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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Prachi Gupta
Read between
December 17 - December 19, 2024
I resented that whenever I succeeded, Papa credited himself and his Indian values, but when I failed, that failure was uniquely mine, a product of my Americanness.
You may be going away, but don’t forget—you are not your own person.
I hate that Papa controls my memories, too.
I was not as excited for a new beginning as I was for a definite ending.
Everywhere I went, people saw me as Indian. But India was the only place in the world I felt American.
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
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What I had once admired as Papa’s assertiveness, I now perceived as arrogance.
The truth of Nancy’s words hit something deep inside me, a place that I had numbed. In that moment, I felt humiliated—but also recognized. Something I had put to sleep had been awakened, and I could not ignore it.
It didn’t occur to me then that you probably didn’t feel safe with me, either, because even while I was resisting Papa, I was guilty of buying into his depiction of Indian born-and-bred women as meek and subservient, judging you and stepping in as your American savior.
Papa routinely told you that you were incapable, but by seeing you as someone who didn’t have a voice, I treated you as powerless in our household, too. It was too hard for me to accept that, on some level, you made a choice to tolerate his behavior and to later redirect your anger toward me.
“No,” I said, quickly backing off. “I just think that when I’m on my own, if that doesn’t change, it will strain our relationship.” “But you’ll always be my daughter,” he said. “Nothing changes that.”
He said it was because Yush had good grades. I felt it was because Yush was a boy.
Papa had once called you or me: selfish, worthless, useless. But even then, Thomas was patient with me.
Looking back, I realize that this was the incident where I began to wonder if Papa’s temper and controlling nature were indicative of something extreme, a potential sign of an illness that none of us knew how to address.
Yush knew that success wasn’t worth his sanity. When he was offered a job at the end of the internship, he turned it down without hesitation. He lost his mind and almost his life, but his flawless code ended up in the International Space Station.
Success was supposed to make one immune to struggle, I thought. I had long understood that mental illness didn’t happen in high-achieving Indian American families like ours. In fact, both Yush and I had believed that part of what made us so successful was this ability to clamp down on our feelings and not let them out all the time, the way white people did so gratuitously.
We didn’t know that Asian American college students are more likely to deal with suicidal thoughts and attempt suicide than white students—straddling multiple cultures, experiencing racism, and living up to narrow expectations of achievement exerts extreme stress on the mind and body. To navigate those pressures, Yush and I learned to repress our feelings and forge onward, as Dadaji did, as Papa did, as you did. None of us knew that this very survival tactic compounded our pain.
Neither of us understood that blaming us for his self-harm was a form of abuse meant to coerce us into doing what he wanted.
He confessed that he felt like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and that something about me “brings out the Hyde” in him.
But it seemed like he wanted me to accept that I would be his verbal punching bag and not take it personally or ever allow it to create distance between us. As he spoke, I listened quietly, scared to respond. I shoved my feelings down, and my numbness deepened.
I doubt any of your relatives would have been willing to hear a single critical word against the man who bestowed so much upon them.
While the readings empowered me at first, they ultimately shamed me into a deeper silence. Everything I read revolved around white families.
At the time, I interpreted my sense of isolation through the colonizer’s story: I felt as if these progressive white women had all this information that could help us but we couldn’t access it, because we came from some regressive, backward place.
Now I understand my isolation differently: I grew up surrounded by white people, alienated from my cultural heritage and its history.
The interventions that worked for white women did not consider the various structural, racial, or cultural barriers that immigrant women of color faced in accessing help, assuming also a familiarity and cultural acceptance of divorce.
The South Asian–specific resources articulated the double bind that trapped you: You bore the burden of maintaining the cultural image that predicated our communal belonging in America, but your ability to project this perfect image was then used against you to delegitimize your own feelings. So long as you portrayed the image you were expected to portray, was anything really that bad at home?
“But I see you demonizing and not acknowledging the good stuff, too. At the end of the day, he has your back.”
