My new friends were helping me broaden my horizons. There were no cinemas in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s and 2000s and I had mainly watched Indian TV shows or Bollywood movies featuring lovestruck heroes, damsels in distress, and dance sequences shot in Switzerland, none of which related to my teenage years in any way. In fact, not seeing myself in books, films, or on TV ended up making me feel more alone. With its strict censorship laws, Saudi Arabia had also played a part in keeping a lot of the real world from me. I did not know about the various feminist movements, the AIDS crisis in the 80s, or the existence of the LGBT+ community, let alone the strides they had made over the decades. These topics were not discussed and there wasn’t much knowledge about it among my school friends. No religion except Islam was allowed to be publicly practised in Saudi Arabia. When I left the country, I had to learn not only to secularise my language, but also my thought process. Even just acknowledging others’ religious views became a conscious effort on my part. My peers in Manipal were also a lot more politically aware and I believe that growing up in countries that respected free speech made a difference to their engagement. In Saudi Arabia, people didn’t freely engage in political conversations and to date, writers and activists are punished for speaking out against the monarchy. Mama is constantly nervous about my choice to be vocal about my experiences, and fears that I might offend my home country. After I left home, I had a chance to experience movies at the cinema and to watch off-beat, indie movies. Indie productions were a completely new art form for me. I spent hours binge-watching old films which I borrowed from the library, as well as American sitcoms that everyone around me had already watched. I remember Gossip Girl becoming popular and though the premise did not interest me at first, I ended up devouring the first season. I started the first episode before bed and was hooked immediately. Although I kept promising myself that the next episode would be the last one, before I realised it, it was morning and time for me to get ready for college. I had stayed up all night, engrossed in the lives of the Upper East Side. These lives were so different from mine; I could not help but watch their stories unfold. Watching New York on-screen, I also became enthralled by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and it became a sight I desperately wanted to see in person. Looking back at my time in Manipal, I realise that I do not have many stories. I think this is because not a lot was actively happening to me. I was an open-mouthed spectator watching the world come alive around me. I read books I had only previously heard of, I perused magazines from cover to cover, everything from The Economist to the New Yorker. I read Vogue and Harper’s. I read People magazine (the Indian version) and I read newspapers. If I were to describe how I felt during this time in one word, it would be ‘overwhelmed’. There was so much I did not know. I had not heard about the Holocaust nor fully understood the impact of slavery in America before moving to Manipal. History lessons at school primarily focused on Indian or Islamic history so both these events came as a shock to me. I became conscious of my lack of general knowledge and sought out books that would help me understand modern history. The more I read about the world, the more I thought about my own place within it. Trying to learn about our past helped me make sense of who I was. I discovered how small I was in comparison to all that had come before me. Until then, I had approached life from my limited perspective, but now I was keen to stop placing my experiences at the centre of every discourse I engaged in. There was a world outside of mine, a world waiting to be discovered. When my friends went partying in the evenings, I stayed in my room reading my books and waiting for Papa’s call. Like me, most of the Manipal students were away from home for the first time. This newfound freedom meant different things to different people. For some it was about circumventing the curfew to stay out late, get drunk, smoke weed or hook up. For others it was about challenging themselves, becoming politically active, fighting for the causes they believed in and staying true to their principles. A lot of my peers were able to strike a balance between the two. For me, it was about asserting control over myself. It was about choosing the food I ate, the clothes I wore, the people I surrounded myself with and the kind of energy I projected. It was about getting to know myself without the superficial pressures to appear a certain way. It was about learning from my mistakes and confronting my fears.
