If there’s one thing about South Asian families, it’s that we roll as one tribe. Cousins aren’t just cousins; they’re your “cousin brothers” and “cousin sisters”, terms so common in our culture they’re usually met with ridicule by anyone who isn’t brown.
That’s because we don’t really “do” cousins the way white families do. In our world, your cousins are your siblings who also happen to be your best friends. They’re your first partners in crime, your original ride or dies. It’s a bond that’s difficult to explain unless you’re in the thick of it.
There were about 12 of us in our tribe, split into two camps: the elders and the youngers. We’d collect little round pebbles because they looked like garlic, tear leaves off the rose bush from the cranky lady at number two because we thought they vaguely resembled coriander (they didn’t) and spit on them because we were pretending to cook like our mums. We’d play knock down ginger on the only older white racist neighbour left on our beloved Ocean Estate. It sounds grim, but it was actually paradise.
Then, in 1995, something terrible happened. I was 10 years old when, completely out of nowhere, one of my uncles told me I wasn’t allowed to play outside on the estate anymore. The boys could, obviously. But not me or my cousin sisters. We were “too old”.
I was devastated. I’m still not over that day. Then puberty hit, and that’s when shit really started hitting the fan. Suddenly, there were comments about how I looked, what I wore and why I was “too loud”. The aunty brigade weighed in, my older cousins joined the chorus, and the comparisons with so-and-so’s daughter, who was always “good”, were endless. This elite mafia controlled my life. And it turned me into a grade A bitch.
That’s mostly because everyone knew your business, no one understood the concept of boundaries and judgement was a hobby we excelled in. The very tribe that had once given me so much joy was now making me miserable. It all came to a head in 2011: desperately needing help, we asked one of my cousins thinking she would say yes. She didn’t. Something in me snapped. That’s when I realised I was still fighting for a tribe that had quietly stopped fighting for us.
So I did a mass ghost. I stopped talking to all of them at once. I didn’t have the language to ask for boundaries or explain that I needed them to accept a version of me that no longer fitted their expectations. So I stopped going to family dinners. I stopped turning up to gatherings and weddings. I stopped replying to messages. It felt cowardly at the time, but after years of confrontation, it was the only way I knew how to leave. And it was one of the best things I did because then something extraordinary happened.
For the first time, I had space. Space to experiment, make mistakes and figure out a life that belonged to me.
Without all those eyes on me, I started saying yes to the life I’d always been curious about. That life became Brown Girls Do It Too. I went on stage, I toured, I made documentaries, podcasts and carved a career I could never have imagined as a little girl growing up on Ocean Estate. The version of me that exists today would not have happened had I still been living under that level of scrutiny.
Walking away from my extended family remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It was also one of the most painful. But I left one tribe and found another.
I used to grieve my cousins. Some of my happiest memories are wrapped up in them. Recently, after a family funeral, I walked back into the East London Mosque with a knot in my stomach. I’d spent years wondering whether anything had changed. My cousins had. They have children now, mortgages and busy lives. They’d moved on.
But then I caught some of their teenage children looking at me in exactly the way I remembered the older cousins looking at me back in the day. Curious. Side-eye. Quietly judgmental. They were the next generation of us. In that moment, I realised the cycle hadn’t ended. It had simply started again.
Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I didn’t. Either way, I felt 14 again. In that moment, I realised I’d worked far too hard for this life to let all that drama back in.
I didn’t leave because I stopped loving my extended family. I left because I couldn’t find a way to love them without slowly disappearing myself.
I have the life I once thought was out of my reach, and I’d make the same decision again. But every now and then I think about a gang of brown kids spitting on pebbles and rose leaves, pretending to make curry on a council estate in east London, and I wonder whether there was ever a version of my life where I could have kept both.
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