A passionate occupant of the transnational transit lounge

![CDATA[I had always been uncomfortable living in England, although I had known no other country. My friends were Indian and I tended to embrace all things Indian. After all, we lived in an area with a very high immigrant population, settled mostly by West Indians, Punjabis, Gujurtis, and Sikhs who had escaped Idi Amin. Women could buy bindhis at the local corner shop along with ghee and henna dye. Diwali was usually celebrated alongside Guy Fawkes Night. My sister and I often made coconut barfi in the house, which we took to school and shared with the others. Yet, even this identification seemed comic to an extent. In the eyes of first-generation Indians themselves, I was an embodiment of the ethnicity that dare not speak its name. I was someone who had defied ancient caste laws, terrorized the purity of the moral order, and vilified the sanctity of the kinship networks that have kept the private memory of Indian history so dynamic for thousands of years. I was someone whom Parama Roy describes as a “hyphenated Indian” (87), a visible reminder of transnational, cross-cultural sexual relations long before the terms themselves came to be used in a postmodern context. For the second generation, I was just another member of the gang except that some of the more middle-class Asian boys referred to me euphemistically as a “coconut,” or “brown on the outside, white on the inside,” as Jtinder used to say. In the essentialist quest for origins to legitimate cultural difference, where was the hybrid home?]]