by Duriba Khan 

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land far, far away, an angel was born. She possessed a cherubic face, blonde locks, blue eyes and cheeks so rosy, they could be mistaken for petals of a rose. She constantly giggled and smiled, and her parents adored her and spoiled her with whatever her delicate, bony hand reached for.

In a hospital room a couple of states away and three years later, a crying, wailing, and kicking young girl with black hair and brown eyes was born (the ultimate combination). Her parents adored her so much that it hurt, and they portrayed this affection through constantly stuffing her with Parle G biscuits, carrot flavored baby food (it tastes just as bad as it sounds), and dreamt picturesque scenarios where she and her elder sister would open a vaccination clinic by the name, “The Khan Klinic” (see what I did there?) for the homeless.

That girl was me.

Now, the Parle-G biscuit addiction has taken a toll on my weight, the carrot thing didn’t really work out, considering I received my first pair of glasses in the third grade, and I guess they’re still clinging on to the clinic thing.

Hey there! My name is Duriba, how about a handshake? No, no, don’t really reach out to your screen. Brothers please, that’s haram, c’mon now. Oh, darn…you got your greasy fingerprints on the screen and my, do you brown girls have a strong grip. Wow! And how soft are your hands? Girl, what moisturizer is this? Costco’s generic lotion? OMG, ME TOO!

Oh, you want me to stop shaking your hand?

Okay, sorry.

Once again, my name is Duriba, and I’m your average sixteen-year-old girl. I live a mundane life where my routine consists of eating (Halal) rice krispies treat at 10 a.m., attempting to practice yoga at lunch, seriously considering cutting my bangs at 4 p.m., painting my fingernails teal at 7 p.m., removing my nail polish to pray at 8 p.m., then staying up until midnight to finish the Precalculus homework. I was born in Chicago and moved to Austin when I was three. I’ve attended Islamic school my entire life, so everything I know about “the outside world” is from Bollywood, Hollywood, brown parties, the Internet, or the secret calls I have every couple of days with John Abraham after my family members fall asleep.

As this is a culturally oriented magazine, I’ll begin with my background. Most people are astonished to hear this, but I’m actually half-Indian (mom) and half-Pakistani (you guessed it, Dad!). You would expect much controversy in my household, but the only time it really gets heated and even a bit awkward is around cricket season.

I like to think that I’m a free spirit, simply a traveler on my way to bigger, better, things. I’m very rambunctious, talkative and open. I love to make new friends, learn new things about people (especially Beyonce), web designing, filmmaking, vlogging, blogging, shopping, writing (DUR HUR HUR) and creating art. But more than anything, I love to make people laugh.

I love learning about Islam, “The Beatles”, coconut water, and spend much of my time re-reading birthday cards. I’m also obsessed with coffee flavored things, an ardent SRK fan (who’s Sallu Bhai?!), passionate about elephants, and a huge believer in good karma. I owe so much to my family including my cousins and uncles and aunts, and my best friends who have supported me in every decision in my life, from debating whether or not to purchase a watermelon to switching schools.

All in all, I’m SERIOUSLY excited to see where my journey with Brown Girl Magazine will take me, and I hope you all enjoy reading my work as much as I do writing it. Finally, a big thanks to everyone who has ever supported or complimented my personal blog, [Being]Duriba. If it wasn’t for you all, I wouldn’t have the courage to submit an application to BGM in the first place.

As for my haters,

I hope you have to consume carrot flavored baby food for the rest of your life!

[divider]

Duriba Khan, or “D-Dawg”, is a sixteen-year-old blogging, vlogging, photographing, filmmaking, sketching geek who enjoys long, romantic walks to the refrigerator. She is half-Pakistani and half-Indian, and currently resides in Austin, Texas. Duriba also feels uncomfortable writing about herself in the third person. For more of Duriba’s work, check out her blog.

By Brown Girl Magazine

Brown Girl Magazine was created by and for South Asian womxn who believe in the power of storytelling as a … Read more ›

Photo by Biscotto Design via Shutterstock.com

NAKED: The Honest Musings of 2 Brown Women was born in the autumn of 2018, when Mimi Mutesa and Selvi M. Bunce began sharing their poetry collections. It was scary, beautiful, and terrifying when they decided to trust each other with their most intimate thoughts. Not only did they feel relieved after doing so, but Selvi and Mimi also felt more seen as women of color. They embarked on their publication journey, so others may feel as seen as they did on that fateful autumn.

“Ingrown Hair” deals with the themes of societal and family pressures that are reflected throughout NAKED. Mimi and Selvi have always written for themselves. They see poetry as an outlet, and their poems exemplify their personal frustration and vulnerability. “Ingrown Hair” speaks to Selvi’s experience with the societal pressures of South Asian women, such as getting married, being a good wife, becoming a good mother, and leading a certain kind of life.

[Read Related: Exploring the Endless Possibilities of who I am In the Mirror]

Ingrown Hair

There is something strange beneath my skin
telling me to build a house,
make a home,
mother children.
I am not sure how to reconcile it.
My mother was strong
and a mother after all.
My philosophy has been to spend my time
on myself and the world.
I have always thought
I could simply address the thing under my skin
when it finally crawled out.
But when my family starts guessing
who will get married first, and my father
has been saving wedding money for years,
I begin to wonder
if I will have to pluck it out.

[Read Related: Reconstructing and Deconstructing our Ideals]

You can purchase your copy of NAKED on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Bookshop, and The Black Spring Press Group. Follow Selvi on Twitter and Instagram. Don’t forget to check out her project, Brown & Brazen.

