Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy... but I really, really care what you think of me....

I know I keep trying to fashion blog posts out of random interactions I have with other Indians, but now that I live in the ‘big city’, this is probably only going to happen more.

What I find most interesting about these interactions that I have with Indian strangers is the way I worry about their opinions – they have nothing to do with my life, but I still stress that the guy serving me at Woolworths, or that Indian doctor I had to see once, or my many, many taxi drivers will judge me for being too crass, or too western, or just simply not enough of a ‘good Indian girl’.

Why do I care?

Here’s a good example – the other night, I was having dinner out in the city with a friend. After, I went to try and catch a train home, only to discover that there was work happening on my usual line, and there were no trains to my stop. I tried to get a tram, but because it was late, it was going to be a huge, long wait.

Finally caving to my yearning for a warm house and the season finale episode of Glee, I walked to the nearest cab rank and hopped into a taxi for the express route home.

The young, Pakistani taxi driver was perfectly pleasant, and started chatting to me about being Indian. He asked where my parents were from and if I could speak Hindi (I can, but very badly, as he later confirmed). We chatted about uni, and about when he moved to Australia and whether or not he liked it. I liked the guy, he was nice and not sleazy or rude like so many other young Indian taxi drivers that I’ve dealt with lately.

So, when he asked me if I was Muslim, based on where I said my parents are from in India, I said yes. Why? I’m not Muslim, I’m openly an atheist. I came out of the religious closet when I was 18, and my parents dealt with it (eventually). I usually make a huge point of stating that I’m an atheist despite the fact that my parents are religious. It means a lot to me to be clear about that.

But for some reason, I didn’t want to correct this taxi driver. I felt like it would ruin the nice time we’d been having, chatting so amiably about our respective lives. I felt like telling him that I was an atheist would change things, make him dislike me somewhat. Or even just judge me for not being true to my culture and my parents’ wishes.

I just didn’t want to rock the boat, and I felt like it would be easier to say what he wanted to hear than to nitpick over a detail.

But that’s just the thing – despite reassuring myself as I climbed out of the cab that I only lied because it was the easier option and it hardly mattered because I wouldn’t see him again, I had to admit that there was something else at play.

My religious beliefs are not just a ‘detail’ at all. They’re something I agonised over as a teenager, something that wracked me with guilt for years, something that took a lot o courage and deliberation to discuss with my parents. Something that made my mum furious with me for weeks, and made my dad increasingly frustrated over the years since that I haven’t changed my mind.

They are an integral part of who I am, yet I was willing to lie about them to appease a stranger because I assumed he would dislike me for them.

For some reason, it means a lot to me to be treated as a fellow Indian by the other Indians I meet. As much as it annoys me to constantly be asked where I’m from, I still feel some sense of camaraderie towards other Indians, if only because we share the profound experience of being migrants, something that I don’t get to share with too many of my friends.

I want to be included in the community of Indians in Australia, even while not actually wanting to be too involved. It might be selfish and completely superficial, but I like the idea of belonging to something.

Lying to that taxi driver was a fleeting moment, but in the broader structure of my life, I know that I try to maintain a loose image of a ‘good Indian girl’ with my family and our Indian friends and relatives so that I can stay within the circle of our community.

I hide things about myself that I think would be disapproved of, and pretend to care more about our culture than I do on a day-to-day basis because I don’t want to be separated from the one significant thing about me that ties me firmly to a group – my ethnicity. Yeah, I have other groups that I belong to, and other communities within society that I am part of. But my ethnicity is something that is fixed, something that exists regardless of whether or not I choose to take it on.

I hope that one day, I’ll feel confident enough in my racial identities to be able to claim all my nationalities with ease, despite the contradictions between them.

But for now, it seems so much easier to chat about Islam to a stranger for ten minutes on the drive home than to explain why I don’t believe in it, or so much else in our culture.

Mama and Daddy's Girl - The Indian Tradition of Footing The Bill

Lately I’ve been thinking about money a lot. Probably because I moved interstate recently, and quit my lucrative full-time job. I’m now down to about a quarter (or less) of my old salary, and living in a place with higher rent than where I was before.

