They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

The memories that stand out to me now, Mummy, and the story I have woven to make sense of them, are likely different from the ones that you hold to support your understanding of our family.

Though it was you who did everything at home for us, it was Papa who we looked up to, as if he personally made the stars and the moon glow bright. Your love was stable, which made it expected and ordinary. Papa’s love was mysterious, like the weather patterns during the rainy season in the tropics.

It was a love that felt exciting and curious, a love that we had to jockey and perform for—a love that we could not afford to take for granted, as we did yours. As children, we did not appreciate or understand the effect of love like this. Your love was so synonymous with safety and warmth that I didn’t have words to describe its power until I mourned your absence.

We stayed so close and performed so well because we followed certain rules—like no divorcing and no dating—that kept us bonded as one impenetrable unit.

Now I wonder who we could have been if we saw our ethnicity not as something to manipulate into belonging in white America but as an opportunity to understand why we were treated differently in the first place.

Papa dispensed these truths in nightly sermons at the dinner table. He animated Yush and me, but I have trouble remembering your role in these conversations, Mummy. So often, I think you were excluded from them. Either you had to sit and turn into Papa’s disciple, as one of us, or you had to withdraw in resignation, unable to contribute—not because you had nothing to say, but because Papa stood at a pulpit for one.

Yush said that Papa had a “wartime personality.” Yush thought this was a good thing to have, particularly when leading a battle, as someone who needed to make tough decisions for the betterment of the group. I agreed with Yush in theory, but I was also confused. “There’s no war,” I said to Yush. “What battle is Papa fighting?” The problem with that kind of a personality, I said, was that when everything was peaceful, one had to create wars to feel useful or important.

That language was Awadhi, an ancient tongue that told your people’s stories before the British ravaged your lands. A language of rajas and poets that, while still spoken in parts of Northern India, had been pushed aside after the colonizers arrived. In our house, Papa was the colonizer. I wish now I had grown up hearing the ancient song of my ancestors that lives within you.

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.

It was through this lens that you built relationships with your in-laws, burdened by a disprovable, unshakable suspicion that they did not want you here and saw you as beneath them. You had no choice but to take Papa’s words at face value, cementing your loyalty to him as your protector in the face of their harsh judgments.

When, even in his own country, his people’s stories did not matter, he was forced to study his oppressor’s greatness, and learned to deny his own.

treating her as an extension of the place he had tried so hard to leave behind.

I am not sure if it ever turned into love—at least not love as I understand it—as much as a dependency on each other.

I barely knew the men who raised you, but I could see the effects of their kindness on you and how that kindness shaped Yush and me. I wondered what it might be like to be raised by men like them, men who did not appear to yell to get what they wanted. I wonder now how their affection shaped your understanding of the world. Maybe you thought all men in the world were that caring, because in your world, they were.

Dadiji doted on her eldest son like he was Rama himself. Papa, by virtue of the auspicious combination of his male sex and the order of his birth, was invincible and incapable of wrongdoing.

I wonder how this shaped his understanding of love—whether to be loved was to be made to feel powerful, and to love another was to dominate them. I wonder who that boy would have become, and how that man would have treated you and me, if he had been seen as neither God nor pariah but as an imperfect child capable of making mistakes and seeking help, ordinary and human.

The difference in treatment between son and daughter would ripple through generations, one learning entitlement, the other learning injustice. One sibling would lean into nostalgia for lost culture to justify his behavior, while the other would struggle to reclaim her lost culture, observing how tradition was so often invoked to evade accountability and prevent change.

You were so busy at home that I rarely saw you engage in any hobbies, Mummy, and as a girl I assumed that you simply had no interests. It is embarrassing now to admit that I could have ever believed that. But in our house, everyone fulfilled a duty: Papa provided, you nurtured, Yush and I achieved. These jobs defined our identities, so I never thought about what you might want for yourself beyond meeting the expectations of the role you played.

But, while I had set the story in our Pittsburgh backyard, I had not made Annie an Indian American girl like me. The decision to cut myself out of my own story was automatic and subconscious.

It’s not that I wanted to be white, Mummy. I loved my bronze skin. There was no food better than your jeera-and-haldi-spiced aloo gobi. I felt glamorous in the deep-blush silver-lined lehenga that Naniji and Nanaji sent me from India. But I yearned for the freedom that I associated with whiteness.

wonder now what more you would have chosen to explore of your own volition. And I wonder what else you and I could have shared with each other through that exploration.

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. I was always on guard for the next rupture of peace, this thing I knew was coming but could never predict or prevent.

But in our house, watching you and Papa fight was like watching a war plane bomb a village. And maybe that’s why, rather than being mad at him, for a long time I was mad at you.

In high school, I began talking back to you or standing far away from you when you dropped me off at the mall, pretending not to know you in public. I feel ashamed of my behavior now, Mummy, and I am so sorry for how deeply this must have hurt you. Papa didn’t yell at me, but he said I had to stop behaving like such a “typical American bimbo” acting out at her mom. He had no awareness that I was imitating the very behavior that he modeled at home.

