Yesterday, I was identified by a worker at one of my fav Indian take-out places here in Halifax as having a Hindu name, which shouldn’t be a very surprising thing given that I have one of the most common Hindu names imaginable. (If you ask a Hindu if their name is Ajay, if they say no, they’ll likely add that they have a cousin with that name.) But I live in HALIFAX, so over the last several decades, most of my experiences of being identified as a Hindu have been quite negative.
For example, bat-shit crazy missionaries at my door who have shown me pictures in their books about a man trying to scrape his way out of a tree, which is how they understand Hindu cosmology. Kids throwing peanuts at images of our gods when I was young. Even finding a Ganesh murti used as decoration on a yoga studio’s toilet because I guess it was on special from Winners or something. (To be fair, that one happened in Vancouver, not Halifax.)
But yesterday, picking up a take-out order, the lady behind the counter looks at me incredulously and said,
“you’re NAME is AJAY?”
(for context – I am routinely identified as Black/Arab/Pakistani/Indian/Sikh/Muslim/ but very rarely Hindu. My beard on a white guy would connote craft beer or heavy metal, but on my brown body it generally connotes racially ambiguous security threat. So I’m usually on the defence at this point in a conversation.)
“yes.”
“But that’s a Hindu name!”
“yes…”
(cue the intergenerational trauma of failing to fulfill whatever this random thinks Hindu is supposed to mean)
“But you don’t look like Ajay”
(cue new fear that they may mistake me for being anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh, or generally fascist.)
“Ya, my people left India for the Caribbean nearly 200 years ago, but it wasn’t really a choice and we held on to what we could.”
No further conversation on the subject, but I discovered extra samosas in my take out bag!
There’s so much to think about with the complexities of transnational diaspora identities. I’ve been worked up in my head for nearly 24 hours wondering what the gift of a samosa means. I’ve been followed through stores, subjected to extra levels of security screening, thrown out of gyms, malls, and other public places for the way that I look, but no one has ever given me a samosa because of it before.
Colonialism and racism and all the knots that hold us in a particular time, place, and body is really hard stuff. Even though I’m lucky enough to have a job that allows me to study this stuff professionally, none of that adequately prepares you for how profound it feels in your BODY for someone to see you, and rather than dehumanize you in some way, just think you’re unremarkably normal.
Ajay Parasram 