At Home in the World
As a young kid growing up betweenTexas and India, Prince Varughese Thomas was at first blissfully unaware that he was perceived as an outsider in Dallas-area public schools. “As a child, you don’t think of yourself as outside of anything, until things are projected onto you,” he says.
That changed during the Iran hostage crisis, which began in 1979, when Thomas was 10. Suddenly and much to his surprise, he found himself on the receiving end of regular after-school beatings. Thomas was astounded that his classmates couldn’t tell the difference between India, the land of his ancestry, and Iran, but explaining that did nothing to stop the bullying. It didn’t help that Thomas had actually been born in Kuwait, the son of Christian, Malayalam-speaking guest workers from India’s southern Kerala state. Having failed to grasp the most basic geographical distinction, his classmates couldn’t parse all those layers of difference.
“I’m moved and affected by those places and cultures where injustices happen, separations happen, the demarcations that are based in privilege happen.”
Today Thomas, 49, is able to reflect on his childhood tormentors with grace. “In the difficulty of all that, there’s a beauty in how one’s eyes are opened,” he says. “That’s the moment I started just looking.” He’s sipping late-morning coffee in his studio off
