Pirya Matai
“I'm a Southern brown girl.”
Pirya Matai at North Cary Park in Cary, North Carolina. / Photo by Maydha Devarajan.
If you asked Pirya Matai for a list of terms to describe herself, “Southern girl” would be pretty high on the list.
Photo courtesy of Pirya Matai.
Scratch that — “a brown Southern girl,” to be specific.
Matai, 49, was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 to a Sindhi family. The painful legacy of Partition meant that some of Matai’s family migrated from the province in Pakistan in 1947 while others did not. It also tracks a complicated journey of existing between multiple states and identities — a constant theme that she discussed in our interview.
As a young girl, Matai and her family moved from country to country, living in Iran, Pakistan, India and then settling in the United States when she was 9 years old. In the U.S., her family bounced around states, from Michigan to South Carolina to California, before eventually landing in North Carolina.
Even in moving between India and Pakistan, Matai says she felt a sense of displacement in both countries, either because of her family’s Hindu background or the fact that she was born in Pakistan.
Photo courtesy of Pirya Matai.
Photo courtesy of Pirya Matai.
Raleigh means a lot to Matai. It’s where she spent much of her youth, where she went to college, where she established a family and a business.
Photo courtesy of Pirya Matai.
Photo courtesy of Pirya Matai.
But adapting as an 8th grader at Daniels Middle School in the 1980s — and one of a few people who looked the way she did — was difficult.
In 1980, U.S. census records reported around 23,000 Asian- and Pacific Islander-identifying people. Of that population, the greatest proportion are classified as “Asian Indians.”
Matai has witnessed both the Triangle and South Asian community grow, and remembers a time back when Davis Drive was a one-lane road and when local places of worship for South Asians — particularly for Hindus — were in their infancy.
“It was fascinating to have a place where you could see other fellow Indians. I was very excited to meet other folks and I really craved an Indian girlfriend, which like even of six or the less than 10 Indian students that were in my class, and most of them were guys, so I don't remember one or two girls standing out that I could be friends with,” Matai said. “And I really craved that a lot.”
Photo courtesy of Pirya Matai.
And then when she got to college, at N.C. State and Duke Universities, a different world opened up.
“I was just like, "Oh my God, where have you been all my life?" It was just so nice to have people who could relate to your hobbies of music and movies and, you know, everything like that.”
She loves her Southern identity, but navigating a Black-white binary, prejudices within the South Asian community and her own notions of self-concept haven’t necessarily come easily.
She remembers experiences of being othered in forms as seemingly dismissible as non-Indian high schoolers assuming all the Indian students at Enloe High School would get arranged marriages to one another, to more painful moments, like being told to “Go back home” after 9/11 and being called a racial slur by the father of her white boyfriend at the time.
In staking out a place for herself in the South, she says she just knows that she’s “special,” belonging in perhaps a “special category” all its own.
“Do I feel a sense of belonging? You know, it would always be nice to truly say that, "Hey, I'm of this—" I'm kind of all over the place. Because of religion, I'm affiliated with this country, but because of my actual place of birth, I'm affiliated with this country. But then I came to the U.S. and I was neither Black, neither white. So I didn't fit in. And so most of my life, you know, up until the age of like 22, it was hard that you don't belong. So do I feel like I belong now? I just know that I'm special. And so I belong in a special category. It's hard for me, even at this age to say this is what I am.”
Matai nows lives in Raleigh, with her husband and 12-year-old son, and is the owner of a novelty boutique called “Niche and Dime” in Crabtree Valley Mall.