Call me didi: Identity crisis in the motherland

Does didi only leave your lips when I wear a bindi? When I look more like an Indian woman? When boys think the dot between my full brows signals my married status?

Married, I am not. Far from it. Woman, I am not either. That red or black or bejeweled spot represents my third eye. The coming closer to my soul. The coming closer to my feminine side, to the part of me I see reflected in my mum, my masis, my bas.

I knew I’d have to go back inside the gender closet, one foot in and one foot out, as I travelled the motherland. I knew I’d struggle to explain pronouns, gender fluidity, the binary, in a country where I both fit in and feel excluded in equal measures.

I’m an NRI – Non Resident Indian – on a constant sexuality, gender, polyamorous journey. And I can’t articulate it because my mother tongue belongs to the coloniser.

Not only do I have to explain my family’s immigrant story when I meet new people here, to justify my brown-ness, my Indian-ness, but also my lack of Gujarati & Hindi. (Thoda thoda has become my catch phrase this trip.)

Correcting people as they misgender me has taken a drop in my list of identity-explaining priorities, something I’d mentally prepared myself for in the run-up to this solo trip. But it hasn’t made it much easier.

As much as I dislike Delhi with its smoggy, suffocating air and maze-like gullies, I see myself returning in a few years to seek out the queer scene. (Mumbai and Kolkata are on the list too.) To find people who look like me, to remind me that we have always been here. Queerness isn’t a new phenomenon in India. Karma sutra? Gender bending deities? Hijras? We be here.

I see a little sliver of gender euphoric light when I get called didi here in India. It’s one of the few feminine words I still like to be referred as. In Gujarati, ben is sister, bhai is brother. My cousins back home in London know they can call me either now.

So however much it confuses people, I’ll continue to wear a bindi here, in the hope that at the very least you’ll see me as Indian and call me didi.