Although for a while I was reluctant to do so, it didn’t take me long to approach my parents to see if they could help out.

My parents are fairly comfortable financially, and I’ve always known that they are willing to help me out with things like rent and food at anytime. When I originally moved out in the same city as them they offered to lend me money, but I was focussed on supporting myself at the time and proving my independence.

I took on two extra jobs, freelance editing, and managed to work around 40 hours a week and study full-time (somehow), all in the name of doing it on my own.

This time though, moving interstate, I have taken the help from my parents happily. They’re paying my rent for me while I’m here, so I can just take on just one casual job and focus on my Masters degree.

I feel pretty uncomfortable telling people that my parents are footing the bill for my rent, especially considering that I’m 22 years old, just had a full-time job, and am choosing poverty in a way.

Particularly though, I feel awkward on a cultural level, knowing that in western culture, the implications of being financially supported by your parents are quite different from that in Indian culture.

Exhibit A – I was having coffee with a good friend of mine who also recently moved down to Melbourne the other day. This friend is a few years older than me, but also doesn’t have a full-time job, and is also living in a sharehouse.

When I explained that my parents are paying my rent, he seemed in equal parts outraged and amused.  

“Why would they do that?” he asked.

I explained how my parents always said they’d support their kids through university, and although this is my second degree, they paid for both my sisters’ rents while they were in uni and didn’t contribute to mine. So, you know. I feel like it’s somewhat even with what my siblings got at least, and not that unreasonable a thing to do.

“So what?” he said. “My parents would never pay my rent.”

I get it – I feel pretty small having my parents pay for me, and I definitely feel like a bit of a spoilt brat. Especially because of the judgement I seem to receive from people like my friend, who think (and rightly so, to some extent) that it’s both lazy, and somewhat unnecessary to have your parents support you when you’re living on your own, and are an adult.

But in Indian culture, this is completely normal. Kids live with their parents until they’re married in most cases, and even if they have to live out of home for uni or something, it is understood that they remain their parent’s responsibility until they can viably support themselves and have started their own families.

My parents actually think it’s unreasonable when I say that I don’t want their money, or financial help. They find it deeply insulting, as if I’m rejecting their right to care for me as parents. I went through a period where my mum used to hide $50 notes in my bag, for me to discover with resignation when I got home.

Yeah, yeah, I know – the world’s smallest violin is playing in sympathy right now, but still. I think this says something about the way independence is viewed in Indian culture, as opposed to western culture.

In fact, ‘independence’ isn’t really a concept that’s well developed in Indian culture at all, or at least the culture I was raised in.

Family commitment is prized above all else, and it’s a two way street. The commitment of children to their parents is returned in full from parents to their children. Whatever you achieve or earn is assumed to go back into the family in one way or another. If I do well at university, that’s something for my family to be proud of, and hence something they are happy to assist with. If I get a well-paid job, it is understood that if anyone in my family needed a loan, they would get it, no questions asked.

It’s a big collaborative affair, cemented even further by the aforementioned idea of children living at home, sometimes even after being married.

That living arrangement is not the case in my family, but there has never been any question of my parents doing their utmost to support us, and there has definitely never been any talk of paying them back (one time I offered, and my mother insinuated that I mustn’t love her if I kept trying to humiliate her by giving her money…).

In western culture, in comparison, parents help their kids – of course. But there is a point at which they are willing to cut the cord, let their kids do it alone, encourage more independence. This doesn’t imply any less parental love, but it places a bigger value on the notion of being in command of oneself, capable of taking care of all the financial needs you may have on your own.

Some of my friends’ parents refuse to lend them money, some pay board to live at home, and some would rather ask other friends for money than go home and beg from their mum and dad.

I often get joked at for the credit cards my parents signed to my name, and for the fact that my parents always try and give me ‘a little extra’ when I go home. Money and parental support aren’t conflated in western culture the way they are in Indian culture.

I don’t necessarily think one view point is better or more beneficial than the other – there are obvious pros and cons to each, and there are always overlaps in behaviour as well. Many Indian parents would loathe to loan their kids money, and many western parents happily dole out the cash when needed. Not to mention the fact that my parents just love me a lot, and dote on me as their youngest child.

