Indian girls are known for their hair. You know the look: Priyanka Chopra’s straight, glossy locks; Padma Lakshmi’s tousled beach waves. Lustrous Indian hair is a multimillion dollar worldwide commodity sold in weave shops — with names such as Indian Hair Depot and Virgin Indian Hair — all over America.

My hair doesn’t look like that.

I was born with thick, curly hair that for most of my life never looked like I had “combed” or paid any attention to it. And to be honest, I didn’t know how to take care of it. My hair always made me feel messy, or unkempt — not put together. In India, there is a word for it: junglee, meaning wild or untamed; not proper — and it isn’t a compliment.

My mother’s hair is even curlier than mine — full-on corkscrew curls — and when she was a kid growing up in West Bengal, India, her mother and sisters wrangled her wild Bengali hair by slathering it with massive amounts of coconut oil and binding it into two schoolgirl braids. But when she immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1970s, she lost that community of women and the cultural tools that you need to get your hair right.

In India, there is a word for it: junglee, meaning wild or untamed; not proper — and it isn’t a compliment.

My parents ended up in Dayton, Ohio, and, at that time, the closest Indian grocery store was a four-hour drive away in Chicago. Indian home-beauty salons wouldn’t open for another 10 or 15 years. My mom spent the first 10 years in this country shampooing her curls with the Prell shampoo my father bought from the grocery store, and she didn’t even own a blow-dryer. But I think that was partly because my mother — a doctor who was also tasked with raising a family — didn’t have the time to figure out how to take care of her hair, much less teach me how to take care of mine.

My hair became a major point of contention in my relationship with my mother. As a baby, my hair was a cap of curls. As I grew up, the curls loosened — my hair moving between a 2B and 2C type of curly hair, according to numerous online hair quizzes I’ve taken as an adult.

I was too independent, too “Americanized,” too impatient for my mother to do what her mother did to her: the wrangling and the dousing in coconut oil. My hair was always a disappointment. I distinctly remember that false hope of curly-headed girls everywhere, the vision of perfect hair emerging from the shower, the curls slick and the wave controlled. Then, by the time I dressed and presented myself, it was a totally different look: a frizzed and untamed mess. The question and concerned look from my mother that deflated me every time: “Aren’t you going to comb your hair?” I gave up hope at an early age that my hair was ever going to be anything but a nuisance.

I didn’t know how to embrace my junglee hair, especially because I was usually one of the only Indian kids in my classes. I envied my white classmates’ wispy, thin hair. I was even jealous that they got perms, coming back to school trailing that burned-chemical smell, because it meant that their mothers cared enough for them to drop up to $40 on a hairstyle. After my mom stopped cutting my hair on a chair in the laundry room, I went to Supercuts and ended up with a hairstylist who had no idea how to deal with curly hair, shearing my waves into something poofy and triangular.

I didn’t know how to embrace my junglee hair, especially because I was usually one of the only Indian kids in my classes.

As I transformed into an adolescent, my feelings about my hair became conflated with so many of the dislikes I had about my body. Frizzy, unmanageable hair was just part of a list that went along with being thick, and having too much body hair. I developed very early. I got my period the summer after fourth grade, and my breasts developed so fast that I never even experienced the training-bra stage. It terrified my mother, who didn’t know how to handle a junglee girl loose in America, so she chose to ignore it. I begged her to help me get rid of the dark hair on my upper lip, but she said to leave it alone. In fifth grade, I took matters into my own hands in the body-hair wars and shaved my arms. For about a week, I couldn’t stop touching my smooth, hair-free arms — until the horrifying stubble came in.