One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

While Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding hands and cops are handing out ice cream cones instead of, say, shooting black men, our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we're punished, as if we're speaking badly of an elderly relative who can't help but make fun of the Irish.

With One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul joins the ranks of other web-based writers – like Lindy West or Jenny Lawson – who have lately collected essays into book form, and as with these other writers, I find Koul's writing to be smart, funny, and self-deprecating; a suitable tone for exploring weighty ideas without getting all heavy about them. Yet I confess to finding a samey-sameness to this writing – to the web-shaped voice; the breezy confessionals; the casual f-bombs – and when one could be reading their ideas for free and at leisure on BuzzFeed, Jezebel, or The Bloggess (when I never personally seek out long-form web-based writing; pretty sure I'm not the target audience for your average BuzzFeed article), I need a reason to pick up one of these books. I was led to ODWABDANOTWM by a glowing newspaper review, and happily for me, as she is the Calgary-born daughter of Kashmiri immigrants, Koul does have an interesting and unique viewpoint – on being a Canadian, and a woman, and a bridge between two cultures – and I was enlightened and entertained by the whole thing.

Only idiots aren't afraid of flying. Planes are inherently unnatural; your body isn't supposed to be launched into the sky, and few people comprehend the science that keeps them from tumbling into the ocean. Do you know how many planes crash every year? Neither do I, but the answer is more than one, WHICH IS ENOUGH.

Koul opens her book with an essay about a trip she took to Thailand with her boyfriend Hamhock, and this allows her to introduce the three most important people in her life: the boyfriend who encourages Koul to do the things that scare her, and the overprotective parents who try to keep her safe by promoting fear. She deals with outright racism and subtle shadeism – in India Koul is considered very light-skinned, but in Alberta she was the brown kid; she recognises and is uncomfortable with her own shadeism (and especially as it relates to her niece, Raisin, whose mother is white) – and details the time that trolls (calling for her rape and murder) forced her off Twitter for a while. She writes about party-culture at university and rape-culture in general (and the two times she was roofied); she writes about learning to accept her body and the futility of fighting against it with clothes and compulsive grooming. And throughout it all, Koul speaks long distance to her parents every day; needing to hear their voices as much as they need the reassurance of hers. The essays are broken up by email exchanges she has had with her father throughout the years, and each of them made me laugh at his quirkiness. After reading about their visits back to India (and Koul's rejection of sexism and patriarchy and all the old, traditional ways she finds there), the final essay – in which Hamhock forces Koul to finally tell her parents about him (after four years together) – didn't end the way I expected: Although they liked Hamhock when they met in person, Koul's parents were adamant that the older, white man wasn't suitable for their daughter. And when she moved in with him despite their objections, Koul's father stopped talking to her for months, with the following serving as the semi-hopeful ending to the book:

Papa has never been the strongest person in the family – that's always been Mom, who carries everyone's burdens on her back. He's never been the most stubborn either – that's always been me. He's not even the most sullen – that's my brother, at least since my birth. But Papa will crack, putting his surly contemplations about my relationship aside for good and not just in temporary bursts, as suggested last week when he answered the phone with, “The vagaries of time are taking their toll” (believe that this is him in a good mood), or a month before when he ended our call with, “You are brave, you are too brave.” Or at least I need to believe in his ability to let things go when they are ultimately out of his control, because otherwise we're both just alone, spinning separately when we're supposed to be in this together.

I found that a sad note to end on. Like Koul, I have lived in Alberta, and although I currently live within an hour of her on the other side of the country, my experience as a (older, white) Canadian woman couldn't be more different. I might not have found much unique about the web-shaped voice Koul writes in, but her story is entirely her own, and worth hearing.