But I do find it funny how I get the double load of guilt – once for taking money from my parents, and once for feeling bad about taking money from my parents.

Fijian? Indian? Australian? A Globalised Identity

The other day, I was filling my car with petrol after work at a local service station. I went in to pay, and smiled politely at the Indian gentleman behind the counter.

“Pump number 4, please,” I said, expecting the exchange to be brief.

He smiled at me, and gave me an appraising glance.

“Where are you from?” he asked, his tone of voice somewhat knowing.

Ordinarily, I would take this opportunity to be obnoxious, and reply something like “Canberra”, but it was 5.15pm, I was tired, and I couldn’t be bothered being facetious.

“Fiji,” I said, with a brief smile, swiping my credit card through the eftpos machine.

“Ah, you look like you’re Indian, or Bangladeshi,” he said, shaking his head.

I paused.

“I am Indian. From Fiji,” I said, bluntly. It’s not as if it’s a secret that there’s a huge population of Indian’s in Fiji. Even the ignorant know this.

“Yes, I suppose you could be considered Indian too,” he said, handing me my receipt.

Right.

Could be considered Indian? I didn’t bother responding to this, but it reminded me once again of the bizarre prejudice so many Indians have towards Fijian-Indians.

We’re considered to be the bogans of the Indian diaspora – the slightly uncouth, less culturally advanced cousins that are awkwardly linked on the family tree despite the general acknowledgement that we don’t quite fit in.

I don’t really know why this is the case. Perhaps because our language is a mixture of a range of Indian dialects, that formed one big slang version of Hindi, which must just sound harsh and uncultured to the average Indian ears; or maybe it’s because most of the Indians in Fiji were taken over as essentially slave labourers by the British Colonials, to work on the sugar cane plantations, making us inherently lower class in the eyes of other Indians.

Who knows?

The fact remains though, that whether in Fiji or in India, Fijian-Indians remain marginalised by the majority culture, to some extent.

My own experience is characterised by this sense of exclusion. I’m a migrant twice over in a way – a third generation migrant to Fiji, and a first generation migrant to Australia. Where am I even from?

India can’t consider me her own, because I was born and raised elsewhere. Fiji doesn’t consider me her own because I am Indian. Australia doesn’t consider me her own because I’m both Fijian and Indian.

Notions of race for me are coloured by a sense of being nomadic in a way, not tied to any one place, though not for a lack of trying.

At the heart of it, I consider myself Australian, but with a certain uneasiness. I can’t help but acknowledge that I’m not *really* Australian, much like I’m not really Indian or Fijian.

I am a product of the globalised world, I suppose.

The thing that gets me the most about the Indian-on-Indian racism of hating on Fiji is that it’s completely senseless. Rather than being outraged at the notion of British colonisers shipping Indians off to another colony without their consent, and then leaving them there after Fijian independence and basically allowing Fijians and Indians to wage war on each other (a social and cultural war that is still going on), Indians choose to continually create arbitrary hierarchies amongst themselves, focussing more on division than the inclusion of all Indians under the umbrella of our heritage.

 When I was about 11 years old, I visited India for the first time. I had been visiting Fiji practically every year since we migrated to Australia, and the more accustomed I grew to Australia, the more I began to dislike Fiji. I found it hot and stuffy, dirty and difficult to navigate – really, I was a bit of a snob about it to be honest. I wanted my crisp, clean, Australian house and backyard, with the shiny busses that took me from place to place, and the air-conditioning, and the cool, Western food like Coco Pops and Vegemite.

Fiji at the time was far less developed in a way, than what it is now. Especially in the more remote areas where my father’s family are from – we still travelled to the river every day to do our laundry and have our baths. My mum and our aunts and grandmother would beat the clothes against the river rocks and scrub them with cheap soap, while us kids would swim in the river and bathe.

