They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

Papa constructed a family tree and indicated how many of his blood relatives had attempted or died by suicide, as proof that we had a genetic predisposition.

I withdrew from all things Indian. I had once prided myself on being a devoted daughter, but I was ashamed that I could no longer call myself that, either.

I didn’t feel any relief, or any better, so after about a year I stopped seeing her.

I wanted to prove that I was capable of taking care of myself. More than anything, I wanted to never have to put up with a controlling workplace, father, or partner, out of financial dependence. I began to think of success not as a job title, wealth, prestige, or social network but as the ability to be myself in the world. To know that, as a woman who had been taught that I needed to serve a man to be complete, I could instead build a life for myself that I loved, and that I could sustain that life by myself. I hoped that, maybe if you saw me live this way, you might choose to come back to me.

But the truth is, hearing Papa deny my reality and yours still hurt me. The truth is, despite everything, I still loved Papa deeply. And I didn’t know where to put that love or what to make of the fact that my understanding of love was to let a man hurt me because he says he cares for me.

I did not have much faith in therapy. I had seen how therapists failed to catch the severity of Yush’s depression and how Papa manipulated therapy to deepen your self-doubt. In my own life, therapy had been a form of witness, a place where I could be honest when I had no other space to speak my truth. But therapy had never been a place where I learned new coping skills, gained insight into my behaviors, challenged myself, or found a sense of peace.

I had always put my faith in people I admired, people whose judgment I trusted above my own. For most of my life, Yush had been one of them. As I saw Yush turn into a person I didn’t recognize and didn’t like, I needed someone to tell me if they saw what I saw and, if so, why did I feel like I was losing my mind? Was I trapped in a delusion, as Papa appeared to be?

As a white-bred Indian American girl, I triangulated what it meant to be Indian by Papa’s expectations and these limited cultural signposts. When I began to sense how anemic my understanding of my own history was, I became threatened by the way white people appropriated South Asian cultural traditions in part because my relationship with Indian identity felt almost as appropriative. My insecurity over my identity had turned culture into a performance rather than something I inhabited authentically.

In our family, therapy suggested that someone was potentially suicidal. Therapy felt shameful. I don’t know what you believed you were supposed to gain from therapy, but on my intake form, I wrote that I wanted to learn how to be at peace with what I could not control and find a way to be happy.

I had underestimated both Trump’s appeal and the allure of that kind of power to men like Papa.

Papa would never be accepted by someone like Trump or his base, but within our home he mimicked the same behavior and reigned as king.

His words shattered me all over again. I told him I liked the woman I was becoming. I told him that even though we didn’t share the same views, I promised I wouldn’t try to change him anymore. I told him that I would be here when he was ready. I told him that no matter what, I loved him.

With one of my white therapists, I would not have dared to say the word “racist,” knowing that this claim could open me up to a dangerous interrogation that would further erode my shaky sense of trust in myself.

Reka stopped me. “Prachi, that was racist,” she said, with such absolution that I felt silly for ever having second-guessed myself. The immediate validation of my experience was radical. But in her next sentence, Reka gutted me: “But you shouldn’t need me to tell you that in order to know that this was racism. You already know this. I don’t want you to be surprised at the racism you experience—you know that the world, that these white institutions, are racist. The question I want you to consider is: How do you accept that reality and not let it take your power from you? How do you stand tall in those moments, when white women speak down to you, without becoming as small as they want you to become?”

For all of Papa and Yush’s anger at how unreasonable the women in their lives were, it was these very women who had organized care and shown up for my aging grandparents. “I would have fallen apart without my granddaughters,” Dadaji said to me. It was heartbreaking to hear him say, “Thank you, Prachi,” so many times. I was surprised by how much strength Dadiji and Dadaji drew from us, and I was surprised by how unburdened I felt offering it to them. I reassured him, many times, that we were going to continue to be there for them. “We love you, Dadaji. You are not a burden. You will not have to do this alone.” For the second time in my life, I saw Dadaji cry.

It was a pageant for Papa’s pain. The familiar sensation of numbness, the armor I wore to shield myself as a girl, returned.

I didn’t see any trace of me in this alternate universe.

I did not say that a man who forces you to prove your worth is a man incapable of seeing it.

It’s a strange thing to miss someone who is right there. When I talk to you is when I miss you the most, because I am confronted by what I cannot have. It was then that I realized that, even in the wake of Yush’s death, I could never tell you the things I wanted to say. It was then that I realized you needed to believe in Papa’s worldview in order to survive and to justify the tragedy that had consumed all of us.

Yush, who was five foot seven, desperately wanted to be taller. He had lost his life in an attempt to be five ten, an inch taller than the average American man.

