At Kapaleeshwarar Temple, built around the 7th century CE in Dravidian architecture.

I have what I refer to as the “universal brown girl” look. I have caramel brown skin, dark brown eyes and black curly hair. As far as global diversity goes, I may posses some of the most geographically non-specific physical traits possible. 

If I keep my mouth shut and dress appropriately, I can adequately “pass” all over parts of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East. In my travels, Brazilian ladies made biting comments to me about tourists in rapid fire Portuguese (not realizing I was also a tourist), Moroccan merchants spent more time speculating my origins than trying to make a sale in the medinas, Indonesian girls put their brown arms against my own and told me “same,” and coastal Kenyans and Tanzanians seemed mystified by my passport and sometimes attempted to separate me from it (presumably for the benefit of some closely resembling family member). I’ve learned to carry multiple forms of identification and come to expect people questioning my American nationality or, at worst, holding me under suspicion at the airport or denying my traveler’s checks or credit cards. Often I find myself deliberately gravitating towards the places where locals look like me, enjoying the freedom and anonymity of being able to blend in somewhere far away from home. 

And now I am in India, somewhere that is more directly my homeland than any other place outside the country of my birth. I feel just as strong a connection to Africa, and reveled in the comforts of familiarity I found as a student in Zimbabwe to the food, folklore and customs of my African-American family. Yet, those connections are more distant, abstracted by displacement, slavery and generations of lost ties. India is a place where the distance is more intimate, a legacy of my father’s absence in my life, but the links are profoundly evident in my name, my face, and each time I have to include my father’s place of birth when filling out official forms. 

Here my connection is more than physical approximation or the ambiguity of the vast array of mixes that produce a person who looks like me. It’s the reality of my very immediate kinship to Tamils and the larger family of Dravidians, one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures living in the same place. I am reminded of this in the ancient artifacts and sacred statues of the deities whose names I bear. It’s both me and foreign to me in riveting paradox. 

Origins of my unabbreviated last name, and my father’s first name, Chandrasekaran from the Government Museum in Chennai.