You see, true belonging - it’s often an inside job.

Photo: Me. Taken by my husband, P.

We are on Day Three of our travels.

The land continues to astound me.

Jordan of the hills, Jordan of the light sand and the people with bright smiles. Jordan where the azaan echoes among mosques, a choir of the heavens. Jordan of the castles and its rich tapestry of history, of the stories of the Crusaders and the Romans and the Ottomans. 

We are exploring the Ajloun Castle today. I was initially skeptical - what could possibly be so interesting about castle ruins. And yet, I find myself enthralled by the stories I read. What first began as a Byzantine monastery was then occupied by Izz al-Din Usama, a general from Saladin’s army in the 12th century. According to Saladin's historian Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, the fortress was primarily built in order to help the authorities in Damascus control the Bedouin tribes of the Jabal 'Auf. After Usama’s death and the fall of the Karak in the 13th century, the castle was besieged by the Mongols, before they were overthrown by the Mamuks. Thereafter in the 17th century, the Ottomans came into the picture and took ownership of the castle. I close my eyes and try to picture this structure in its different forms of construction and destruction over the years. I imagine the shouts of battle, the clanging of swords and steel, of all the different ways in which blood was shed. 

I learn that sieges last for months on end and that rulers surrender not because they are weakened, but because their people die from the prolonged lack of resources resulting in starvation, widespread dehydration and sweeping illnesses. I stare out through tiny crevices at the top of the castle and imagine myself as an archer, preparing to guard my home and my land till the bitter end.

I stare at the old, old walls and think about all the stories they hold. I remember that it is an honour to bear witness, to be around long enough to be able to carry the stories of yesterday. 

I take a deep breath and listen to wind whistling through the crevices, wondering about all the people who came before me, who stood in this same spot, and surveyed the land of Ajloun. 

+++

We are making our way down to where our driver, Mr H, awaits. There is a gentleman selling tea and Arabic coffee and the smell of cardamom is so tantalising that my mouth starts to water. My husband and I decide to get a cup of coffee each, and we seat ourselves on the narrow bench as the coffee gets prepared. On the bench, a tabby cat lies curled in a fluffy ball. She opens one eye to check us out, and deciding that we mean her no harm, yawns sweetly and goes back to sleep. 

The gentleman selling the coffee looks at me for a long moment and asks where I’m from. Singapore, I say, and he nods. Welcome, welcome to Jordan, he responds and smiles. He continues staring at me as he hands me the freshly brewed coffee and says, you look Jordanian. Bedouin, he adds.

I laugh, and say, thank you, and truly, I mean it. Beside me, my husband smiles in response; he has been with me long enough to know how often I receive comments regarding my ethnicity and nationality. 

The coffee is a dark roast, the cardamom sweetens the bitterness. It tastes delicious in the winter cold. I sip the coffee and stare into the distance; we are still high enough that I can see the town of Ajloun spreading out beneath me, whitewashed homes scattered on green and brown hills. 

+++

Hours later, I am in the car heading back to the hotel, and I am replaying the gentleman’s words in my mind. Texting my best friend S, I say that I have been mistaken for Jordanian. He replies, I’m not surprised, you confuse everyone you meet. He knows me well, this S. When we first met 12 years ago at university, he asked me if I was from Barbados. You sound like Rihanna, he said. I remember being terribly flattered; it probably sealed our relationship from the start. I still laugh when I think about his surprise at learning that I was Indian by ethnicity and from a little Southeast Asian island called Singapore. 

I turn to my husband in the car and tell him, isn’t it strange that in almost every country I visit, I am assumed to be a local. And yet, in the country that I am from, I am constantly mistaken for an outsider. He nods, and after a few moments, says, you should write about it. I shake my head in response and go back to brooding. 

+++

A decade ago, I had just returned to Singapore and was starting work in my first adult job. It was perhaps my third day, and I was trying to enter the office building when I was stopped by the security guard, who refused to let me in. Repeatedly, I said that I was an employee of the organisation, showing her my office pass. Yet, the guard din’t believe me, going as far as to demand that I show her my identification card. Only when she saw my pink identification card, issued to citizens of the country, did she concede that I was indeed “not a foreigner”. You look like a N*gro, you see, she said. 

I sputtered a laugh, I was too young and too flabbergasted by her choice of words to formulate a proper response. Cheeks flaming, I rushed through the entrance to the elevators. My heart was beating very fast, but I didn’t have the words to explain what I was feeling. 

