Excerpt: Good Indian Daughter by Ruhi Lee
Chapter 1:
The wrong kind of homework
Early in the millennium, I set myself a new goal: to one day be able to tell my parents things they wouldn’t like hearing, without shitting myself. At that point in time however, my backbone was so close to non-existent, I may as well have been classified as an invertebrate. This was not an ideal condition to be in on the day Pa had the biggest explosion I’d experienced in those first eleven years of my flaccid existence. It happened on Boon Wurrung land, about forty minutes south-east of Melbourne’s city centre, in a suburb where the pharmacy, Vietnamese bakery, Hair Panache, Hot Potatoe’s DISCOUNT SUPERSTORE, Chandu’s Sweetmeats and Spices and the local Club X sex shop, were all conveniently located on the same shopping strip – it seemed, just to make family errands awkward for us.
Our house was a double-brick basket of stone fruit. A second-hand velveteen sofa the colour of pluot flesh was the pride of the lounge room, its upholstery surprisingly taut for its age. Peach enetians hung on the windows. The kitchen benchtop was the colour of apricot, naturally. And we always kept a cardboard crate full of ripe mangoes, selected by Pa according to the sweetness of their scent, in the place we pragmatically referred to as the ‘kitchen cupboard’. We didn’t know yet that it had a special name: pantry.
The lounge was the nucleus of our square home. A corridor wrapped all the way around it from the front door to the kitchen, joining the dots between the three bedrooms, bathroom, toilet and laundry. Children did not jump on furniture in this house, hence the undefiled sofa, and shoes were not allowed indoors. Devoted to the meticulous preservation of all things his sweat-soaked money had bought, Pa had also spread plastic protectors along this corridor, lest the filthy soles of our bare feet ruin the frieze carpet forever.
On the evening of the explosion, I stalked along this plastic-covered corridor in search of Ma, clutching two sheets of folded-up paper in my small brown hands. I found her in her bedroom, reorganising her wardrobe. Again. It was an unusual hour of tranquility in our home as the radio played SBS Hindi; only the sound of the radio host’s voice floated through our open doorways between old Bollywood ballads that sounded like they were being broadcast through a thick woolly sock.
I could hear Pa crooning along as he did the laundry. Detergent. Cottons. Cold. Start. No fabric softener. No delicates. Ma sat cross-legged on the ground, a bindi on her forehead and a knitted sweater over her bandhani nighty, surrounded by piles of folded clothes. Melbourne’s winter always snapped its metallic fangs at immigrants from warmer climates, but to Ma, it was worth enduring for her daughters to receive ‘a better education’ than she believed we would have had in her hometown, Dharwad. She and Pa were raising two very good girls out here in Australia: girls who would become accomplished women, and make their parents proud and their in-laws prouder. Girls whom they’d done an exemplary job of protecting from the satanic forces ruling the outside world – until this particular moment.
Ma?’ I murmured from around the corner.
‘YA?!’ she shouted into her cupboard. I shuffled closer.
‘Shh!’ I was embarrassed.
She popped her head out from behind her cupboard doors and made a poor attempt at a whisper.
‘What?!’ ‘I’ve got some homework that my teacher said to do with you.’ ‘Ask your pa.’ She shooed me away.
‘NO! I mean, no. Can you please just have a look?’ I unfolded the two large sheets of paper, shuddering as I took one fatal step after another toward her.
Earlier that day at school, I’d had my first sex-education class and the teacher had sent us home with diagrams of the male and female reproductive systems. We were to discuss what we learned with our parents and label the anatomy together. My gut told me Ma and Pa weren’t likely to take to the exercise, but my teacher’s naive optimism must have rubbed off on me. As I packed the papers into my schoolbag I thought, Well, you never know. Ma and Pa might surprise me and actually want to talk about this stuff … because …
But really there was no precedent I could draw on to complete that thought.
‘Give it here,’ Ma said with a sigh. She snatched the sheets of paper, male bits first, from my now-trembling hands. Then she looked down and gasped.