Although I enjoyed those activities in an abstract sense, I knew even then that there was something less ‘civilised’ about that lifestyle than the one I led in Australia. My parents would have been horrified to know that I already had a fairly prejudiced view of our home country, a place which they still very much identified with. I certainly don’t feel any contempt for Fiji now – but as a child, I think I felt faintly embarrassed at the thought of my Australian friends knowing what our lives were like, when they were so used to washing machines and showers and proper facilities.

My mum, knowing that I found Fiji distasteful to some extent, warned me before we went to India that I might find it a bit difficult at first. It was equally dirty, she told me, and very crowded and busy and sometimes I would have to use a squat toilet.

I was horrified.

When we got to India, I was all ready to be uncomfortable and homesick for the entire two months we were spending there. I knew my parents were both very excited, having only been there once before.

My mum didn’t know of any family over in India, but my dad had strong ties to all of his aunts and uncles, and the villages where his parents were from in Gujarat.

From virtually the first day we were there, I realised that this was no Fiji – I didn’t feel awkward, or upset, or out of place in any sense at all. I felt completely at home.

Everything about India amazed me. The mess and the mayhem, the people absolutely everywhere. The poverty was confronting, the atmosphere intense. I felt so completely like I belonged, it was crazy.

It never occurred to me that anyone would ever claim that I didn’t actually belong, or that I wasn’t a ‘real’ Indian. I knew that I didn’t have the experience of growing up there, but it was the first time I had been completely surrounded by people who looked like me, who dominated the population with brown instead of white.

Although Australia was and always would be home, India made sense to me, helped me make sense of who I am. I loved it, and I love it still.

Now, years later and after a second trip to India as a teenager, I have a better understanding of the country, and the intricate relationship between Fijian-Indians and Indians.

My attitude towards it is very much one of defiance – at the end of the day, no one can really tell me where I do or don’t belong, and I am truly a product of all three countries that have featured in my life.

Identity is such a complex thing – although so incredibly personal, people tend to assume they have a right to comment on my cultural identity, or assume that they know what it is.

I am as Fijian as I am Indian, as I am Australian.

A true Coconut, I feel.

The Beauty of Bollywood

In which I ramble like an old geezer about the good 'ol days, and why I actually kind of love Bollywood movies. Apologies for the poor structure in advance!

 

One of my all time fav movies!

 

 

Last night I went over to a friend’s house for a ‘Bollywood night’. Much as you would expect, the evening consisted of watching a Bollywood movie and eating Indian take-out.

In the process of organising the night, all of the friends coming expressed a certain amount of enthusiasm for watching a rollicking, hilariously unrealistic, undoubtedly trashy Bollywood movie. I, too, was super excited to laugh at the tragic costumes and silly songs, to join in on the mockery.

However, after settling down with my vegetable korma in hand, and diving into the 00s classic, Main Hoo Na, I realised less than half an hour in that my love for Bollywood movies is not based entirely on the fact that they’re kitsch.

I actually have a deep-seated, true fondness for Bollywood films. They evoke more in me than just a laugh at their irregularities as compared to Hollywood – they were actually a bigger part of my childhood than I realised.

While we were sitting there, laughing at the terrible cinematography and unnecessarily plot additions, I found myself getting irrationally defensive – culminating in the moment when one of my friends said they weren’t sure if Shah Rukh Khan was actually attractive and I shouted ‘YOU TAKE THAT BACK, HE’S BEAUTIFUL’ to a slightly stunned group.

The thing is, I actually do really enjoy mocking Bollywood, much in the same way that I enjoy mocking Glee or Justin Bieber – I can laugh at them, but I know that I actually really love them, and the laughter is mostly a guise for my embarrassingly fan-girl attitude.

Bollywood movies were a big part of my life when I was growing up. My parents had a healthy distrust of a lot of western films, and so family time was usually spent watching some classic Indian film from the 70s or 80s, starring an actor who was a legend at the time but no one remembers now. I used to be completely captivated by the over-the-top drama, the colourful costumes, and the jangly songs - basically all the stereotypes of Bollywood films, which are completely based in fact.

My day dreams as a preteen embarrassingly often incorporated a song element (me and *insert pop star crush name here* would be wailing sweeping choruses at each other on top of a snowy mountain, my blood red sari flowing in the wind, looks of longing shooting between us). To me, this was the stuff of true romance.