The opinions expressed by the guest writer/blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Brown Girl Magazine, Inc., or any employee thereof. Brown Girl Magazine is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by the guest writer/bloggers. This work is the opinion of the blogger. It is not the intention of Brown Girl Magazine to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. If you’d like to submit a guest post, please follow the guidelines we’ve set forth here.

By Selvi M. Bunce

Selvi M. Bunce (she/they) has written for academic and creative journals and spoken at diversity conferences and TEDx. Selvi currently … Read more ›

Photo Courtesy of Varsha Panikar

“After so Long” is a poetry film created for Simha’s EP, which is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. The poem was collaboratively written by Simha, a U.S. native, and Jae, who is based in India, during the 2020 lockdown. “After so Long” was recited by Simha and their parents. In 2022, I directed and produced the film through my studio, Star Hopper. “After so Long” premiered on Nowness Asia in March 2022.

By Varsha Panikar

Varsha Panikar (they/he) is a filmmaker, writer and multi-disciplinary artist from India. They are the co-founder of Star Hopper, a … Read more ›

For BGM Literary, editor Nimarta Narang is honored to work with writer Sri Nimmagadda. In this short story, we follow a man in a gray suit who makes a stop at a church to bide his time before a job interview. Sri Nimmagadda is the Chief Program Officer at MannMukti, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the stigma around mental health in the South Asian community through storytelling and advocacy. He lives in Los Angeles with his dog, Rani, and is passionate about authentically growing inclusion and diversity through storytelling in the entertainment industry. Editor Nimarta was extremely grateful to have Sri join the legacy of wonderful and moving authors for the literary vertical in honor of Mental Health and Awareness month. 

A man in a gray suit stands in front of a church and looks up and through the entryway with the resignation of a desiccated man taking a bitter medicine he’s absorbed for years but simply accepts as a fact of his life, however unpleasant. So, the man in the gray suit — a get-up slim but not so lean as to emit a cockish, metrosexual air, scraggly lint escaping the seams across the surface in a manner that supposes either venerability or somewhat tired desperation — thinks about what it means to take a bitter medicine, the trade-off between the instantaneous sour, bitter, wretched, and cloying and the promise of perhaps a better tomorrow, or a better tonight, or a better five-minutes-from-now. After some consideration, this man in a gray suit — an outfit that some would’ve supposed he’d purchased from Goodwill, the night before, for a painfully wrought $95.67 with tax after getting into an argument with his wife about who was going to take the kids to school in the morning and fucking Brenda skipping out on babysitting again — steps inside the church.

This man in a gray suit — armed with a briefcase, and the last and latest copy of his résumé that he’d worked on until 1:30 a.m. the night before after Max and Annabelle had long gone to sleep and his angry, exhausted wife laid restless, in their shared bed, thinking about whether she’d consult the number of the divorce lawyer she’d been recommended by one of her girlfriends in the morning before deciding she’d give her husband another shot just as she had the night before and the night before that and the night before that — paces towards the front of pews almost cautiously, as if someone were watching him, afraid to be caught in the act of being vulnerable and giving himself up to some higher power. Maybe if you go to church and the pastor or some other demure, God-fearing soul sees you, they’ll call you out — who are you? why are you here? — and you’ll realize that for as much ado as people make about the unconditionality of God’s love, they make claims to His love the way they’d claim a parking spot or a position in a queue at a grocery store. Faith, it appears to the man in the gray suit, is really about paying your dues.

So the man in a gray suit approaches the front-most pew — the communion table before him standing guard ahead of a cross. He lays his briefcase down. He sits at the pew. He closes his eyes. Please, he begs Him in his own mind. I need this.

But then this man in a gray suit considers his pathetic whimper to God, how he can’t even acknowledge God by his name, how he begs Please rather than Please God like a weak, unfaithful man who cannot bring himself to say his wife’s name when begging her for forgiveness after his own infidelity. What a mess, he thought of himself. So, he tries again.

Please, God. I need this.

The man in a gray suit considers this again and admonishes himself for his cowardice — when you pray in your head, words and phrases, and sentences and prayers, and pleas twine and intertwine and mix until the signal becomes the noise and you can’t really figure out whatever you’re trying to say. So, for a half-second, you think the only way to get it out of your head is to blow it up so that it all spills out and maybe then God will understand how you really feel — and so he tries again, and puts his prayers to air. The man in a gray suit is not used to coming to church. This is his first time coming in a couple of years. He’s going to need a couple of tries to get this thing down.

“I’m sorry,” the man in a gray suit exhales, “I’m just not used to praying.” But that’s okay. Prayer is a process, the man in a gray suit would find, and what begins feeling ridiculous, or like grasping for spiritual straws, ends up feeling akin to a dam giving way to water; unrestrained, unexploited. So the man in a gray suit — the man who’s come an hour and a half early to an interview because the early bird gets the worm, only to find himself with an hour and a half to kill and nowhere but a church to grace with his presence — prays, and he prays faithfully, and he prays well. He picks up the Bible on the shelf of the pew in front of him, flips it open to whatever page presented itself and begins to read. He closes his eyes, and at that moment he feels safe, like God’s hands envelop him, and that tomorrow will be a better day, and everything will be okay.

~.~

Somewhere along the line, this stupid fucker in a gray suit fell asleep in the middle of Galatians and missed his interview.

By Nimarta Narang

Born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand, Nimarta grew up devouring Hindi movies, coming-of-age novels and one too many psychology textbooks. … Read more ›