They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

Vijay Prashad observed in The Karma of Brown Folk, “unaware of how we are used as a weapon by those whom we ourselves fear and yet emulate.”

think often of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in which she shows how women’s voices in colonial India were appropriated by both the British colonizers and Indian men in power during the struggle for control.

But maybe by explaining to you why I abandoned the story that I was raised to love, I can make room for others to write their own stories instead.

Please remember: There was a time when my outspokenness brought us together instead of tearing us apart. There was a time when speaking my mind was received not as a threat but as an act of love.

Now I wonder where that anger of yours went. I wonder if the anger I thought I learned from watching Papa instead came from you. Trapped, without an exit, transferred from mother to daughter through the secrets we were both meant to keep.

You relied on letters in blue air-mail envelopes to communicate with your siblings in India.

Ancient Hindu, Jain, and Muslim versions of the board game called Gyan Chaupar in Hindi guided players to spiritual liberation. The top of the grid represented spiritual enlightenment and self-acceptance, while the bottom represented a state of earthly egoism, lack of awareness, and illusion. Players moved along squares by rolling die or cowries, advancing or descending levels by landing on squares with a ladder, toward either clarity and knowledge, or a snake, which pushed them deeper into spiritual degradation. When the

My memories highlight the anger and likely downplay the periods of kindness that followed, probably because none of us addressed the tumult, and therefore the bad moments left a stronger imprint on my mind than the good ones did.

On one hand, Papa wanted me to be high-achieving, attending an Ivy League school and then running a company as a CEO, an extension of his own greatness. But on the other, I was to serve him, as he expected of you.

You may be going away, but don’t forget—you are not your own person.

struggled to determine whether the behaviors in Papa that I found distasteful stemmed from differences rooted in culture. While cultural norms certainly played a role in what Nancy and Marin found different about our family’s dynamics, I think that what they pointed out to me as concerning was not simply code-switching or differences of collectivist cultural norms. At college I existed to others not as a daughter or as a sister but as an individual, and they had each been alarmed by the degree to which the woman they knew was diminished around Papa.

Wedding planning involved too many intimate decisions, each one creating room for conflict and misunderstandings that could spiral into a complete breakdown. I

Then Dadaji brought out an essay I had written about his life: “How Dadaji Became a Feminist.”

In your kitchen, Ambika Aunty came up to me. “Can you do something for me?” she asked. Before I could respond, she said, “I need you to keep your Buaji away from your parents at the funeral.” I was shocked and enraged by the insensitivity of her request. Today, even today, when I would have to look at my brother’s costumed corpse and release him into a fire, I could not simply grieve. I

Summoning all of my strength, I said no.

was terrified of publishing the essay, “Stories About My Brother.”