My mother's first visit to America was soon after 9/11. That Christmas, I took her to a mall near where I lived at the time. J was only a few months old and I was not able to fit into any of my pre-pregnancy clothes yet. I remember wearing to the mall a black shalwar-kameez she had brought for me from India because it was the only outfit I could fit into comfortably. My mother wore a sari as she always does. So there we were, two dark-haired, brown-skinned, petite ethnic women in clothes that looked decidedly foreign. A group of white punks hurled racially charged abuse and insults upon us while we walking inside the mall. It was the first time I had experienced anything like that in the States and I had been here for a couple of years at the time.

Needless to say, I was terrified and thought they might harm J. There had been reports of racial violence and the targeting of Sikhs because of their turbans. I could tell these teens were educationally and culturally backward enough not to know the difference between a Hindu or Sikh from India and an Arab from the Middle East. Not that being able to tell one apart from the other justified their behavior, but clearly my black shalwar-kameez had been the trigger for that outburst. Dusk was gathering and it was raining heavily outside. I was a relatively new driver at the time and was scared to drive down the hilly road that led home in that weather - especially with a new born in the car-seat. But we were too shaken to do anything else.

Having spent all our lives in India, where women have never felt safe around men in public places, we found this incident to be eerily reminiscent of the many bad experiences we have both had at different times back home. Of course, race and ethnicity have nothing to do with misbehavior there, but men will cuss out women in the most obscene manner just to terrorize them - we were both very familiar with what that felt like. That evening, a group of white kids had traumatized us in the exact same way, with their ignorance about our race and religion making it so much more dangerous given that 9/11 had happened just a few months before.

My mother has visited me in America quite a few times since then and we had no other unpleasant experiences like the one in the mall, until last evening. We were taking a walk in the neighborhood just outside our community. As luck would have it, I was wearing the same black salwar-kameez. I should note at this point that I never wear ethnic clothes unless I am going to an Indian cultural event. With my mother here, I find myself wearing clothes I haven't worn in a long time mainly because she likes to see me in them and she finds my Western clothes too monotonic.