'Who am I?': Former UAE resident Kritika Arya on identity as a third culture kid

Author Kritika Arya dreaded being asked ‘Where are you from?’ all her life. The Indian expat, who grew up in Dubai in the ’90s shares, “If I said India, people didn’t think I sounded or behaved like an Indian. If I said Dubai, they would say ‘but you don’t look Arab or Dubaian’.” Born in Sharjah in 1991, Arya battled an identity crisis as a third culture kid for years, that led her to write an autobiography titled Citizen by Descent, published in 2023.

Born in the UAE, educated in the UK, and now living in India, Arya’s book is a collection of personal essays exploring themes of home, belonging, identity, mental health and emotional complexities of life for third culture individuals. Each chapter delves into a specific part of a home and is illustrated by a set of international artists.

“The UAE is a kaleidoscope of cultures, where I was exposed to traditions, food, religions and festivities from around the world. I am grateful for this vibrant upbringing that made me quite worldly. But growing up in the UAE was also very confusing,” admits Arya. “I was born in Sharjah and raised in Dubai, yet I had an Indian passport, with a permanent address in India, a place that I would only visit for a couple of months in a year.”

In 1977, Arya’s father moved to Dubai from Jaipur, India. Her parents got married in 1983 and almost a decade later she was born after her two elder siblings. From kindergarten till her A levels she studied at Dubai Gem Private School, Oud Metha.

Over the years, the author reveals, she lived with mixed emotions of feeling like an outsider, living on a resident visa and not being a citizen of any place. This sense of rootlessness intensified as she moved to the UK for college education at 19 and later went back to India to work and to eventually live with her retired parents. In the course of a decade, she had lived in eight homes in three countries. This constant transition left her grappling with anxiety and struggling to find a sense of belonging.

It was during a bi-weekly therapy session at the time of the pandemic in June 2020 that the idea to write Citizen by Descent took shape. “I was mentally living in a toxic bubble back then. The world had shut down. I was struggling with my thoughts and emotions. I had no specific goals. All I wanted to do was write something for myself,” shares Arya. And that's exactly what she did by writing an essay called ‘Bubbling’, introspection on the toxicity in her life. Her elder sister Ritu loved the write-up and suggested that she get it illustrated by their friend Mohannad Salim. “The small pandemic project was supposed to be one essay and a zine but it did not end there,” tells Arya.

One write up led to another and in the course of three years, Arya wrote an autobiography with illustrations by 12 artists. The book has ten main essays centred around a specific part of a home she had lived in one of the three countries. Each chapter also tackles her mental health at that time in her life. The first chapter, ‘Home-Centred’, is set in Dubai when she was between the ages of six and seven. The setting is the villa where she lived in Al Satwa. She writes about her family, the time when her classmates stopped talking to her, when she got lost in a furniture store in Sharjah and the incident of how her head almost got stuck in the balusters of a staircase. The bittersweet musings of her childhood reveal insights about her close-knit family, her own anxiety of the outside world and her biggest fear of losing her parents.

In another essay titled ‘Rani from Dubai’, Arya pours out her angst of not fitting in as a third culture kid. She writes : “Deep down, I felt ashamed of whatever this version of me was. Not Indian enough, not Arab enough, not Dubaian enough. I was self-conscious of this amalgamation of culture. I didn't quite understand how to utilise it back then… I was something else, I sounded different. I acted differently. I was strange. I didn’t fit into a box, which is difficult for people when they’re trying to make fast judgements.”

“Who am I?”, the author says, is a question that everyone often asks themselves. For the third culture kid the answer to this question is complex and challenging. “The feeling of not belonging anywhere, constantly having to adapt to new surroundings and struggling to form meaningful connections can be difficult and isolating. It's why the two constants in my life have always been my passport and my anxiety. They travel the world with me.”

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