The Cab Driver, The Suitcases, and The Henna

There are three things to remember about getting a ride from the airport as a broke college student:

1. Always book ahead—preferably as soon as Lyft will deign to give you a slot—to get the lowest prices.

2. Deck yourself out, head-to-toe, in college merch; the goal here is to look like a walking, talking, mega-cringe advertisement for all of the crappy sweatshirts and overpriced basketball shorts in your campus store. That way, you’re effectively using every inch of skin as real-estate to market your availability to share Lyfts with other broke college students who didn’t have the forethought to book in advance.

Like all carefully laid plans, both steps went out the window once I departed through the glass doors into the hot LA air. Scrambling, I pulled up the familiar app, and twenty minutes later I was sprawled in the back of a (relatively cheaper) Uber from LAX to Westwood at 9am on a Saturday, sweating like an Indian mother flipping parathas on a gas stove in May: not pretty. It was as I was attempting to evaporate the rolls of sweat on my neck simply with the power of my mind, that the driver began to make small talk.

After we’d traversed familiar chit-chat territory—LA weather, what college I went to, and the like—he asked me where I was from. I knew that the conversation had been building up to this point, but I still wasn’t ready to share the ambiguity of what ‘home’ meant for me with a relative stranger. Still, I recited my pre-choreographed answer.

“Oh, well, I was born in the Bay and lived there for a while, but I went to high school in India.”

This wasn’t technically true; I’d spent seven years in India, but this, I’d found with trial-and-error, was even harder to understand.

And he was having trouble as it was to wrap his head around this new information.

“Oh, so you’re from India! Did you grow up there?”

“No, I’m from the US, just moved there later on.”

“Oh—a native Californian! O-kay! Yeah, I’ve never been to India, but I heard that everyone is required to go to college there, right?”

“I mean—I know a lot of people who don’t, but I don’t think—it’s not required, no.”

“Oh?” He seemed stumped. He paused to edge narrowly around a curb and then glanced back, intrigued.

“Yeah, I mean—” I was reminded, randomly, of a friend in Singapore, who was required to serve in the armed forces. “it’s not like conscription,” I laughed to soften the blow.

He didn’t seem to have heard, rattling off another question vaguely in my direction instead.

“Oh, well the parents are strict, right?”

“I don’t know if I would generalize—” I started to say, but he stopped me before I could finish. When he turned around briefly at a stop sign, a light was pinging around in his eyes, as if he was watching his own version of Fast and Furious.

“I mean, of course, I don’t know much about how it is down there in India, but I know in Asia the parents are often all strict. Was it like that when you were a kid?”

“Not really, no.”

He snapped his head to the road and then back again to make eye contact, probably planning on continuing his line of interrogatory questioning. Instead, he paused, seemingly arrested by the sight of my hands. They were patterned delicately with the mehndi from the cones my cousins had gotten specially imported from Thirupathi.

The fine orange-brown lattice traced my wrists, crisscrossing vein-like on the backs of my hands, and truncating at the edges of my fingers. With my arms outstretched, ornate swirls of henna on the slopes and valleys of my skin, I could inhabit a different place: one saturated with memories of my aunts and cousin sisters; dreams of India.

“What is that?” He asked, pivoting wildly to check on the road when a car behind us honked angrily.

“It’s called henna,” I said. “It’s like a…liquid, you apply from a cone to create patterns on your hands.”

“Oh, but it’s not permanent though?”

“No, no,” I told him.

He glanced back, and grinned, relieved. “Good. Pretty girl like you shouldn’t tattoo her hands permanently like that.”

I smiled back tersely, nausea and indignation colliding in a sick rush in my belly. I didn’t know how to say that this was my culture; that I had felt restless my entire life and drawing attention to the brown of my skin, the delicate frame I’d inherited from my dad’s sisters, the mehendi dripping down my fingers, was the only way to feel like I was on firm ground; that I was worried I’d be a nomad forever, trudging and trudging through an endless, scorching desert. I didn’t know how to say any of that.

So instead, I only said, “What a relief!” Then I hunched down into the seat, burying my hennaed skin under my thighs. As though if I squeezed hard enough, they’d turn white.