truly, fully fulfills you.

Perhaps in part because of how movie-like my parents' courtship was, I almost hate to tell the story of how my husband and I met--I steadfastly do not beleve that you need to have an epiphany-moment where you just "know" you have met "the one." I truly do not believe that. Yet, when my husband and I met, I kind of just knew. I know. But it's true. Which is why we were engaged 6 months after we met, and married a short 6 months after that. Sometimes, sometimes: When you know you know. When I found myself telling this to my parents, they were nodding as if any other alternative was absurd. Of course you know, they thought.

And of course they were excited that my chosen one was Indian! As modern as they were and are for their time, they still have some traditional notions of marriage. They don't use these notions as axiom, but they don't disavow them either. In essence, I pretty much had to talk them out of a celebratory parade when I got engaged. Then I engaged in an ongoing crash course on what it means to be an Indian daughter-in-law which, quite honestly, is the subject for another (and perhaps very long) post. Our courtship and marriage was replete with cultural implications, from the familiarity my parents immediately felt with my husband's to the traditional Hindu ceremony, including the 7 circles around the fire, which marked the official beginning of our marriage. Because my husband's family is more traditional than mine, I at times felt like a guest in my own body, a student of my own cultural heritage, but I told myself that that was not necessarily a bad thing and that an open mind did not mean I was compromising the identity I had built to that point.

My husband is my best friend, my fiercest supporter, my partner. I love being married and I had great role models to provide me with a map on how to do it. I go back and forth on the importance of our shared cultural heritage. Sometimes I think it does give us a short-hand in terms of the way we see the world--that, somehow, the way we were raised has been internalized and can be manifested in a way that, simply put, could be called "Indian." But more often than not, our race, and the fact that we are the same race, is an invisible component of our union. It just doesn't matter.