Under Pooja’s skin: How girls experience race in America

NEW YORK: Writer Pooja Makhijani has been an East Coast girl her whole life and she has no time for people who trumpet their sense of alienation. But growing up in a predominantly white neighbourhood in New York Makhijani hated having to rely only on Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book for a good Indian story.

“When I was growing up there was no literature that I can remember for South Asian kids. We did get material from India and I devoured Amar Chitra Katha, but it had a different sensibility,” said 29-year-old Makhijani who has just added her second book Mama’s Saris published by Little, Brown Books to US bookshelves. 

“This is the book I would have loved to read as a child. It is also a story that every little girl can identify with. As a child I went to my friends’ houses and we would pull out their moms’ clothes and play “Dress Up.”

I remember all of us trying on hats and shawls, falling over in leather pumps and getting tangled in costume jewellery, putting on pink blush that found its way to our noses. When I got home, though, it was my mother’s saris which captivated me.”

“It is a universal story in some ways couched in a very cultural specific context,” added Makhijani, who has a day job in New York’s Sesame Workshop supervising aspects of the Sesame Street India project.

In the introduction to her hugely popular first book Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, Makhijani confessed to suffering a fleeting “I-refuse-to-be-Indian-how-can’t-you-see-that-I-am-as-white-as-you” phase. In one of her candid essays, Makhijani recalls a childhood spent swapping the traditional Indian lunches her mother packed for the processed school lunches other ‘luckier’ kids bought. 

She also writes in Under Her Skin about her Sikh classmate who had his turban yanked off during a kickball game as the defining moment in her life: “I should have defended him on the blacktop that day when a boy pulled off his coordinated patka. He was rounding second base during the daily kickball game at recess when a pale hand yanked the swatch of red fabric off his head. His silky black locks cascaded down his shoulders.

A few others gathered around and one voice even yelled, “He’s a girl,” but he just snatched it back and went inside. He showed up in class after recess was over…It is one of those memories whose sounds and colours don’t fade away with time.”

Makhijani told DNA that Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America was actually targeted at young adults but it found a much older and wider market. Makhijani plans to compile another book of essays on race but this time from the male perspective.

“It is an idea that has been growing. But I have to find the time to do it properly. I get very passionate about what I am working on,” she told DNA. “I would love to put more books for South Asian kids out there. We need more of our books. We need more of our stories told,” she added.