I'm A Brown Woman – But I Only Made Brown Friends In My 30s

‘These chaats are seriously good,’ I told my friends. We all burst into laughter. Not because it was a particularly clever pun (chaats are the Indian street food we were eating whilst… chatting), but because we all understood it.

And as three brown women who had grown up without having close brown friends, this was something we hadn’t experienced before. For the first time in our lives – and we were all in our 30s – we’d found friends who could understand us on levels that our non-brown friends just never could.

Growing up, I didn’t have friends who looked like me. I knew I wasn’t an anomaly – there were plenty of British Indians in London – but I just didn’t know any. In my North London primary school, all my best friends were Greek, and in secondary school, where our classes were organised according to postcodes, they were mainly Jewish.

Of course, there were some other British Indians in my schools, but circumstances meant they weren’t the people I connected with. And this kept on happening. At university, I did an English degree, with minimal brown people. And then I went into a career in journalism, novel-writing and screenwriting. All very white worlds. 

It was only last year that things changed. I went to the book launch of a British Indian writer and realised that unlike my recent launch party, hers was filled with brown people. Her friends. I felt a pang of longing as I realised this was something I’d never had. I have plenty of relatives who look like me, but not a single friend. I was 32 years old, but I didn’t have any brown friends. 

I came home with a newfound sense of purpose. It wasn’t too late. I could make new brown friends, and it suddenly hit me that I already knew some potentials. I’d recently created a book club in my local bookshop West End Lane Books, and some of the attendees were Indian.

A few were quite a bit older than me, but two were in their 30s. Like me, (and unlike a lot of other Indian women of the same age) they were unmarried. This felt like enough for a first friendship date, so I bit the bullet and suggested dinner.

That was the start of regular ‘chats over chaats’. It turned out that all three of us were starved of friendship with other brown women, and we relished in being able to talk about our different upbringings, cultural expectations, how it felt to be brown women on dating apps (not great) and the strange disconnect that comes from growing up in communities that aren’t your own. Not to mention how much we all adored Indian street food and were happy to travel for miles in search of the best chaats and chilli paneer.

I realised how healing it was to discuss things with them that my closest white friends couldn’t understand. I felt like crying when they validated my experiences of micro-aggressions and unconscious discrimination in workplaces. I even asked for their thoughts on the novel I was writing – I Wish We Weren’t Related – all about a British Indian woman who is forced to spend two weeks with the sisters she hates whilst doing Hindu grieving prayers for the dad she didn’t know she had. 

That book is coming out on July 6^th, and so many of those conversations we had informed those that my heroine Reeva has with her sisters, and her (brown) best friend Lakshmi. In a way, life is mirroring art, and I am proud to say that I’m now a 33-year-old woman with brown friends – and more keep on coming.

Recently, I made my first close male brown friend through a mutual friend. He’s a 38-year-old man who grew up in India, meaning his lived experiences are so different to mine – I often tell him I’m deeply jealous his formative years were spent in a country where brown was the norm – but we also have shared experiences that not everyone else gets. Like how it feels to have mixed-race relationships. And to have people think of us as less attractive purely because of our skin colour.

But also, (because this now seems to be my new standard for creating brown friendships), a shared deep appreciation of Indian street food. 

I’m so grateful for these friendships. I still value my non-brown friends just as much as always, and many of them are like family to me. That love is always there. But it also feels like a huge gift to also have brown friends. F

or the first time, I have friends who know how it feels to grow up feeling like you never truly belonged – friends who understand the complexities of being judged on your skin colour, and the unique identity crisis that comes from being a brown person living in the UK. In a way, these friendships have healed a loneliness that for most of my life, I didn’t even know I had. 

I Wish We Weren’t Related by Radhika Sanghani (Headline Review, £9.99) is out now.