‘Ayo.’ Her palm went to her forehead. ‘What is this?’ The blood drained from her face. Then she called out for Pa. Oh no.
Pa heard the panic in her voice and arrived promptly. Ma handed him the diagrams. It was as though they had seen a ghost. Or a ghost’s dick, to be precise. They looked at the labels I’d already filled out in class: vas deferens, urethra, epididymis, prostate. I’d left the easier ones for my parents to spare them at least a fraction of the embarrassment – things like scrotum and testicles. Also, deep-down, I just wanted to hear someone in our household say the word ‘penis’.
Ma was on the verge of tears. The tectonic plates beneath Pa’s face shifted as horror turned into rage. ‘What is this?!’
‘My homework …’
‘THIS? THIS is homework? WHO the HELL is the teacher giving you this?’
‘Mrs Fitzsimmons.’
Pa glared again at the rudimentary depictions of male and female private parts. ‘Maya! Go turn the radio off please!’ he shouted to my little sister, who had been busy playing with her toys – or pretending to, by this point – in our shared bedroom down the hallway. The intermittent screams of the pressure cooker in the kitchen now began to pierce the silence. I found a speck of solace in the knowledge that – at least this time – I wasn’t in trouble for my own actions. Still, even though Pa’s fire-breathing was aimed at my teacher, my hair was sure to be singed; I was still a guilty, if mostly unwilling, participant in something so veritably unIndian.
‘What is the need for this?! WHY does an eleven-year-old child need to know this rubbish?! They call this “homework” here?!’
So much for a better education. In Pa’s eyes, my teacher, the school and the entire Department of Education had failed his daughter, who had neither the maturity nor the required wariness around boys to be asked to label a penis and its neighbouring unmentionables. Until this point, I’d understood the bits between my legs as just the front section of the general bum area, responsible solely for urination. My parents were happy to leave this conclusion unchallenged until I was married to a man of their choosing, who would explain the rest to me at the appointed time. Even before this new information penetrated my carefully curated consciousness, myriad obstacles had already threatened my ascent into a successful, career-driven woman. Boys equipped with the necessary parts would be the architects of my ruination, and needed to be pulled out of my path like weeds.
To add insult to Pa’s injury, the teacher had photocopied these pictures of sexual organs on enormous A3 pieces of paper. How was this allowed when maths homework was only ever printed on tiny A5 sheets or hidden inside a textbook? My parents might have considered it marginally more admissible if, in the name of biological studies (not ‘sex-ed’), Mrs Fitzsimmons had used an overhead projector to light up the images on the wall, just for a few seconds, before they could sear into our minds. Instead, she handed out what was, as far as my parents were concerned, gigantic, two-dimensional black-and-white porn for students to take home and drool over. Never mind that the work sheets looked more like mazes from an activity book to me.
Pa nearly blew the walls off our Stone Fruit House with his diatribe about the debauched syllabus that Year 6 kids all over Victoria had to endure. I expected him to tear my homework to shreds, but what he did instead petrified me. He folded the papers slowly and precisely, corners and sides accurately lining up, and placed them in his pocket. Then he assured Ma and me that he wouldn’t let this go unaddressed. My teacher was in for a firm talking-to about this depraved so-called ‘curriculum’.
But Pa’s efforts were wasted. The penis got to me in the end. And not via some rando chosen by my parents.
This is an extract from Good Indian Daughter by Ruhi Lee, out now through Affirm Press. Buy a copy here.
Ruhi Lee writes on Boon Wurrung land. Her articles, poetry and book reviews have been featured in The Guardian, ABC Life, SBS Voices, South Asian Today and The Big Issue among other publications. In 2019, she was a recipient of the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund and her manuscript was shortlisted for the Penguin Random House Write it Fellowship. In 2020, she was one of the commissioned writers for the Multicultural Arts Victoria’s Shelter program. Good Indian Daughter is her first memoir. You can follow her on Instagram @sneha_lees.