Feeling Free in Kings Cross

Written by Hardeep Dhanoa

This is an excerpt from the book Growing Up Indian in Australia, edited by Aarti Betigeri and published by Black Inc.

I fall back onto the sticky dance floor, legs all around me, red, blue and green lights flashing, Rihanna’s voice blasting, pleading with the DJ not to stop the music. I have taken one tequila shot too many and am laughing. My cousin tries to pull me up and instead I drag her down to my level. How funny is this! She is not impressed. We are out for her eighteenth birthday and I have ruined the baby-blue dress that took her six weeks to find. I laugh again and struggle to get back up, my thirteen-centimetre heels making me look like a newborn giraffe. I start to sway my hips and dance into oblivion. Good Indian girls do not end up falling on dirty club floors, yet here I am. 

When I turned eighteen, my mother told me to avoid the clubs. Good Indian girls don’t go to those places, she said. I had spent my high school life as a shy, nerdy teenager. I did not go to house parties, drink goon or miss a day of school. I waited to do things the legal way, always afraid of stepping out of line. Now, under Australian law I was an adult, but to my parents I was still a child. 

My parents had always said that our family was not like the gora families we saw on TV, that we are Punjabi and that means something. My young brain could never comprehend this. To me, being Punjabi meant not being able to go to the school dance with boys, not being able to wear short shorts, going on a holiday to India every couple of years, constantly being told what to do, and being reminded that I was a girl so I’d always need to be more careful in life. The reputation of all Punjabi families seemed to lay upon the heads of their daughters. When I finished school and started university, I shed my scared skin and wanted to start anew. I had no idea how I was supposed to navigate this white world in brown skin. I was tired and I wanted to be vanilla. And what was more vanilla than binge drinking?

On Fridays, I would finish class and catch the train back to the wild wild west, often referred to as Blacktown. I’d head to Hipster at Westpoint to buy a fifty-dollar dress – usually something tight that would hug my size-eight frame and show off my legs, the environmental impacts of fast fashion far from my mind. My friends and I would meet up at each other’s houses, wearing stockings and cardigans that would come off on the train to the city. We weren’t a wild bunch, just curious to see what was beyond Blacktown, beyond the narrative our parents had spun about what we should be. Namely that we should be decent girls who stay home, learn how to cook, be studious and get high-paying jobs so that in a few years we would land a good rishta. No decent Indian boy would want a ‘party girl’. Our parents were stuck in the old world, and we boldly wanted to explore the new one: the world that said women could do and be whatever they wanted. That world is not for us, our mothers would say. Decency is everything. 

Our first stop would be Bar Century, a dodgy little bar on top of a backpacker hostel on George St that served three-dollar drinks. We downed drink after drink after drink like it was the elixir of life. Then we would catch the train to the clubbing centre of Sydney, Kings Cross, and be blinded by the Coke sign. 

The pulse of the city at night, the vibrancy of the people, the excitement that travelled through the air invigorated me. The club promoters would pester us – Pick me! Free drinks here! No entry fee for girls! I revelled in the attention, collecting entry stamps like gold coins in club after club, scoring free drinks from boys in tight shirts drenched in cologne and sweat. 

Clubbing was deemed a rebellious act at home and a rite of passage outside. Under the dark lights of a dance floor, with my body swimming in a mix of vodka Red Bulls, I forgot about the expectations that had been placed on me, the feeling of constantly being on edge about my identity, the pressure of working extra hard to blend into the white world. In that space there were just bodies, movement and music. I finally felt like I was doing the ‘normal’ thing, like what white people did in films. At work I could say I went out and everyone would know what I was talking about. I had created a library of drunk stories to share. It was a weird kind of assimilation. Part of me felt guilty for the enjoyment I experienced, my parents’ immigrant dreams never far from my thoughts. Could both my worlds coexist? 

Eventually the night would come to an end, the fuzzy benefits of the alcohol would wear off and we would get onto the Night Rider for the one-hour-plus journey back to the west. The stockings would go back on, perfume would be sprayed, water chugged. At Blacktown Station, McDonald’s awaited us. We would all stand at the top of the station looking out at the taxi rank to make sure none of our dads were working. I’d reach home, slowly turn the key my mother had left under the mat and silently Spiderman-climb up the stairs to my bedroom, knowing full well that my mother would not have slept until she heard the creak of the front door. The mask of make-up would come off, the reality of my world would return and I would drift into a dreamless sleep, trying to avoid thinking about the inevitable lecture awaiting me the next morning. 

Hardeep Dhanoa is a proud second-generation Punjabi woman and emerging writer hailing from Western Sydney. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, SBS Voices and SBS Food. In her spare time, you can find her immersed in the world of words or walking aimlessly.