Dadaji surprised me by calling to say, “For the first time, you are not under the control of a man.”
Despite this insight, Dadaji was a controlling father and husband for most of his life. When I asked him how his upbringing may have been different if the women around him had equal rights, Dadaji fell silent. “Very difficult question,” he said. Then, with some soberness: “I might have reacted in the wrong way, thinking that an injustice was being done to me.”
Maybe love was simpler than I thought: Maybe it was a willingness to witness someone, to be curious and empathize with them, as they are.
As you struggled with thoughts of suicide, Papa dumped you
Our reunion was not a happy one, but I was surprised by its warmth.
She told us that if we pressured you to do what we wanted, then we were no better than Papa, denying your agency. I was angered by this advice at first, but later I saw that she was right.
Then one day that winter, the calls to Buaji stopped. She phoned you repeatedly over the course of several months, but you never answered, and we never found out why.
Slowly, your therapist convinced you that you were not an abused woman, you were simply an anxious wife whose biggest problem was having too much time on her hands. I had feared this would happen, and I knew it did when, six years later, I read what both of you had written in a lawsuit defending Papa’s upstanding moral character.
He did not want us to ever really see each other.
The more I tried to explain my version of events, the more deranged, bitter, and angry I sounded. The pain of being seen through that lens by people I cared for hurt too much. I knew that they could never see what you and I saw, and so instead of bargaining with them, I let them go.
When I last saw you in Winnipeg, you had been trying to make the same calculations: You were wrestling with whether to perform normalcy and what that might cost you; whether to speak your truth and what that might cost you; trying to determine whom you could trust with each warring part of yourself.
When I asked Buaji why she hadn’t told me any of this earlier, she said that she wanted to believe that Papa had changed and thought that he had.
The doctor said no. “He told me it would hurt your father’s career,” Dadaji recalled. The doctor believed that a potential diagnosis would deny Papa’s ability to get into a good college and succeed, an outcome that would have invalidated Dadaji’s decision to leave India.
In a capitalist society, the measure of wellness isn’t a person’s actual health or happiness but how far one can rise or how much wealth one can accumulate. Somebody seen as “unwell” is unable to produce and to achieve.
You had dedicated yourself to helping him construct this statue, but I couldn’t do it any longer. I threw down my tools and walked away.
I noticed that with her—an Indian immigrant woman like you—you did not try so hard to look put-together.
your psychiatrist was an Indian immigrant, so I trusted that she wasn’t pathologizing Papa or us on the basis of cultural background.
Questioning the consequences of these negotiations seemed wrong, too. My cultural identity—often the thing that made me even a little bit special—also felt fragile and poorly defined, so easily threatened by the outside world that anything that challenged any aspect of our tenuous but distinct way of life struck me as a judgment. This isolation exacerbated my struggle: I was not able to separate my true self from coping mechanisms I’d learned to adapt to an environment that did not fully accept me, and then I blamed myself for the limitations of that acceptance.
The behavior I experienced at home went against every impulse I had as a writer, who has a responsibility to build a deep inner life for their characters and illustrate how that shapes their relationship with the world around them.
I had no insight into Papa’s emotional life. I still don’t. But to me, it was offensive to view Papa’s troubling behavior through cultural tropes like “strict Indian dad” or “tiger parent.” Such dismissals normalized mistreatment and implied that our dysfunction was an inevitability resulting from our cultural or ethnic identities. The refusal to seek explanations beyond these tropes had severe consequences.
The world discouraged men from seeking help and told women that goodness was self-sacrifice.
He would rather watch you destroy yourself to please him, and he would rather risk his relationships with Yush and me, than look within himself. Again and again, you and I jumped over hurdles to earn his love, but seeing us struggle was never enough to compel him to change.
He could only change for himself. And I did not know if he could ever do that, because I did not know if he could ever love himself enough to want better for himself. And that thought made me very sad.
