When I was about ten or so, my mother took my brother and I to the local planetarium to watch the solar eclipse. It was crowded when we got there, a huge group of about a hundred or so brown children screaming and laughing as we all ran from telescopes to the welding masks to watch what in ancient times would have been described as Surya the sun god being eaten by two demons named Rahu and Ketu.

And then of course, it rained. The previously clear skies erupted with a clash and bang, the water flooding us all as we watched the grey of the fog swallow both Surya and his demons before their epic battle could even begin.

Disappointed, my family and I ran to the awning, my brother and I playing Tetris on my mother’s old phone as we tried to wait out the storm in hopes of maybe catching the Sun’s final victory over his enemies. Sitting on the floor in my white shirt and skirt, my pale skin caught the eye of the state-wide television crew. The american accent they heard screaming at my brother to “stop acting like an idiot for Pete’s sake” dragged them the ten steps between us at which point they explained who they were, and that they very much wanted the pretty girl to look the camera’s in the eye and tell them how miserable she was that the viewing had been cancelled.

I looked around and saw a girl with the most beautiful eyes complain to her friend in my mother tongue, arms linked together as they moaned about the unfairness of it all. Her hair was in the two braids worn by school-girls my age in Tamil Nadu, jasmine flowers swinging from the bobby pins at the top of her head as she skipped in her churidar.

I looked at her, and then I looked at myself and told the people from the television station that I was not the one they were looking for. I told the people from the television that I with my pale skin and broken Tamil was not the girl they wanted to feature as their “typical Tamilian.” I told them that I was much too American, too little Indian and politely directed them towards any of the other girls my age whose English was coated in the tones of my mother, their skirts with the dust of a major Indian metropolitan cities millions strong.

I told them this and turned back to my speechless mother and my uncomprehending little brother, stealing back the cell phone to win a few rounds of Tetris. The men from the television station tried to convince me that it was my pale skin that made me all the more desirable, as if my foreignness was a height that every Indian should strive to be.

They tried to convince me that I was more beautiful than the girls five steps away because I wasn’t Indian but all I could tell them was that I should have been. I should have the accent and churidars and jasmine, but instead I’m letting my hair down my back and wearing skirts that eventually are blamed as reasons innocent women were raped in broad daylight.

I should have been Indian, but I’m not, so I looked at the men from the television station one last time and pointed out the girl with the braids and jasmine still skipping with her friends and told them that if they wanted to find their “typical Tamilian” they would have to look anywhere else but here.