Un-American Indian

“And… where are you from?” they’d ask, slowly, hands clasped between their knees, crouching slightly as if talking to a child or, I suspected, someone they weren’t sure spoke good English.

“Also, England,” I’d reply in my best, most affected English accent – something I’d learned to do from my time so far at an American university, where I didn’t immediately present as British, despite my increasingly twee attire.

It was my fault, I thought, for standing at the end of a row of housemates, like the last Sugababe at a Royal Variety Performance line-up.

Imagine how bleak ‘Love Actually’ would be if all four storylines were different kinds of Colin, looking to cash-in on their English accents – and you’ve just imagined mine and my housemates’ year abroad in California.

I was brown Colin, who went out with high hopes, but for the most part was mistaken for being Mexican.

So, I spoke first and loudly, which meant startling wait staff when ordering a banana milkshake.

I was used to being asked where I was really from. But in another country that added an additional layer of complication. You mean before this? Or before that?

It was a bit annoying back in the UK, but in California it was forgiven on account of its surroundings. If the true meaning of ‘utopia’ is “perfect place that doesn’t exist”, I think California offers a pretty viable asterisk to that definition.

I was there to read American Studies (or ‘Studies’, as you might think they’d call it in America). I’d already endured a year back in the UK of people joking that it was a “Mickey Mouse degree”. But joke’s on them, I guess. I did in fact study Mickey Mouse.

Quite what I’d do with the qualification once I’d graduated, I hadn’t thought through. Academia was always an option but staying on to do that in America felt like the very definition of teaching grandma to suck eggs.

So, I just sort of enjoyed the experience. One day learning about the Vietnam War. The next, reading Walt Whitman.

I signed up for a Native American Studies class and took the opportunity to visit a nearby reservation with my housemates. This time when we lined up to meet the locals, I blended in rather than stood out. Explaining that I was British Indian confused matters further.

The elders invited us to join them in a purification ceremony, which consisted of stripping down to our underpants and entering a hut draped in animal skins, where a spiritual leader prayed, sang, and poured water and herbs over hot rocks that made our eyeballs sweat.

It was hot more like the ending of ‘Terminator 2’ than the ending of ‘Love Actually’.

As we passed round the pipe and the lodge filled with smoke, a thought entered my mind as all moisture left my body: when we say, ‘where are you really from?’ are we asking, ‘what are you doing here?’ Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, I had absolutely no idea.