I Want to Be Chai | Volha Kastsiuk

Here, next to the stone elephant at Kailasa temple,
on the streets of Aurangabad,
in the waves of the Arabic Sea,
I will always be a bright
shameful white sheet
among more practical brown.
I will be bleached as a stain
on the dark khadi fabric,
unnatural shine on natural cotton
hand-spun and woven by Gandhiji.

I will never feel one of them
while walking on the footpath in Pune,
even if I am dressed in a kurta or salwar-kameez,
even if I am tanned by the Murud sun,
even if I eat puri
sitting on a plastic stool
wiped for me at a bazaar.

A brown boy
passing me on the narrow touristy path,
announces
with a perfect Indian accent,
“Look at her, mom!”
I never announced, “Look at her!”
while watching a dark brown lady
carrying sand in the bucket
on the top of her head.
I just whispered
in my mother tongue.
And I wonder
how it feels to be honest?

To be a white woman in Janjira Fort is
much worse than being a white man.
To be a brown woman in Janjira Fort is
much worse than being a brown man.
To be a woman in Janjira Fort is
much worse than being a man.

I wish to be a girgit
and be able to change my skin colour.
I would be brown in India.
I would be black in Brooklyn.
I would be white in Lapland.
I would be invisible in Belarus.

The lady clad in an orange sari
carrying cauliflower, potatoes, and onion
in the plastic bag in her brown right hand
saw me on the Railway Station Road
and put her left hand out
spitting “Money” in English.
I am white,
And I have to have money for
all the brown, black, and yellow,
and purple,
and turquoise.
And the other colonized nations.
But I am Belarusian and
I should put my white left hand out to
yellow Mongolians,
white Poles,
snow Swedes,
beige Russians,
cream French people,
blonde Germans,
Russians,
Russians,
Russians.

One day in India,
Maharastra, Mumbai,
Colaba, Leopold café,
I was seated at a table
next to the bullet holes from 2008.
With an Indian woman.
She was speaking Marathi.
I was speaking Belarusian.
We shared my butter chicken
and her chicken spaghetti with pesto cream sauce.
We drank beer and
went outside to have a cigarette.

Black tea with ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, clove,
black pepper and star anise
and milk from the plastic bag.

That day, Saraswati added some sugar to the pot
and I became chai.

Volha Kastsiuk is a writer living in New Zealand. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Russian Philology from Belarus State University. In 2021 she completed two courses at the Creative Writing School (Russia). Currently, she is writing in Belarusian and English, while before 2022 she was writing in Russian. Over the past three years her short stories, poems, essays and translations have appeared in printed magazines, anthologies and online in Belarus, New Zealand, Austria, the USA, Finland, Kazakhstan and Russia. She is presently employed in the education field.