I’ve spent some time being expected to explain, soften, and accommodate my culture to keep situations from escalating. As an immigrant, politeness often becomes a survival skill--you learn when to translate yourself, and when not to push back.
The Hindu Laundry came from a fear I recognize: the moment when accommodation turns into complicity. Set in an LA laundromat, the film explores how belief, when poorly understood, can be reduced to a transaction. I’m drawn to stories where harm arrives through routine interactions and small moral concessions, because that pressure feels frighteningly ordinary--and getting used to it deeply unsettles me.