It wasn’t until I got older, entered that teenage phase of dissing everything you once thought was cool, and started watching Hollywood flicks that I discarded Bollywood as yet another tragic thing about my culture that I couldn’t be bothered engaging with anymore.

Suddenly, every time my mum would suggest going to the cinema to see a Bollywood film, on the rare times they’d screen one, I would roll my eyes and claim to have better things to do. I stopped listening to the music, and grew hopelessly out of touch with the goings on of the industry.

Now that I am older and wiser though, I have come to have a certain nostalgic appreciation of Bollywood films for their sincerity, simplicity, and complete commitment to Whatever Sells.

There’s no such thing as a ‘genre’ film for Bollywood, because normally every film will have action, drama, romance, comedy and often some kind of supernatural element thrown in. The juxtaposition between tawdry love scenes, knuckle-dusting fight sequences and familial drama never gets jarring because each change is accompanied by a song, usually taking place in a ludicrous setting like Switzerland or Canada, despite the film being set in India.

In a way, I’m glad I lost interest in Bollywood in the 00s, because the industry has gone relatively downhill in that time, with more and more sensationalist crap being made (that’s not surprising at all, really). They even allow on-screen kisses now! The horror!

Instead, I can focus on the glory days of the 80s and 90s, when Shah Rukh and Kajol were the couple de jour, and the closest to a kiss anyone got was to lean in, and then sweep away to gaze at the heavens while singing of true love.

Bollywood is a guilty pleasure for me, because there’s no way to overlook the hideously sexist, often homophobic, usually somewhat racist and classist views that most of the films espouse. But like anything that is pure fluff, Bollywood films are like an energising sugar rush – they may not stay with me for long, but those few hours are priceless.

See below for some of favourite Bollywood actors:

Juhi Chawla - severely underrated, but oh so wonderful!

Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in 'Dilawle Dulhaniya Lejayenge' (probably spelled badly). I lent this to a friend recently, and he was totally hooked - as he should have been!

Another favourite on-screen couple, Madhuri and Salman. 

Shah Rukh again - I really like him, ok?!

An oldie but a goodie - Shammi Kapoor was in a whole bunch of classic films from the 50s to the 70s. He died last year, sadly.

The Desi Dating Dilemma - by Gaurav Bhalla

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm ridiculously slack and haven't written anything in a while. Well, JUST YOU WAIT, as I have another post lined up for this week too. I'm also still blogging over at my other blog, Goodbye Blue Monday. I met Gaurav in the cyber-world through this blog, and he's hands down the coolest fellow Coconut I've ever met. His experiences of dating are super different from anything in my life, so it's quite interesting to see this from another perspective! Enjoy!

- Zoya

My last relationship was an absolute nightmare. He was this Colombian guy that I met in September of last year. An aspiring model. He took a lot of care of his body and was really charismatic. Unfortunately, in spite of his abdominal definition and sun-kissed bronze skin, we had nothing in common and I knew it was a disaster waiting to happen from the moment he walked into my life. I’ve got plenty of other nasty nicknames for him, but for now, let’s just call him the Meathead.

The reason I ended up dating the Meathead might have been that I was looking to distract myself from an earlier relationship that had left me with a great deal of emotional baggage and feeling a bit lonely. I sort of liked the idea of being seen with this guy because I found him so attractive, and the fact that he studied medicine was going to impress my doctor parents.

But the Meathead turned out to be the exact opposite of what I was looking for in a relationship. He was as devout a carnivore as I am a vegetarian, three years younger than me, and I’m convinced that he was only studying to be a doctor so he could make lots of money. I was terrified by the thought of going out with someone so young, and the thought of dating a med student made my stomach churn.

The Meathead and I had such different tastes in everything from music to clothes that we often had nothing to talk about. He liked taking classes like Cellular Biology and wanted to someday memorize the location of every known bone in the human body; I study Anthropology and aspire to one day locate a tribe unknown to academia. The Meathead knew more about contemporary celebrities than about, say, Anne Frank, and in his eyes, studying history is a waste of time.

