Written by: Deeghi Basu
Once you pass a couple of time zones from your home country toward Britain, you notice the first difference. All of a sudden, the people around you ask for“a glass of orange juice please,” instead of the usual milky tea or coffee that you see everyone sipping on flights back home. It is not until much later into your first month of stay that you realise the connecting flight to London is quite literally a rite of passage.
As an aspiring postmodern anthropologist, you do not wish to look at this new, freezing (it was four degrees at the Gatwick airport when I landed) world with the ‘us-and-them’ monochromatic lens. At the same time, here you are writing about how the wind, the cultural shocks, and the ever-mounting INR-GBP conversion rates all hit you in the face at once. Do not get me wrong – the Eat Central serves an amazing Katsu bowl and there is a solemn wooden bench outside the ACCA café where the light hits your shoulders just right; you could even replace your online therapy sessions with the smell of fresh laundry every time you pass the Swanborough Laundrette. But then at night, after cooking your first dish of rice (mostly starch), ghee, and fried eggplants (read: homesickness), you lie in bed thinking that if someone documented ‘Welcome Week’ for an unsociable brown twenty-something with anxiety, it would probably make an appropriate sequel to Stephen Chbosky’s ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ – “Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don’t try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don’t want you to do that.”
One day, you spot a small green packet in the Co-op, and get excited about the existence of something as simple as Kleenex. Talk about finding the smaller joys of life. You cannot believe the fact that there’s a designated set of tissues just for your face that you can use – come tears, come sneezes (almost like a uni-starter-kit to deal with all the overwhelming feelings and the Fresher’s flu, innit?). Hailing from a third world country, your reusable cotton handkerchiefs traditionally embroidered with flowers and initials by mothers and grandmothers suffice – this non-recyclable piece of tissue just for your face actually makes you giggle in the midst of a breakdown.
The thing about feeling isolated is that it sneaks up on you – you give it other names like ‘stress’, ‘new environment, ‘it’s just been a week’, and so on. But one day you wake up and realise that the truth is as harsh as the air-conditioning at the Co-op; that there are not so many people around you who look like you, that somehow everyone already has groups of their own. That, despite the long reading list for your module on the decolonisation of knowledge, most people here are tall, white, and pretty. Their blonde hair flies in a way that is unseen even in high-end commercials back home, without so much as a spot on their faces. That you being you, the 5’3”, Indian, PCOS-ridden (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, it’s a hormonal imbalance that messes with your hair, skin, mind, and intertwines itself into every single lived bodily experience you have) girlie, your hair is used to humidity like the inside of a rice cooker, and ferruginous water. You cannot quite grasp the concept that drinking the water flowing from the kitchen tap would not harm your intestines. Neither can you understand the absence of bidets in restrooms, despite the abundance of clean water.
Eventually, however, your first week turns into the first month, and you are just that – a month old. Despite the initial turmoil with leaving your Salto card in your room and locking yourself out a number of times, you find people who look different, but warmly invite you to communions at the Meeting House without knowing a single thing about your ethnicity. You make friends who treat you to flavourful Mexican rum; fall in love with the streets in Brighton; and start looking out for pretty chrysanthemums around the corners. You realise that the University of Sussex might not be perfect, but none of us are, and in that we are similar. You heave a sigh of relief, knowing Sussex has finally grown on you.