They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

By this trip, I was only a few years younger, at twenty-one, than you were when you emigrated to Canada. You had now lived outside India longer than you lived in it. Your relationship with your motherland was complex, so much so that I think you struggled to talk about it. It must have been so bittersweet and even painful for you to visit, catching a glimpse of a parallel universe that held both your past and your alternate present in one view; a place that, like you, had changed so much that neither of you could fully recognize the other anymore; yet simultaneously a place that saw and loved you in a way that your other, permanent home never could. Your grief, like all grief, forced you to hold contradictory emotions at once: longing and repulsion, relief and agitation, freedom and entrapment. I was too lost in my own anxieties on that trip to be there for you, Mummy, or even to consider what you felt as you processed your father’s death.