He made me go spend Christmas Eve with his family, which I did with relatively little complaint; but when I told the Meathead about how I went to the riverside with my friends to celebrate the day of Oxúm, the Afrobrazilian fresh water goddess, I’m pretty sure he imagined me galavanting satanically and selling my soul to the Devil. . . .

Yeah, okay, you get it. It didn’t work out. Dating is about learning from these kinds of experiences and moving on. . . but what does all this have to do with me being a coconut!?

Well, it’s not so much about who I date, but how I date.

After a long conversation with one of my roommates, she and I came to the conclusion that one tends to approach gender roles and relationships with his parents in mind. I think that could be the reason that I subconsciously think of all men as careless moneyspenders, and women as selfdemanding emotional messes. That might also be the reason that dating puts me into such a predicament.

According to www.divorcerate.org, 50% of American marriages end in divorce. In India, it’s only 1.1% (yeah, “one point one percent”)! I can’t make the claim that married couples are happier in India, but I will say that marriage is a more serious matter for Indians than it is for Westerners. Who you marry is important to the whole family, and once you’re married, you’re sentenced to stick by that person’s side for the rest of your life.

My parents had only met each other briefly in a formal familial interview before being engaged. Theirs was an arranged marriage. We moved to the States when I was four, and since then, I don’t think they planned much on me following in that tradition, but they also didn’t foresee the alternative: me dating.

When I was little, I lived with a constant internal conflict due to my multiethnic identity. I used to wonder what it’d be like to be blond, and I liked eating pizza and hotdogs because they made me feel more American. When I was 17, I began to identify more with my Indian side, and five years later, I’m still working on figuring out what exactly that means for how I live the rest of my life.

As far as dating, it doesn’t leave me with much wiggle room: either I date like a Westerner, or my parents marry me off to an Indian, imported or otherwise. There was the third possibility: living my life as a celibate Buddhist monk, but I don’t look all that great in orange, so I chose the first option, dating, which opened up a deliciously philosophic can of worms.

I was taught that love is something that grows naturally in a relationship over time as a fruit of sacrifice and fidelity. Having a family is the greatest joy in life and an important goal for Indians. Separation, on the other hand, is so unimaginable that leaving my parents’ house to travel young caused some of my family members psychosomatic stress disorders. I’m now coming to realize the effect that being raised in that sort of environment had on me, now that I’m somewhat older.

Although I didn’t really start having boyfriends until I was 19, even as a kid, I never questioned the fact that I was going to have what we Indians call a “love marriage” (meaning that I was going to date and fall in love before marrying). In most of India, that’s still a big taboo, but my parents are liberal, to a certain point. . . You see, most of my friends in high school were of the opposite sex, and if they came over and we were alone, my mom would try to kick them out after a particular hour. Dating was for when I was done with university and ready for marriage.

Now that I live on my own, I do date more, but maybe it would’ve been less trouble to just ask Mom and Dad to pick out a nice Indian boy for me the good old fashioned way!

I was told to marry another Hindi-speaking Indian so that my parents could communicate with my partner’s parents, but that sounds like a pipe dream now that I live in Argentina. The one time I introduced my father to the Meathead, thanks to 21st-century videoconferencing technology (a.k.a. Skype), there was a painful language barrier that put me in the middle translating for them between Hindi and Spanish.

But it did make me very happy to see my father speak to him because my parents had shown no interest in meeting my previous boyfriend who was never even allowed to come home with me. I got into a huge fight with my parents over that which led to us not speaking for more than a year.

Things between us are calmer now, but as far as asking Mom and Dad for dating advice. . . well, let’s just say that they’re willing to listen, which is sometimes all I need, but actual guidance for all those sticky brokenhearted situations I tend to get myself into is asking a little too much from my mom and dad since they never dated themselves.

I guess it’s no wonder, then, that dating makes me a bit nervous.

Familial Obligations

(my family would totally do this!)

So, I haven’t blogged in absolutely ages (or at least, that’s how it feels!), and the explanation for that is both mundane and expected – I’ve been way too busy. Being a magazine editor, and working full-time, AND maintaining some sort of social life is pretty difficult when you lack the ability to stay up later than 10.30pm, and you still need to fit in time to watch Gossip Girl and read trashy novels.

