One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter QUOTES

1 " Fear always reaches a breaking point and turns into anxiety or rage, and I don't have enough storage space for more fear in my life. Namely when it involves people I've never even met. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

2 " When Sweetu wasn’t being reduced to merely existing as a bride, as a piece of meat to be handled and prodded, to have decorative contraptions stuck into her skull, her interests were otherwise unexpressed. She rarely complained, hardly asked for anything, and maybe that’s because Indian girls grow up going to weddings and we watch the procedure and we know our roles: be demure, don’t complain, cry but don’t scream, get tea for anyone older than you, and calmly meet expectations. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

3 " If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from “fun,” trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from “vacation.” When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

4 " There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

5 " I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

6 " I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package! "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

7 " She used to call me on the phone and scream, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

8 " You know what would be fun,” our school’s administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. “What if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter? "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

9 " The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn’t premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you’re drunk and you run into a girl who’s also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you’re being accused of something you’d never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn’t a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don’t notice when someone’s watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

10 " And while Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding hands and cops are handing out ice cream cones instead of, say, shooting black men, our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we're punished, as if we're speaking badly of an elderly relative who can't help but make fun of the Irish. The white majority doesn't like being reminded that the cultural landscape is still flawed, still broken... "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

11 " It's taxing to consider the circumstances that can take an unmarked human canvas and make it rage-filled and petty and lost. It's not fun to have sympathy for the people who are trying to hurt you. But their actions can sometimes make sense: what's easier than trying to get better is trying to break something else down. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

12 " Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we're taught anything, we're taught to hide. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

13 " These men who harass women online were all owed something very simple at one time - respect, love, affection, he basic decency of living upwards and not curling inwards, a humane education - and someone, along the line, failed them. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

14 " Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

15 " I knew they were my people, but it didn't feel like it. I was pushing against any first-generation narrative, while all the people in that area were seemingly proud of it. Aunties wore salwars to go grocery shopping, and little kids had those silver or gold bangles we were all given at birth...We were different from them, and I was determined to keep us different. Every piece of gold jewelry ever given to me was hidden in my dresser; I refused to wear any of it, because it made me feel I was being marked as an Other. (I now wear all of it, sometimes at the same time, a signal to other Others that I'm an Other too.) "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

16 " Raisin in our only outlier for now: her mother is white, she lives in a white neighbourhood, she eats white food, she listens to white music and goes to a white school. In some ways, things will be easier for her, and in others, much harder, because you can belong even less when you come from two separate factions. We struggled towards whiteness, and soon she will have to develop her own definitions for the complexity of being two things at once. I want to stamp brownness on her, but in a way that protects her rather than exposes her. I can't have it both ways. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

17 " Do you tell your friends you're half brown?' She is passing, always passing for white, and for some reason, I want people to know that she isn't, that we at least tried to have some say in it. I tried to force myself out of brownness at her age, but the older I get, the more I tuck myself into it...

'Some kids know,' she said. 'I don't need to tell everyone. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

18 " But most unsettling is how this time I notice my own fairness. I notice that while I might be a person of colour among the diaspora back home, or in any white-majority country, here I am the white person. Kashmiris are notable because there are so few of us left, and because we've taken up a privileged space in India. In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they're bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he'll try to bond with me over the trouble with 'the blacks.' All of us struggle towards whiteness. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

19 " I have never been this white anywhere in the world. I've never had the most obvious, most useful kind of privilege as soon as I've walked into a room. This, though, is maybe what it's like to be white. People who look like me in India are assumed to be higher class, in better socioeconomic standing, more educated. This is sometimes true, but only because the world here is built to benefit those with light skin and punish those with dark skin, much like the world at home. The caste system is largely defunct in the areas we visit, but that doesn't mean that I and my family aren't still benefiting from decades of racial advantage. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

20 " People would see me on the street, shoving fistfuls of Teddy Grahams into my mouth on the way to the podiatrist, and they would think, "Boy, that lady sure does have her life together. "

― Scaachi Koul , One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter