The Woods
by Raena Shirali
“As well-honed survival machines, human beings are also naturally deceptive.”
David Livingstone Smith,
Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind
I don’t remember the first lie I told, the same way I don’t have a first memory—no first impression of my surroundings vignetted, no rose-tinted arrival at consciousness. Instead, I must rely on the indisputable facts of my early life to fill in the gaps. As far back as I can remember, I was a lying, masturbating, confusing child, and my early memories of my parents’ facial expressions support those claims. My mother was in labor for nineteen hours, and the blood vessels in her eyes popped, so as I entered this world, she was crying blood. We are not a Christ- nor Satan-fearing people—my mother is Gujarati and my father Konkani—but hearing that story once a year, it’s no surprise I felt there was something fundamentally evil inside me, clawing its way to the surface, just as I had clawed my way into existence.
Perhaps my first lie can be traced back to the tears of blood dampening my mother’s face as a doctor handed her my perplexingly skinny, blonde baby body. I can imagine her confusion. How could her daughter have emerged like this, and how could said daughter then set to work on being difficult at every turn—determined, it seemed, to draw a fat underline under Tears of Blood, lest any soul forget? It’s a tempting explanation. Unfortunately, though I am not a parent myself, my friends with children have since convinced me that no baby is evil, and, in fact, the opposite is true. Sure, pregnancy is difficult, but I was a pure being of light! It cannot be that I am the way I am because of how my birth affected my mother physiologically.
To begin to write about the many, many lies I’ve told, I wanted to start at the beginning. The first lie. The serpent. The original sin. The capital-t Trauma that caused such deviant behavior. And if it wasn’t the Tears of Blood, the promise of an easy birth undermined by medical reality, then what was it?
Of course, my first lie, whatever it was, came from a child’s mouth. A child’s compass—her attempt to navigate social and familial pressures. Add to this the fact that kids tend to lie without a good reason. They also steal, and ironically, I remember my first theft with an acuity I cannot summon when contemplating yesterday’s activities. If grasping for my first memory was an exercise in humility, imagine my dismay when, thinking I’d reached the nadir, yet another lie broke the surface—the process nonlinear, lies and years jumbling together in a veritable stew of remorse. One thing did become certain, though—there is no unifying explanation for the embarrassing tendency. Not only that, but I could not blame these lies on circumstance. No one bad thing happened to me in my childhood. In fact, kind of a lot of bad things happened to me in my childhood, and most of them happened in broad daylight and warm weather, the conditions under which a different child may have frolicked and thrived.
It was sunny and warm in Redlands, California when I stole for the first time, and I don’t know what the weather was like when I first lied, but it was probably also in that town, as I suspect I began to lie as soon as I had access to sufficiently elevated language. But I cannot in good conscience group lying and stealing into the same essay—especially as a person who still believes, strongly, that a large portion of American companies deserve to be stolen from, broken as our economic system has been since I was five and walked away from the cash register at Lucky’s with a Little Mermaid Chapstick shoved into my tiny pants. The lies we tell don’t often end with us walking away with a treasured item. We lie constantly, inconsequentially, in ways that scholars posit are related to our evolutionary desire to survive, but that no longer tangibly connect to the same dire stakes. We lie socially. We lie without even noticing. We lie to ourselves.
Well, if we do it so often, then order be damned! I’ll begin with the lies I have told to survive.
***
One way to measure the significance of a lie is to weigh its lifespan. Perhaps my longest-running lie was one that spanned preteen-dom and adolescence. One that spanned schools and friend groups—that is, until friends finally met my family and came to suspect its implausibility.
The thing was, it perplexed me, too—why my hair was so light at birth, why I seemed to confound my parents with every independent desire or decision, why the same was not true for my younger brother when only a few years separated us. I had the not-unique feeling that I had been born to some other family, and through various Shakespearian plot twists, had ended up here, “Indian,” a “Shirali,” a “girl.”
At eleven, I was the kind of tomboy who hung out only with my little brother and his friends, scoffed at dolls, bloodied my knees jumping down from various trees and docks into creekbeds, dreamed of running, jumping, climbing, never stopping the endless forward momentum of my body. It seemed each of my actions had a corresponding reaction of disapproval from my mother (see: Tears of Blood). I wore shorts (too short!). I ravaged my Barbies (those were expensive!). I grew out of clothes (what was with this constant, costly, unnecessary growing!).
Whether it was summer or not on the day I almost broke my nose would be impossible to say; in South Carolina, oppressive mugginess is a nearly year-round feature of the outdoors. I definitely wasn’t wearing sleeves or protective gear of any kind—no helmet, no shoes. So when I tried to wrest the front tire of my bike over the curb, to catch some sort of “air” and impress the kids next door, it was my bare flesh that made contact with the rough concrete. If my parents were in the neighborhood, they must have been a few doors down. I stood watching the side of my face, opened and pulpy, in our powder room mirror, trying to tamp the wound with toilet paper, and felt for the first time that something about my appearance had been forever marred. It was a quiet triumph. I would not, could not, be beautiful. I could play forever.
I’m sure it is scientifically true that wounds on the face hurt tangibly more than wounds on other parts of the body—sensitive skin, gravel near the eyes. But the breadth of this pain did not set in until several days later, when it congealed into a massive, horrible scab, and I had to return to the all-girls private school in the rich part of town where I had not exactly succeeded in flying under the radar. Standing outside the gated perimeter, waiting for pickup, I was approached, then cornered, by three or four upperclassmen, who informed me that my new nickname was “Africa,” after the shape of the scab and because I was “basically black.”
It is almost an honor to report that the prominence of the scab was of more concern to me than the microaggression at the time. Encountering and ignoring racism was and would always be part of my daily routine, with 9/11 just around the corner and the whole of Confederate legacy looming over my stomping grounds. So perhaps it’s unfair to cite this as the cause of my later claim that I was part-white. But it certainly had an effect. Scholar and memoirist Julia Lee speaks to the commonality of this assimilatory drive for Asian Americans in Biting the Hand: “It didn’t cross our minds that we were distorting our features to make ourselves visible to American culture. We just wanted to be seen, even if the image was warped.”
My image had certainly begun to warp. After the scab finally, blessedly flaked off, it left in its wake a patch of raw skin, obviously lighter than the deep tan I’d developed in my yearslong affair with being outside (you used to be so fair!). One of the girls who’d bestowed me with my new nickname—which stuck, in case you were wondering, for the rest of the school year, and which I transferred schools in an attempt to escape—approached me by a different section of the school’s perimeter. She had found my chosen haven during recess, a beautiful pagoda bedecked with oyster shells. She asked why the new skin was so light. Was it because I was part white?
It was so easy to say yes.
Easier than jumping from a tree branch ten feet off the ground, a branch I loved to climb and had ample practice falling from, gracefully. To jump, you have to address the voice in your head that tells you this is dangerous, I could get hurt, I do not want to be in pain. Approached by the rhetorical question—whose desired answer was so clearly yes—I was, I hate to admit, fearless. What would the possible harm be here? Some random girl who never speaks to me except to call, “Hey, Africa!” from across the cafeteria and then titter loudly with other strawberry blonde stunners will think I’m part white. So what. This interaction will end. There will be no consequences. The voice in my head did not say, this won’t end well, nor, consider the vast beauty of your lineage, nor this will cause you and your family (who are, in fact, your biological relatives) incredible pain. In its place was a warm, fuzzy static, the kind I now buy various devices to imitate so that I may fall into blissful unconscious reverie. It is the easiest word in the world, yes. It signals a going-along. A people-pleasing. A willingness to do what it takes to show you I agree with you. I am amenable to your terms.
And here were the terms: the upper-class girl skipped happily away to report to a gaggle in the wings that I was part white. I didn’t think much more about it for the rest of the year. Those spindly, magnificent teens kept calling me names. The skin on my nose and cheek darkened more slowly than I had hoped it would, so when I left the all-girls school at the end of fifth grade, it still did not quite blend in.
***
Two years, two schools, and two neighborhoods removed from “Africa,” I started seventh grade tarnished by my failed tenure at both the private girls’ school and a math-and-sciences magnet. These two years had seen a few other important developments: my father bought an American flag and mounted it on the front porch. And people—not just kids my age—started using new words to taunt me.
It was 2003, and I arrived at public school with an oversized sense of my own bad girl reputation, about which no one had heard, much less cared. I carried an L.L. Bean bookbag and an arsenal of comebacks ready to be deployed against any asshole who mentioned turbans, or deserts, or terrorists, or camels. I wore a jean miniskirt that had cost me a year’s allowance and blatantly defied the institution’s rules regarding inches and kneecaps. I wore my favorite tee, a light orange number with innuendo about oysters emblazoned across the front (did it read, “Joe’s Oyster Shack”? It was clear the establishment did not exist in the real world, but rather in the land of cartoon. To this day I have no idea of this shirt’s unnatural provenance, and I am more than a little afraid to ask my mother. The answer must be: the very bottom of the clearance bin at Ross). Mean Girls would be released the next year, but I had learned the rules of Girl World from the best teachers: bitchy preteens, my very tormentors. I pushed through the double doors having donned my slutty armor, tongue thick with weaponry, thinking I knew exactly what to expect.
***
Inside the middle school’s buildings and trailers, I was something of a novelty. A new girl—not the only one, but one who could be easily distinguished from the others with the addition of a slur. I rode the intrigue like a wave—knowing it to be temporal, skimming along the surface of the adrenaline rush nonetheless. Attention proved an effective balm for a time. But the thing about novelty is that it wears off. And middle schoolers have truncated attention spans. I was not hot new shit for long. By the end of the first week, I was subject to questioning.
While waiting for the bus, the kids who lived in my neighborhood and the adjacent developments used to stand in a circle and, I don’t know, roast each other for fun? Let’s say there were eight of us, though the part of my brain that tries to shield me from my own past has long since repressed the concrete details you might crave in a story such as this.
We stood in a circle—Jason and Tyler, who were twins, and who the girls in the group alternately lusted after and rejected when their middle-school-boy-behavior became too repulsive to handle (boob-honking, tongues draped out of mouths like cartoon characters); Margaret, a seeming ally who also liked to call me the N-word sometimes (as friends do); Cara, who would eventually become my actual best friend during those years, who overall treated me like a person, and for whom I was always grateful. Already I’m thinking there were more than eight kids in the circle, and already you can guess that there was only one non-white teen, in her miniskirt and sexually suggestive tee, trying her very hardest to look and sound like everyone else.
“I heard from Samantha that you’re part white. Her sister goes to All Girls’,” one of the twins challenged, during a routine discussion about my lineage.
“Oh, yeah…that’s true. My real dad is white!” I lied chirpily, before I understood that I would need to provide evidence to support this lie.
“So your dad, the brown guy, isn’t your real dad?”
“No.”
“So your mom is a slut?”
“No!”
“So your mom had a different husband before she married your dad?”
All the kids opened their mouths and made a collective “Oooooh!” Those who have heard this sound know its timbre—collective finger-pointing tinged with a desire for more salacious detail, its ending pitch rising and reverberating like a question.
“Yes.”
“And that husband was white?”
Okay, so I would need to think on my feet. “Well, actually,” I ventured, “she wasn’t married before my dad. But she got pregnant with me and then she and my dad got married like, right after that. So it seemed to my dad like I was his kid. And I am part Indian! But yeah, I guess my mom wanted me to keep the secret.”
“Oh my god, I can’t believe your mom told you all this!”