But really, what often ends up being the biggest hindrance on my time is my family.

Now, as mean as that may sound, it’s relevant because I think it’s a cultural issue of expectations in an Indian family group. I’ve written about parental expectations before, but one thing that never truly struck me until I moved out of home, was how much time being an Indian daughter seems to take up.

I live in a sharehouse with two friends. I earn my own money, pay my own rent, buy my own food, and (excluding a few minor perks), I by and large support myself.

By logic then (or at least the logic adhered to by most western cultures), I should no longer be under any real obligation to my parents, beyond what I choose to do and be part of, right? Right?! Wrong.

If anything, the fact that I don’t live at home means that my parents feel even more entitled to huge chunks of my time, and spruik this commitment as a sort of familial duty which I am impelled to by virtue of the fact that it’s the least a ‘good Indian daughter’ could do.

My obligations to my family include a time commitment of one evening during the week, and the entirety of Sunday each weekend, to be spent on my parent’s hobby farm doing ‘family things’ (including but not limited to baking stuff, being tortured by my 2.5 year old niece, weeding the garden, feeding animals, and occasionally cleaning stuff).

If I can’t make it on one of these days during the week, I get a guilt trip from my dad to rival all other guilt trips, and it gets tallied up in the mental list they no doubt have of all the ways in which I have let them down.

Now, to be fair, at least 40% of my parents’ demands come from a place of parental love and affection – like all parents whose youngest child has flown the roost, they want to make sure I’m ok, fed, alive, clean and not doing anything too bad for me.

But that other 60% is a barely examined, automatic assumption that children should devote a good amount of time to the family, be that in a useful capacity or not, because that is simply what good children do.

Even though I often come round for dinner and just eat and read a book while barely talking to the family, they feel somewhat comforted by the mere fact that I am there with them at all.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I realise that it really does come down to cultural understandings of familial obligations. At the core of the matter, the fact that I don’t live with my parents is completely at odds with our culture more broadly. If I lived a traditional existence, I would be living with my family until I got married, and then would go to live with my husband’s family.

My sisters both only lived out of home when they were at university in different cities, and now one of them is married and lives with her husband and daughter, and the other lives at home again. My brother lived with us for two years after he was married, in a granny flat off our house, before buying his own house with his (now ex) wife – a mere street away from our house.

My parents seem to suffer from a fairly constant state of anxiety when it comes to me not living at home. Where my mum has at least accepted it as fact, dad still often suggests that I stay the night at the farm, or move back home on a whim as though these are completely logical options. The fact that I have a lease, and a home of my own seems to have sunk into the recesses of his mind, and now he lives in a state of denial when it comes to me (this same denial often pops up around my vegetarianism and atheism. It’s as amusing at it is frustrating).

I’m moving interstate in a few short months, and my dad is completely against it, often giving me talks about how I should ‘be with the family’ or at least get married.

Every family is different when it comes to familial obligation, and what parent’s expect of their kids, but I do think that Indian culture sets up a structure within families that claims the input of each member to the general family life as vital.

The communal approach to the running of my family is incredibly cohesive – there is no ‘I’ acknowledged under most circumstances. It is assumed that all of us kids will contribute time, money, and labour whenever it is necessary (I have at least five years of cleaning rooms at my parent’s motel to prove it).

It’s also super evident in the way my niece is being raised. Her mum and dad have the same amount of say as do I, my other sister and my parents – we take care of her, discipline her, feed her, and teach her things that we think are necessary. She relies on each of us to a different extent, but my sister (her mum) never questions our right to have a say where she is concerned.

I guess the point I’m really trying to make (in an incredibly roundabout, rambly way), is that Indian families are much like mafia families – they’re a ‘till death do us part’ kind of operation, with no real notion of independence.

Having had no experience of being in a traditional, western family, my outsider view point makes me believe that there is far more variety in the average, white Australian household. Is this true? How is your family structured? Do other Indians have equally demanding (though also loving!) families as I do?