But I didn’t know how to tell you that I disagreed. I was angry at Dr. Guichet, too, but I was more disturbed by whatever thought process had led Yush to pursue a cosmetic procedure that could cause permanent nerve damage, chronic pain, and even death. Yush had added risk on top of risk by pursuing the surgery in isolation in a foreign country, where he didn’t speak the language or have any support. This was not a symptom of Yush’s forgetfulness or eccentricity. It was a planned, major, deliberate life choice, reflective of deep longing.

Yush’s vision of success surpassed financial gain. He wanted to change the world. In the months before his death, he had been engineering a system of blocks that could form the skeleton for any structure, inanimate or living, and take on its behavioral properties.

To Yush, money was a resource to achieve grander ambitions, but it was not the goal itself. This had been apparent in his lifestyle:

I had long dismissed Red Pillers as vile and pathetic, but my quest to try to understand Yush’s motivations for his surgery compelled me to look deeper. “If you are weak, depressed, small, poor, uneducated, unconfident, or anything else that prevents you from being powerful, nobody will care about whether you live or die,” the website read.

These men were clearly not much kinder to one another than they were to women like me.

Numerous studies show a link between height and workplace success, and in Western cultures, many straight women prefer dating tall men.

Moreover, Western culture has a long history of trying to emasculate Asian American men—particularly East Asians—going back to the 1800s, when Chinese men emigrating to the United States during the gold rush were viewed by white people as an economic and racial threat.

Indian men are nerdy and clumsy with women,

The Red Pill offered a tempting solution to take back the kind of power that Yush likely felt had been stolen from him. According to the website, “All racial barriers are overcome by power, for money is power.

but I could see how these ideas validated Yush’s insecurities and appealed to his binary approach to problem-solving. The guidelines fed an addictive need for external validation, predicated on internalized feelings of unworthiness and perpetuated by a pressure to conform to impossible societal expectations of the idealized man. For men who are forced to disconnect from their emotional needs and then further alienated by society’s narrow conception of masculinity, the belief that success solves all problems offers a sense of power. It was easier to believe that people would automatically respect someone tall and rich than to accept that no one can ultimately control how others see them. But in this bleak outlook, men turned themselves into products, treating women as a hive mind of consumers. Intimate emotional connection became a myth, condemning all interactions to be transactional. It was a deeply cynical, isolating worldview that reinforced itself, pushing away anyone capable of or interested in authentic connection.

“There’s a huge social stigma in our culture against body modification. Basically, if you change yourself through what sounds like ‘extreme’ measures to change yourself or whatever, it comes off like you’re just really insecure,” Yush wrote in the email. “In the future, it’s probably going to be totally normal for people to get body modifications like cybernetic implants and stuff. At that time, getting longer legs is going to seem like a pretty mundane thing to do. I just don’t hold the same stigmas that other people do on how I should behave.” But in his pontificating, Yush was talking around the emotions of the issue: What problem did he think being five foot ten would solve?

I believe that being taller may have boosted Yush’s confidence. He may even have enjoyed more success in attracting women and investors.

Would he have been able to soothe himself and move forward? Or, lacking those emotional skills, would the pain intensify precisely because of what he had put himself through to prevent this very thing from happening again?

The Red Pill rants left out the most important part: In the end, even if every step is achieved, it will never be enough. Yush was trying to belong to a club that would never accept him. He clung to a hierarchy, climbing to the top, but the whole point of a hierarchy is that the people at the bottom will be forced back to the bottom.

But I believe that the logical explanations Yush presented to you and Papa couched a deep, unresolved pain from boyhood. The child who was raised to believe that hard work and intellect could overcome any problem took a chilling, clinical approach to solving a deeply emotional one: He believed he was not respected by white America’s elite. His extraordinary success hadn’t eased his pain. Instead, success gave his pain more power over him.

You loved Yush, but like me, I am not sure you liked the man he became, either. After his death, when the secret of Italy was finally revealed to me, you told me that he was mean to you. You nursed him to health, but he treated you like a servant. When you spoke of this, it reminded me of Papa. I was so sad to hear this, especially since your last memories of your son were not ones of joy but of more pain. I was surprised, though, when you told me that you had scolded him. You told him it was not okay for him to treat you like that. I was proud of you for standing up for yourself. You said that he felt bad. After that, he was more appreciative.

In the essay, published posthumously, Yush had disavowed Buaji, criticized you, and empathized with Papa’s pain. Yush wrote that he used to feel bad for you when you cried, but now he saw the toll that your marriage had taken on his father as the sole provider and a short brown man rejected and emasculated by white America. He lamented a society that valued the emotional pain of women over the burden men had to provide for them. He complained that women were inferior in logical ability and that women in abusive relationships were not held accountable for their decision to stay, while the societal pressures upon the allegedly abusive men were overlooked and ignored. Yush wrote that he planned to “sever ties” with me and our extended family over our views.