It was a good point. Hard to imagine a younger Raena confronting her mother about her apparent whiteness (I’m rolling my eyes here) and being met with an honest confession of infidelity, sex before marriage, somehow meeting a white man in the few months between her own arrival in Texas and my father’s (the timeline here doesn’t add up, by the way—my folks wed in Mumbai before they separately immigrated, and I already knew their immigration/love story by heart at this age). Harder to imagine any mother asking—no, begging—her preteen daughter to not reveal this salacious truth to her father, who believed the Tears of Blood to be his own spawn and had unwittingly taken both the cheating mother and the bastard daughter under his wing.
I’m of several minds recounting that moment waiting for the bus.
One, though I was perhaps a third of the way through my villain era, I was pretty bad at telling lies. Who could have believed this, if not other thirteen-year-olds, who for their own part were clearly hungry for me to admit my belonging to their group?
Two—and not to foreshadow my way out of my own storytelling here—but it was these very same peers of mine who would eventually dedicate themselves, like tiny pubescent detectives, to determining that this was, in fact, a blatant fabrication.
Three, I still think it was fair to not worry that this would get back to my parents. This whole affair—gossiping about one’s family in middle school, wearing, my god, a Hollister miniskirt—was, and still is, decidedly common. It was cruel, yes, and I would be forced to reckon with my own cruelty in perpetuating the lie before long. But it was pointless, meaningless, had no practical value or concrete outcome—and by that I mean, neither did the lie last long enough to be considered truth, nor did it help me succeed in fitting in. Instead, it made me the target of a new, far more sincere effort to out me, and to shame me in doing so: she’s not white, she’s not a bastard; she’s the child of a happy marriage between two Indians, and we were right that she does not belong! How right were we? Can she ever be trusted again? You tell me.
***
Because even essay writing cannot excavate every repressed depth. Because I’m opposed to trauma porn, to my own victim complex, to showing you that after all, those white kids were right. Because I’m embarrassed and remain embarrassed all these years later. Because my family deserved better from me. Because I deserved better from me. Because I don’t want this essay to be a kind of blueprint for lying successfully—a display case filled with pristine figurines of each of my miscalculations, blunders. Because I resist the liar’s longing, the “if only’s” that characterized the days after this falsehood was found out, because I lived in that longing for years, and sometimes I worry I seek to replicate it in my search for authentic feelings. Because now I’m worried you’ll label me as sociopathic. Because I’m not interested in the essay as having to explain myself to you; rather, I am interested in the essay as a place where I can test out approaches to my history and both learn and teach from them. Because my mother cried, because my father cried, because I cried, because honestly, people forgot about it pretty quickly and moved on, the way teenagers do. Because I didn’t move on, couldn’t, still don’t feel that I should.
Pick your reason from the list I’ve just provided and make your peace with the fact that I’m not going to tell you the story of how I got caught in the lie. All you need to know is that it didn’t last. From eleven to fourteen, I was part-white in the eyes of a handful of Charlestonians, and once I was again an Indian through and through, they moved onto more interesting matters—pink polos and junior varsity and Adam Sandler movies and fingerbanging and, most importantly, they moved back onto worrying only about each other. At the end of my lie I was left with the same old nicknames, the slurs I’d foolishly tried to erase, triply alone—alone without friends who felt they could trust me; alone with parents who treated me from the moment of this discovery onward through the lens of my potential for transgression; alone, most completely, in my brownness. My permanent allegorical counterpart was that stupid boy, alone in the woods, wishing a wolf would devour him whole.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Photo Credit: Brooke Marsh, 2022
Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT, was released by YesYes Books and won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Published by Black Lawrence Press in October 2022, her second book, summonings, won the 2021 Hudson Prize and was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from PEN America, VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, & Cosmonauts Avenue.
Website: www.raenashirali.com
Instagram: @raenashirali
Facebook: @ren.renn.1
Bluesky: @raenainthemorning.bsky.social