The question of family ‘normality’ evokes within me the most ardent absolute relativism and a critical knee jerk dismissal of all other positions as insular. After Kristine and I briefly visited a Pakistani grocery store, she noted the palpable hostility the store clerk and his friend directed at me. Although there was nothing particularly mean spirited about their now too familiar responses, the survey, evaluation, and rejection of my inauthentic Indianness took mere seconds. While the notion of the “authentic” is dense with cultural, economic and discursive density, my own ruminations here will be centered on a simple definition: Authenticity is the praxis of codes established by the Self. This open ended, ambiguous, problematically relative ‘definition’ replicates the very absurdity of ‘the authentic’ while also providing for a few markers to help find our way.
    In the space of the grocery store, thick with the smell of spices, mixes, vegetables, the figure wearing sunglasses, dressy jeans and a quirky yellow t-shirt screamed inauthentic. The clerk’s heavy accent announced his recent emigration, betraying his high academic achievements in the English-medium schools attended in India. His turbaned, heavily bearded Sikh friend paused conversation when the white girl and I entered. My American accented English said that I couldn’t speak any Indian languages, especially the Hinid or Urdu necessary in this situation. I bought nothing. Clearly, I was an American Born Confused Desi (ABCD) not a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat).
    When I first arrived on the Wayne State campus, I was putt off by the two distinct South Asian communities. The first were young college students like myself but whom I judged to be generally too superficial for my tastes. The second community, and second class in my mind, was comprised of the numerous graduate students who were clearly new arrivals. Complaints from fellow students about their thick accents and incomprehensible presentations as discussion and lab leaders embarrassed me. The snobbish glare I shot was matched with the unanswerable thought, “Why can’t you just be normal?” Maturation, desensitization and a few wonderful lab leaders began to normalize their existence, but it was family that brought a radical break.
    Visiting newly arrived and newly married cousins in Texas had all the excitement of a desert plain. However, when Vishali, an elder sister-figure in my youth, mentioned that she clearly felt the hostility and condescension in undergraduate glares, I fell silent. Otherness sat next to me. The accent, clothing and other such practiced codes fell under the weight of courage required to uproot and repot one’s existence. Wayne campus was suddenly filled with the inspiring audacity of belief, placing my anglicized ass in its proper place. The authentic, as a codified praxis, dissolved and allowed me to step closer to the Real.
    The heated emotional stakes of a conflict, like the one my family currently faces, are predicated on the practice of codes established by a Self; they are wars of authenticity, or more precisely, authentic modes of being. Negotiations and/ or mediation can only begin when all sides are assailed with the inherent violence of their position through a nauseating hypernegativity that opens the space for recognition of the relative. That is, ruthlessly interrogating the Self will begin to reveal the artificial construction of the various codes so desperately clung to. When even a modicum of artificiality—here understood as historically and socially overdetermined––is recognized, there is space for change.