June Jackie Harnodkar Siddi has grown accustomed to being stared at when he walks through the dense Mumbai streets, his long dreadlocks swaying as he threads through the crowds. The looks are rarely hostile; they are more often puzzled, as if people are trying to reconcile his appearance with his fluent Hindi, which in turn invites the inevitable question: “Are you Indian?”
June answers it with the same steady patience every time, though one imagines the repetition has worn grooves in his temper. He is Indian in every imaginable way—by birth, by language, by the rhythms of his upbringing in a small Siddi settlement in the Karawar district of Karnataka, and by the long, complicated history that braided Africa and India together long before either of them resembled their present selves.
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