+++

It is terribly lonely to be an outsider in your own home. 

As an only child, I know this better than most.

While your parents always want to be your friends, they are, first and foremost, your parents. Your relationship with them almost immediately starts off with a power differential. Also, they are a couple, a little unit enmeshed in their own story of love and lust. You belong to them, you are a part of their world, but you’re never really one with them. 

My relationships with my extended family remain complicated. I never had much of a relationship with my paternal relatives. My maternal family was large and sprawling, and my cousins were much older than I was. This meant that as I was learning how to walk, speak and dance, they were well into their teenage years, having the time of their lives. Watching them as a kid, I always felt like I was on the periphery of things, trying to decode their language of cool and desperately trying my best to fit in. After a certain point, it got too tiring and I kind of just stopped. It didn’t help that I was also always a bit of a loner, which meant that I often preferred my own company when given a choice.

Even now, I struggle to communicate with my cousins. I have accepted that we lead different lives, that I wish them well in the way I wish humanity well, and that I will always remain that strange little black sheep in the family, the misfit girl.

Yet, it isn’t always terrible.

As I began to understand myself better, I began to collect people in my life who understood my brand of oddity. Friends who didn’t live in the same country but with whom I could speak with everyday, friends who did live in the same country and were only children themselves. Friends who I met through work, friends I made while exploring the world on my own.

I mean, I even managed to marry someone who accepts me for who I am, warts and all.

And yet. And yet. 

The feeling of being an other follows me around everywhere in Singapore. I slide into the backseat of a taxi and the first thing I get asked is where I am from. Sometimes, I have fun with this, and create elaborate backstories, about being a naturalised citizen from Rwanda or Ethiopia or about being a visiting tourist from America. I watch the ways in which people lap up the details, watch the satisfaction spread across their face knowing that they had guessed my otherness right. 

Sometimes, I cough out the truth and abruptly change the conversation. The hair on my skin stands. I try to get away from them as quickly as possible. There is a lingering taste in my mouth, loneliness mixed with despair.

+++

During my first cycle of chemo, my hair was falling off in clumps. Big fat clumps of feathery hair, all over my pillows, in my mouth, in the shower drain. It broke my heart to lose the thing I coveted, so in true Arathi fashion, I told my husband to shave it all off. 

At some point during my chemotherapy treatment, all my hair follicles died and my body became incapable of any new hair growth. Staring at my bald, shiny head got boring real quick so I took to tying turbans - bright printed pieces of cloth in elaborate patterns, soft cotton, silk. I watched many YouTube videos to figure out how I could do different knots for my turbans and created a ritual of taking them out for a spin during the rare days where I would have the energy to face the world. 

During my second chemo cycle, for Valentines Day, my husband decided to take me out for high tea at a really swanky hotel. I was terribly excited; it was the first time since I had started treatment that I felt good enough to go out and enjoy a day out. It also gave me an opportunity to get dressed up, and as was customary for me at the time, I wore a beautiful peach-coloured turban to complement my floor-length mint-green dress. 

At the hotel, we were brought to our table and took our seats. The china was sparkling, there was soft conversation among the other guests in the dining area, and in the background, a harpist played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

As we finished relaying our order to the waiter, he stared at me for a few seconds and said, Miss, I absolutely love your turban. If you don’t mind me asking, what is the cultural significance of your headdress. I paused for a long moment before saying with a smile, actually I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer and have lost all of my hair, so I usually tie these turbans when I go out. 

The look on his face. The secret glee in my dark, bitter heart. I smiled sweetly at him as he stammered his apologies and scuttled away.

In retrospect, I should have been kinder. I should have been gentler in breaking the news to him.

And yet. Would you believe me if I said I couldn’t help myself? 

I think about this story often, about the ways in which we fall into the trap of assuming (and often wrongly) about people’s identities, about the callousness of the questions we ask, about the need for sensitivity, about the minefields that are identity and belonging, about all the different ways in which we can make people feel like they should be anywhere else but here. 

I think about all the ways in which I cope with my big feelings. Sometimes I cry and snap. Sometimes I quietly educate. Sometimes I completely disengage and walk away. I allow myself to behave as well or as badly as I want. Because the truth is pretty simple really - the permission to be doesn’t come from anywhere else but from my own damn self. And if being means taking up as much or as little space as I possibly can, depending on how I feel, then I will allow myself that. 

You see, true belonging - it’s often an inside job.