Undone: Falling Apart Under my Brown Skin
By: Dharini Woollcombe
Tags: Adoption, Suicide, Identity, Skin, Race

I am a coconut. A lychee. A spud.

Stuck between here and there. Stuck in the middle of nowhere. I am lost. I am nowhere to be found. My parents look at me. No, my mother looks at me with anger. My father doesn’t look at me at all. Neither of them see me. They don’t know how to find me. They don’t realize how far I’ve gone. They hope it will pass, it will all go away, that we’ll move on and forget this day. Forget that I am lying here in a hospital bed. My own doing. I am undone.

Imploding with every breath. Feeling nothing and altogether too much. Death was my only escape. I tried. I failed. My plans were foiled. I lay here terrified, alone. But I will never forget. I can never forget this scene, this feeling, this life. Because I live it. Every day. Every day I am brown and I cannot escape. Hard as I try. I am denied.

Where it began. Boarding school. Away from home. Away from my parents. Next to them, my parents, people can guess I am adopted, perhaps. Away from them, I am a free-floating, unidentified object. A teenager trying to fit in. Sixteen. Awkward. Alone. New. ‘She probably has a brown, wrinkled, grandmother at home making curry.’ Right. Ya. That’s me.

Cast in a school play as the maid. Tituba in the Crucible. A good part, but…I wanted to be the lead. I wanted to be white. I thought I was. That’s what everyone always said. Not in so many words. In fact, there were no words. So I assumed. No one told me otherwise…not to my face. My ugly brown face. Someone should have told me.

And after the play, a big summer holiday. A trip to Indi-yuck.

Indi-yuck. The homeland. That’s not my home. Nor my land. I was born there, that’s all. Big deal. Nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with my parents. Except my father. My father loves that place. I don’t know why. I know why. Because that’s where he ran off to. That’s where he volunteered shortly after University. To become a man. That’s where he was on his own for the first time, he and his friends. Off to save the world.

But why go there now? Why take me? I don’t want to see. I don’t really care. I don’t feel prepared. It’s just my father and me. White man, brown girl. The odd couple. Or the master and his servant. Is that what they see? At the airport? In the lounge? On the plane? ‘What is wrong with that man,’ they think. About this man. My father. My father. I want them to know. I want to wear a sign explaining it all. All of it. To these strangers.

‘Who cares! Who cares what people think!’, they teach us. I care. I care what people think. Because they always think wrong. And I am never seen. Forever invisible, in my “minority.” Forever invisible. Never seen. Where am I? Where have I gone?

Here we are, the two of us. My father, happy as a clam. Me, quiet as a mouse. Overwhelmed. With heat. By smells. The days that overlap and weave into each other. The hazy days of India. Thick, wet, endless, heat. Monsoon rain clatters atop a taxi with no doors. The driver manually clears his window. With a broken windshield wiper. Heavy, oily foods send me drowsily into my pillow. Beautiful morning bathing. Copper bucket, plastic cup. The only thing of beauty I will see. We stay with families. One family lives in a walled-in courtyard, on the second story. Another lives in a palace, with long driveways and lush green gardens. Immaculate rooms, endless servants. And a third lives in a simple, white-washed, welcoming home.

We eat. We travel. We take the train. Wherever we go it is the same …hazy, dusty, brown. An occasional scrawny cow. Huge multiplexes that are sparkling and new in smooth, clean marble. They look displaced. Like me. But I was dissed and placed. We are surrounded by children in rags. Starving dogs.

Is that what my parents saw, when they saw me? Couldn’t be. Then what did they see? I wonder.

We finally visit Shreyas. Where it all began. Where our paths crossed. Where destiny happened. Where fate took over. Under a covered terrace a large crowd of brown children, sitting in rows facing us. The Guests of Honour. They sing for us with earnest voices, clear eyes, open hearts. My sixteen-year-old frame is rocked. Something begins to splinter. We are given a tour of the grounds. For my father, the foreigner, memories resurge. I remember nothing. He is happy. I feel nothing. He shows me the world map that he built with cement. He is proud. The oceans can be filled with water. I am angry. But I don’t know it yet. The hut that had been his home for those two years still stands. As I crumble.

Finally we stop. A row of doors, by a low building. They point. This one was my home. ‘With five other children, and a house family,’ they tell us. Oh, I say. It is has a large room, a small kitchen, a bathing area. There is a loft for sleep. In the bathroom 6 little pegs under the mirror. 6 little towels on each peg. 6 little colourful cups above each towel. Everything is lined up. Low enough for children to reach. It is orderly. I am in chaos.

A young girl appears. ‘She is your age,’ they tell me. Oh, I say. ‘She was here,’ they tell me. Like me? I ask. ‘With you,’ they say.

But she is still here.

And I shatter.

I don’t understand. These children. This girl. They are here and I am not. Why are they here, and I am not? How could this place, this country, this god-awful country have anything to do with me? My life is Europe, is Canada, is white. This place of dirt, of mud, of brown faces, dark eyes? It’s ugly. It’s UGLY. This is not who I am!

And I fall. I fall. I fall deeply down into the pit. The depths of despair. The unanswered endlessness of:

Who am I…?