The Pigment of our Imagination !

Why are Indians, the world’s greatest racial profilers, pretending to be shocked when others profile them? Shobhan Saxena on his personal experiences

(from TOI dated 03/09/06)


The tip of the nozzle was cold like an icicle. As the man pressed the handgun against a twittering artery on my neck, the crawling train stopped with a jerk and his face became clear in the sweep of white light slicing through the coach. His red eyes scanned the twinge on my forehead through two holes in the blue hood on his face and his black finger quivered nervously on the trigger, sending a wave of shivers down my sweat-covered body. Then he spoke in a blood-curdling baritone: “I got a gun. You got something, brother?” I slipped two $100 bills into his left hand. He looked out, slunk through the sliding doors, turned back and said, “Thank you, bro.” With his green eyes piercing my face, the police officer asked me to describe the mugger. “Black man, about 6 feet, good built and glowering eyes,” I said. “This could be almost any black man in America. C’mon mister, move on,” he snarled. Robbed by a black guy and humiliated by a white cop on a damp night in Chicago, as I dragged my feet through the snow and a frosty gale, I wondered if they are all racists. Do they hate us, the brown-skins?

On the morning of 9/11, when I was fast asleep at home in Queens, New York, the melanin in my skin suddenly became deeper. Suddenly, fellow New Yorkers began to notice the shape of my eyes and the sharpness of my nose. Suddenly, the craggy hair on my face turned into a ‘Shiite’ beard.
At the Sports Bar in Madison Square Garden, two white blokes offered to buy me a drink: “You drink jet fuel, right?” Outside the Punjab restaurant in Long Island, a bunch of yobs reminded me of my nationality: “You bloody Paki, go back to your Poon-jaab.” At Lexington Avenue, a man blocked the door as I tried to board the train: “F*** off, you f****ing Arab.” Outside a grocery store in Washington DC, a drunken lout updated me on geo-politics: “Your Taliban is finished. We smashed your Kabul today.” And, on a flight from DC to JFK, an air hostess gave me a lesson in men’s room manners when I got up to go to the loo: “Don't move. Sit tight, it’s a short flight.”

With dark clouds of racial prejudice hanging over the City, I spent a few hours with Hardeep and his friends, the lads of Punjabi-By-Nature-Boys gang who rule the streets at night. They picked me from a dark corner in Jackson Heights. With his mighty rib cage boasting of a huge tattoo of two swords in semicircle and his headphones screaming a hate song, Hardeep played with the gas pedal as his BMW flew on Bhangra beats. They rolled spliffs and smashed empty beer bottles on the road. “So, what do you think is goin’ on here, this racial profiling and all,” I shot a question and they all began to talk at the same time. We’re tough guys, we no pansies. We’re not black. We’re not white. They all pick on us. They call us smelly Indians. We take no shit from no SOBs who call us FOBs. We ain’t afraid of no White trash. We don’t give no shit to no nigga. We gonna bust all Dot Busters. We ain’t afraid of no blood. We won’t let no Latino slut dime us out. Our life is tough, but we love pain. We wanna go out with a hole in our head. We hate our parents. They don’t know nothing. We hate everyone.

So, we hate them too. We always have, actually.

Many years ago, while studying in London, I used to work at an Indian restaurant in Hounslow for a couple of hours a day to make some money.

As I would sit behind the cash register and pass on the orders to the cooks in the kitchen, an old white man in blue pants, a grey tweed jacket and a black hat would be mopping the floor. His frail hands moved from side to side in a slow rhythm as Gulati, the café owner, hurled profanities at him in Punjabi. The man, fallen off the National Health Service and social security network, worked like a dog. He wiped the huge glass windows, mopped the floor, cleaned the tables, filled water jugs, removed the trays, carried massive grocery bags and put garbage in the trashcans as Gulati paid filthy tributes to his mother, sister and daughters. At night, just before we downed the shutter, Gulati would bark at him: “Babaji, roti kha lo,” and the man would wash his hands and look at me with his moist blue eyes. One day, as I gave him a plate of mutton chops, aloo patties, chickpeas and some green salad, I asked him how he understood Gulati’s command for dinner. “He is always insulting me, but when he asks me to have food he hisses pure hate. That’s how I know,” he said, shifting his gaze back to the mutton chops.

Our Sundays were so full of hate. In the morning, I would be at the Gurdwara with my old aunt. In the evening I would be at Glassy Junction, a Punjabi bar in Southhall. At both the places, the chatter was always the same: the white man is an evil and the black man is a devil.

In Birmingham, I met a middle-aged Indian man who wanted to slit the throat of his daughter because she had a black boyfriend. In Glasgow, I saw a Pakistani girl being kicked and dragged into a car by his brothers from the house of her white boyfriend. In Manhattan, I saw a black boy being punched because he gatecrashed a Basement Bhangra party.
We may not admit it, but we practise the worst kind of racism with others as well as within our society. Apart from ridiculing the vegetarians as ghass-phoos eaters, Imran Khan, that famous, Oxfordeducated, sexy, sultan of swing, is infamously on record for referring to India as the south “where we Pathans have always gone to screw women”. And in our part of the world, the alleged twice-borns carry a seething hatred for the lower castes and born-agains.

We practice racism in a subtle manner. We know it’s not in the colour of your skin. It’s not about biology. It’s about culture. Through caste and religion, we have institutionalised and legitimised racism. That’s why we have a culture of hate wielded by an equally strong culture of silence. That’s why we leave no opportunity to abuse a black man.

And look at the black man. Even when he robs you, he calls you ‘brother’.