I wonder sometimes if this is why Papa made such a fuss of your “communication skills”—because, despite the cultural barriers you faced, you had an ease with people that eluded him, and this must have led him to feel insecure.

When Papa yelled at me, I felt the need to throw up a wall against the onslaught. But when you told me that I had hurt you in such plain language, I felt awful, baring myself to the monsoon of your pain. I wanted to take it back, and I hoped to never make you feel that way again.

As Yush and I became adults, you lamented that you’d taught us nothing. You parroted Papa’s words about yourself and believed them. You thought that because your education level or technical skills didn’t match his, you were somehow unintelligent or had nothing of value to offer your children. I could never convince you that what you offered Yush and me was so much more essential, not just to our survival but to our humanity. Your consistent, stable love grounded and protected us, particularly as children, acting as a shock absorber against Papa’s volatility. Your kindness gave us small pockets of time within which we could learn that we were more than what we produced.

This was usually how we conveyed feelings, too, rarely speaking about them directly and instead telling each other what someone else had said about us, monitoring our emotions and actions based on how we imagined that others perceived us.

But these moments suggest that we had the capacity to build our own, separate relationship. The ornamental aspects of womanhood brought us together. Maybe if we could have acknowledged the pain of womanhood, too, we wouldn’t have been so burdened by its constraints.

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.

I wonder if, out of a desire to not show his anger the way that Papa did, Yush instead became fearful of expressing any strong negative emotion, turning to humor to mask an anger that he didn’t know how else to release. He learned to bury his feelings, a practice that the world bent into habit as he reached manhood.

Nancy had a sense of self that did not waver. I was enchanted by her ability to stay true to who she was.

Your social acceptance depended on your ability to play the role of the perfect wife or perfect in-law. I wonder what you would have seen about yourself if you had a separate group of friends—maybe through a job or an outside hobby—who saw you not as a symbol but as a full person.

After that trip, I began to intervene when Papa laid into you, preparing to absorb the anger that he reserved for you.

One time I stepped in between you two just as tension escalated. “Don’t talk to her like that. It’s not okay,” I said to Papa.

Then you said, “Prachi, stop. Stop. It’s okay,” annoyed at me for having made a tense situation worse. I left the room, angry at him and frustrated with you.

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. It was too painful for me to consider that a part of you chose to accept mistreatment rather than to leave, that you later chose to protect him instead of protecting me.

That same year, during his senior year of high school, Yush got a girlfriend. You had her over for dinner, and Papa let Yush go on dates. Papa let Yush run cross-country, too. He said it was because Yush had good grades. I felt it was because Yush was a boy.

I gave no indication that I was dealing with something difficult, yet I was angry that they didn’t seem to care about what we were going through, as if they should have somehow figured out what we’d all worked so hard to make impossible to figure out. Holding on to my resentment was more comfortable than telling them the truth, which would open me to potential rejection or judgment.

seemed to me that success meant giving up one’s time, health, and relationships to make a rich corporation richer.

You described erratic behavior, Papa getting angry or violent. Rage swelled up within me on your behalf, but I felt so helpless.

I validated your anger and fear, and then I criticized Papa with an eagerness that shames me now.

You treated Papa like the enemy one moment but were fiercely loyal to him the next.

Eventually, after this cycle happened a few more times, I snapped at you. “If you don’t want me to hate him, then don’t talk to me about how bad my father is!” I yelled.

I am sorry, Mummy, that I didn’t understand that your back-and-forth was a reflection of how confusing it was to live with him. Without Yush and me at home as buffers, Papa was now your entire world. You felt responsible for his well-being, but you were also so angry at him for hurting you. I wonder if your decision to tell him some version of my thoughts was a way to share your own opinion passively, which was safer than directly saying that his behavior hurt you. We were all drowning, unintentionally dunking one another below the surface in an effort to lift ourselves up in a raging ocean.

:(((((

All of the anger that I had repressed came rushing out. I paced around the living room and then wrote in my journal, gripping the pen hard, sloppy handwriting flowing.

Angry journaling

But the last thing that I could put on my page was me—not that I even really knew who that was. I prided myself on my ability to be a chameleon: to change myself to reflect what others needed of me when they needed it. This, I thought, was the quality that made me unique—that was what made me me.

The internship was unpaid. But when I found out, I jumped up and down on the bed like a child. I had made it. I knew now that the toughest step had been accomplished. I had a foot in the door. Now that I was in the room, they would finally have to see me.

“They’re going through a rough patch,” Yush said. “It gives me more empathy for Papa.”

Yush seemed to assume that because you had been raised to not expect to build a career or pursue outside hobbies, this meant you never wanted them. I saw things differently: that, even if you did want to build a life for yourself beyond our home, you lived in a household where you could not safely express such a desire.