You sit cross-legged on the carpeted living room floor of a one-bedroom apartment. Your mail is on the counter, your orange juice in the fridge, your suitcases against the wall — but still, this place feels freshly foreign. There is a pack of crayons and a stack of papers on the table beside your mail. You decide to draw a picture of a stick figure man next to a house topped with an orange triangle. Now, it is time to draw the sun.
You choose the brightest yellow crayon you can find and press it into the top right corner. Your mother and father walk outside the one bedroom and into the carpeted living room. You drop the crayon with your left hand, pick it up again with your right. Let your fingers hold the yellow, shake as you draw a sun. At age four, you relearn how to hold a crayon.
The hardest thing you will ever do is relearn yourself.
I. Right
You swallow this over and over — through grief, heartbreak, loss. You brush your teeth and stare into the mirror only to realize your features are all the same, but with the toothbrush in your proper hand instead of your natural one, you feel entirely different. Each time you pick yourself up to perform the same brushing routine, you’ll find relearning feels foreign every time you try again.
On the first day of first grade, there are certain things you leave in your father’s car — your lunchbox, a water bottle and some other things from the Walmart clearance aisle that never really felt quite like yours. But there are things you remember and things that confuse you, and you cannot fathom forgetting another thing.
So you sit in a seat labeled with your name and write five letters you’ll always know. Over the years, you’ll learn to write your name a little differently. Little by little, it’ll become something that feels so much like yours and nothing like your name all at once. You’ll adopt something that feels natural in pronunciation, design tips and tricks so a name becomes more of a habit and less like a burden.
You lose yourself twelve letters into your name when the boy next to you taps your shoulder. He’s never met someone left-handed, he says. You realize then that you forgot to use your proper hand. After years of remembering, you’ve memorized the way it feels to escape instinct, but habit creeps into your bones the moment escape loses its rush.
At recess, you let the habit ride high into reversion. Swing a dodgeball, pass out stickers, accept food with your left hand. In a moment, you undo everything you learned without thought. The girl from across the field approaches you in line to head inside. She’s left-handed too, she tells you. You ask if she has ever needed to write with her other hand. She responds with confusion.
You begin to explain how left-handedness is a curse and the right hand is representative of everything you must do. As those first words tumble from your tongue, you pause, and in that pause, you read her confusion once again and realize she never made a decision between her two hands.
In that pause, you keep your first secret, something bigger than your brother’s birthday present or the missing cookie from the candy jar. You’ll one day realize that this secret would multiply thrice its size, all for the same reason you kept it in the first place.
That night, you return home, not to the one-bedroom apartment, but to a house bigger than your father ever imagined a home could be. Your life, in a couple years, has expanded by three bedrooms, a sibling. Your father’s explanation of how?
Discipline. Good habits are not natural — they are learned.
The left hand, as your father once explained, is unsanitary, a treacherous instinct. The right hand is knowledge, wealth and the hand you use for all that you must be doing. He describes the separation between the two as a maintenance of discipline: Would you use toilet paper to solve a math problem?
No, but now you ask if you could divide the body into halves differently. If you could use the right hand for anything unsanitary and the left hand for all you should do. The answer to the math problem would be different, but still equal. Your father shakes his head and explains that traditional rules are not to be bent. The consequence, he says, would be to leave behind the culture you’d already lost, the discipline slipping again and again from the excellence of this land.
So, under this roof, you choose to abide by the rule. Lift rice from your plate to your mouth with your right hand, finish your homework in shaky letters. Lead a toothbrush with your mind first and body third. Like this, you relearn — when the clock strikes five, how to embody a knife. You divide your body and learn which side deserves visibility when.
In years’ time, the lie becomes so controlled that you can hardly distinguish yourself between halves of your body. As all things grow, you do too. When you write with your wrong hand, you realize you’re a little louder, more resentful. When you write with your proper hand, you’re more thoughtful — a little more appreciative of everything your parents have left behind.
You divide from halves into quarters into eighths and continue until you can no longer recognize yourself. You listen to yourself lie about the little things, tell yourself that these lies are how to preserve a culture. If disobeying natural instinct is resistance to assimilation, this is a small price to pay in return for the culture that built you.
Gradually, your father learns to let it go. You write with your left hand in the hours past five, slyly at first like a rebellion should be, and then quickly and all at once, so no one realized it had happened, but it had and all too swiftly to talk about it.
Still, beyond your fingers, the lie has claimed fractions of your body so distinct yet similar that your reflection cannot distinguish between them and your mind cannot comprehend you.
II. Left
By ninth grade, I unlearned the distinction between my two hands, a controversy that soon became nothing short of a distant memory. Despite its symbolic significance in my upbringing, I still cannot put into words how the harsh cultural stigma was a piece of my family’s upbringing, too.
I’ve been asked a million times how a left hand could ever be labeled taboo in India, and each time, it sounds as cruel and ridiculous and faraway as the thousands of miles away it is.
Each time, I found myself defensive over the stigma that’d brought me far more hurt than security, the same way I would my mother tongue or a home-cooked meal — things that have always felt like mine.
In swallowing silence, my parents and I both learned our rights from wrongs on America’s timeline. The first time I relearned myself was from the other half of my body, and in that same apartment building, a hundred immigrants relearned their bodies for the hundredth time in a land they could only learn for the first time if they unlearned the only home they knew.
Thanks to the things that were always mine, I took in the culture that built me. I celebrated my mother’s first job with milk sweets and samosas, pinned flowers into black braids before a trip, reveled in folktales, cracked jokes in another tongue — everything never unlearned.
I could describe the heritage of an immigrant’s daughter in a thousand metaphors, but a metaphor couldn’t claim every thread that spools from memory. The common thread lies in how an immigrant’s daughter is raised more than once with multiplying expectations over her head. From either edge of life, I learned my identity as half a body at a time, beginning with a hand at either side.
It was mostly easy to let in the pretty things that were mine. There was much less shame in admitting a celebration and never a secret in a universal delicacy. So I divided my body once more between the traditions that felt acceptable and those that really weren’t.
It is senseless to label a fraction of culture as good or bad, regardless of the outcome it brings. And to blame a person for the culture they carry is less senseful. Still, we sift through our identities, through tradition and bitterness. It’s an exhausting thing, to have divided myself so many times to protect something I never understood.
Tying one hand behind my back was the easiest sacrifice I made for preservation’s sake, but I still struggle to understand how culture can be regarded with unequal respect for the parts America can accept as its own and the parts too old-fashioned to be swallowed by a modern lifestyle.
I resented the way I could so easily assimilate and do it well, but I learned to let go the same way my father did with my left hand. Sometimes I let go of the left half of me, and other times it was the right, and at times, I find myself continuing to make incisions. Slowly, I learned to forgive these divergences.
My family silently exhaled apologies for all the anger and broken traditions and hollowness that accompanies discovering instructions for how foreigners can find acceptance in foreign land. I found love in enforcing the things that stigmatized me first, and I sifted through the things that hurt me to discover what renders them whole. Once you look at one person completely, you never unlearn how to extend that same grace to everyone else.
I only needed to learn how to forgive once.
MiC Columnist Sneha Dhandapani can be reached at sdhanda@umich.edu.
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