Since attending the book launch for Sayantani Dasgupta’s ‘Brown Women Have Everything,’ (her third book) last week, I finally found time to sit down and read it.
I couldn’t put it down. I am struck by how much we have in common, this woman who grew up in New Delhi and I, who grew up in small-town New England. It’s not just that we both moved to North Carolina a month before Hurricane Florence tried to wipe our new town off the map in 2018. It’s little things, like being baffled by the volume of unfamiliar choices in the grocery store or the coffee shop. The delight at being allowed to sit in the cafe for hours, sipping lattes while writing or reading. It’s the frustration of trying to follow our mothers’ recipe instructions from afar, peppered as they were with phrases like “a pinch of” and “until it’s done.” It’s the anger at having the thrill of achievement and new opportunity crushed by being told we should leave those chances to someone more ‘deserving’ – because they were older, with more experience, and of course, male. In her case, also – white. It’s the struggle of always having to learn something new, even as those around us have no knowledge of the things we know.
I read with delight about some of our many differences – yes, I had no idea that paanch phoron was required to make chutney, or that it means ‘five spices,’ or that it is used in the preparation of many other Indian foods. Let’s be serious here – of course I had never heard of paanch phoron! But I immediately relate to this writer who, after many years in this country, still wonders, “Did I smile enough? Did I say ‘sorry,’ ‘please,’ and ‘thank you’ the right number of times?” We both look back on days when we didn’t write about everything happening to us in our weekly letters to our mothers, because we knew it would upset them too much, All of us do everything we can to adjust to the rough parts of living in this world, while thrilling to the exhilaration of the challenges and the successes that come our way.
“Of course you got the job,” a just-met white woman tells her. “Brown women have everything these days. They get all the jobs.” Looking around the room filled with a few hundred of her university faculty colleagues, the author sees that a handful are black or brown. And the title of her new book is born.
I can’t use enough adjectives to describe this book. I will just say, “Read it. You won’t be able to put it down.”
Lauris Burns 