Yush wrote that he was angry with Papa, but it was “hard to hate him more than I hate myself, because I have so much of him in me.”

At home, Yush and I had both absorbed a casual sexism that was reinforced by the world outside. But, of course, as a woman, this affected me differently than Yush. The double standards that I eventually felt as constraints, Yush experienced as power. As the war between you and Papa intensified, Yush saw himself in Papa’s struggles, and I saw myself in yours. But I reduced you to helpless victim and demonized Papa as a monster because I could not face the pain of realizing that some part of you chose to stay with a man who mistreated you. I think Yush eventually saw Papa as the victim and you as weak because he could not face the pain of realizing that the father who cared for him also psychologically tormented his mother. Each of us yelled at the other for vilifying the parent we empathized with so deeply. We had difficulty accepting the “both/and” of the situation: that you have both been victimized and you have agency; that Papa both loves you and hurts you in profound ways.

To make sense of your decision, one that defied the 1–0 binary of how people are supposed to behave, Yush concluded that women cry abuse for sympathy, because if they were truly abused, they would leave; that they complain but ultimately stay because of the material comforts they enjoy and rely on from a man. I think that he could not separate your personhood from the role you played, because he could not separate his own personhood from the role he felt pressured to play. He strove to meet the expectations of those who relied on him and mistook this performance as his identity.

every unknown could be resolved through willpower and intellect, a message reinforced by America’s rigid conception of who we are supposed to be. The truth is, society doesn’t raise people to aspire to be kind or compassionate or happy. It pressures adults to achieve and accomplish. It teaches people that what matters more than their character or how they treat others or how they feel about themselves is how much money they can hoard, who they know, how famous they can get, and how much power they wield over others. Emotions have no basis in this framework.

even when he followed the rules, even when he achieved, he was still somehow less-than and he was still not happy. I think that when he achieved such success, he sank deeper into feelings of self-hatred, and assuming that more success would relieve him of this pain, he sought to attain more.

But now I understand that coming together in shared grief is a choice, not an inevitability. Unless we choose to face it, grief folds us inward and pushes us deep into our own pockets of suffering, intensifying our pain and further isolating us from those we love. There is no hack, no quick fix, no step-by-step solution to navigate grief. We only have ourselves, and one another, to make it through.

A year later, you called me and told me you wanted a closer relationship with me. I cried, “Of course. I want that, too.” “But I don’t want to live in the past,” you said over the phone. “I can’t go back to that dark place. I want to move forward.” “I want to move forward, too, Mummy. But I am a writer. I have to write about my life, too, to make peace with the past.” As briefly as the door between us opened, it shut again. “Okay,” you said. “Never mind.” It was the last time we ever dared reveal ourselves to each other.

Woman as mother. Woman as wife. Woman as Indian immigrant. Woman as daughter-in-law. In turn, you sensed that your acceptance was based on your ability to play these roles. These assumptions bonded us to each other.

For years, you felt my anger, my desire for you to rise up and fight and leave him. I believed—I still believe—that you are capable of so much. You navigated a new country and culture without any emotional support and endured so much hardship. Maybe there is no part of you that can forgive me for writing this, for broadcasting what you feel should be kept private, and for taking away your power to reveal what is yours when so much has already been taken away from you. But maybe there is also a part of you waiting to be seen, a part of you that has been buried, a part of you that hopes someone pieced it all together. I want you to know: I see what you have lost. I want you to know that you have not lost me.

was telling you that your choice had no value, that it wasn’t good enough for me. You must have felt my judgment, my lack of acceptance over who you are or what you have chosen for yourself. I had failed to see how, from your perspective, Papa and I were two sides of the same coin: He sought to mold you into some image of who he needed you to be for him. And I, too, refused to accept you as you are, not willing to listen when you made your desires clear to me. Instead, both of us held your own wishes against you, sending you the message that you were not good enough as is.

I realized that Sita was not the submissive waif I had always assumed her to be. She had agency. After Rama imposed yet another brutal trial upon her, she said no to him. Instead, she chose to leave her husband and children behind and return to Mother Earth. The earth split open and swallowed her back.

I know that letting go of my fantasy of togetherness does not mean that I do not want the best for you and Papa or hope that each of you finds your way back to me. I still want all of that. But I no longer live in the space where I tell myself that if I silence or shrink myself, I can one day have that ideal relationship with you both.

But now I see that I wrote this for me. I wrote what I needed to face that I had avoided looking at for so long. I wrote this to understand what stands in the way of sharing love with the people I long to share it with the most.