Hiren Deliwala
By Hiren Deliwala
In 1998, during my first year in the United States, a group of white colleagues invited me to a work dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant. Walking in felt overwhelming. We passed a wine cellar the size of a room. The tables were large, the lighting warm and low, and everyone around me seemed to know exactly where to sit and what to do. I had grown up in Amdavad, and nothing in my life there had prepared me for this.
I stood at that table trying to look comfortable while quietly panicking. The place settings alone — four silverware pieces, multiple glasses — felt like a test I hadn’t studied for. I kept staring at the two glasses in front of me, terrified I was going to drink from the wrong one.
A colleague named Ray, sitting next to me, noticed. Under the table, he held up both hands and made a small “b” with his left index finger and thumb, and a “d” with his right.
“Left is bread, right is drink,” he murmured, without making a scene. “B and D.”
That was it. No eye roll, no lecture. Just a quiet hand under a table. He wasn’t testing me. He was just helping me out.
I have made plenty of cultural mistakes in twenty-eight years. Spoke too loudly in the wrong places. Didn’t know the unwritten rules. Showed up to things slightly wrong in ways I only understood later. Most of the time nobody said anything. A few times someone like Ray did. The difference between those two things is something I haven’t forgotten.
Twenty-eight years later, sitting on a shuttle bus in Banff with my wife, that simple gesture felt a world away.
Lately, my feed has been filled with videos of Indians behaving badly abroad. Garba in quiet public squares, cutting lines, yelling at waitstaff, carrying that specific unbothered noise from back home into places that expect quiet. Every time one of those videos appears, I feel a physical cringe.
So in Banff, I went into overdrive. I became the most polite Indian in the Canadian Rockies. I held open every heavy door I could find. I jogged over to take photos for families. I yielded on trails.
Looking at my wife on the bus, I said, “We need an app called Rate Your Indian. Every time we hold a door or let someone merge, people give us five stars. We can lift the community score.”
We laughed, but there was a sharp edge to it. I added, “We should only do it for white and Black tourists though. Other Indians aren’t keeping score.”
It was a funny line, but an ugly one too. It showed I was just putting on a show for strangers. After twenty-eight years, I had gone from the guy who needed help to the guy quietly judging everyone else. I wasn’t holding doors to be kind. I was holding them so people wouldn’t lump me in with those videos.
Fitting in doesn’t really have a finish line. You don’t just arrive one day and close the door behind you. It’s a long, messy journey — shedding old habits, picking up new ones, getting things wrong, occasionally getting them right.
I see new arrivals now doing the same things I probably did years ago. It’s easy to get annoyed. It’s easy to become the condescending guy who looks down on his own people just to feel more American. I’ve been that guy more than I’d like to admit.
It’s fair to want us to do better in public. But there’s a difference between judging someone and holding out a hand. I don’t need to run a rating system for my people. I just need to remember the guy at the dinner table in 1998 and pass along the b and the d with a little generosity.
Hiren Deliwala is a Charlotte-based overthinker, closet philosopher, and avid board gamer. He writes about everyday life, Indian upbringing, and finding humor in the chaos. When not philosophizing over chai, he’s usually losing arguments to his wife and, shockingly, learning from them.
Contact: hcdeliwala@gmail.com
