Chapter 1
Dawn
Kanika has several meanings in Sanskrit, but Papa liked “gold”—an object so striking that people traded it for food and clothing. You preferred the name Prachi. East. Sunrise. Dawn. A nod to the homeland you’d left five years before my birth. A word that, in poetry and literature, represents new beginnings. Papa suggested a creative compromise: Let me decide. If born during daylight, I was to be Prachi. If born at night, I would be Kanika.
I was born just as the sun began its climb into the sky, exercising its full power on a hot day in the middle of July. I had made my choice clear.
I wish I had asked you why you picked the name Prachi. Instead, I remember telling you when I began to hate my name. Jessica and the other white girls in my pre-kindergarten class played a game: One girl had candy in her hands, and she would open and shut her palms quickly. The girl next to her had to pick pieces of candy from her friend’s hands before she clamped them shut. I asked Jessica if I could play. She smiled and said, “Give me your hand.” Then Jessica grabbed my fingers and yanked them back toward my wrist and looked into my eyes as I yelped in pain. She laughed. The teachers ignored me when I told them that Jessica had hurt me.
I didn’t tell you what had happened. Instead, when I came home, the confusing, turbulent feelings inside me distilled to one question: “Why didn’t you name me Jessica?” I think you were taken aback, and in your surprise, you apologized. I didn’t have the words for racism yet. I only understood that if I was more like Jessica somehow, I wouldn’t have been treated that way. “I’m sorry,” you said, accepting my feelings as fact, likely unaware of the cruelty children inflict on those who look unlike them. “I liked Prachi.”
I wish I could tell you now that I love my name.
We had moved to the Land of Jessicas in New Jersey from Silicon Valley, where we’d lived among one of the biggest Indian communities in the country. In California, Papa owned a townhouse and began a lucrative career as a hardware and software engineer, a rare skill set that positioned him well for the coming tech boom. After your initial years surviving icy Canadian winters, you welcomed the warmth. You looked after me at home, and eighteen months later, to the day, Yush arrived. For most of my childhood, I thought that half birthdays were the day that one’s sibling was born.
At first, I envied the attention you gave Yush. You told me that once, while you were changing his diaper in the bathroom, you left him alone for just a moment. I snuck in and locked the door behind me. Like a hostage negotiator, you cajoled and convinced me to open the door. Yush remained unaware of the danger he was in. He was the easy baby: He sat with anyone, content in his own world. He was like you—gentle, mild-mannered, and kind. I was the fussy, possessive, mischievous one, clawing at you for constant attention. My temperament mirrored Papa’s—stubborn, opinionated, strong-willed, outspoken, and loud. Traits admired and encouraged in my father but concerning when manifested by a girl. Yet Papa was proud of me. I, in turn, thought that Papa looked the way all papas should: thick curly hair with a nascent bald spot, a strong black mustache, and a slight paunch.
Just as your amorphous future in America acquired a shape, Papa abandoned his promising engineering career and propelled us into the unknown. His decision to pursue medicine came top-down, like a CEO’s directive. Dadaji tried to talk Papa out of this doctor business. “Think of what this means for your wife and little kids,” Dadaji said. To him, it sounded like another one of his son’s impulsive decisions. Papa was angry that his father, who had always felt distant, yet again withheld his emotional support.
Papa said that he made a long list of reasons why it made sense for him to switch careers, as if it were a purely logical decision. But this was not a simple job change; this was accumulating a mountain of debt and earning little income and relocating the family every few years to complete medical school, residency, fellowship, and specialized surgical training. It was a decision that meant you’d have to raise two young kids in an unfamiliar country with little support as your husband worked long hours. It was a decision that meant you would move too often to build a close circle of friends. You would see your parents only a handful of times again in your life because we could not afford frequent trips to India. When your parents died, we would meet your grief like strangers.
Papa was passionate about medicine and wanted to help people. But somewhere on Papa’s list of reasons—the one that stands out to me now above all of the others—is this: He noted that being a doctor would earn him more respect, particularly within the Indian community. I had underestimated the power and the depth of that desire and how the force of that current swept up the rest of us.
Papa moved to New Jersey for medical school and lived in student housing. He worried that we would distract him from his studies, so he sent the three of us to live with Dadiji and Dadaji in Toronto, where he expected us to stay for the next four years. I remember the extended visit at their apartment building only in flashes: Yush and I running around a 200-meter indoor track on the top floor; entering the narrow mail room with anticipation for packages from Papa; opening a box to find the T-shirts he sent us—a peach shirt with a beach sunset cartoon graphic for me, a tiny blue shirt for Yush. I think it was during that first year that I grabbed ahold of crayons and drew all over the white walls, and then Dadiji and Dadaji had to repaint them, after which I did it again: untamed signs of what would become a lifelong passion for painting and drawing.
I was Dadiji’s little Pachu, Yush her Yushie Bushie. Through her broken English, I was never sure how much she understood of what I said, but it didn’t matter. She expressed her love by squeezing me so hard with her plump body that for a moment I had to hold my breath. Then she smushed her face into mine, shaking her head so vigorously that her prickly mustache hair scratched my skin and reddened my cheeks, and I closed my eyes to shield them, squealing throughout. Dadiji’s apartment housed her entire world: her plants, her original artwork, and photos of family. In the photo that best captures our friendship, Yush and I posed in front of her cascading plants. I am holding him tight, smiling at the camera and squeezing my little brother like he’s my doll. He stands warm and protected as he gazes off into the distance.
Dadiji doted on us, but it was Dadaji who animated me. We exchanged love through banter. His voice was thick and knotty, like a banyan tree, later lilted by a slight slur from a stroke. He spoke in concise, pithy sentences and half sentences, weaving between the sardonic and the serious so quickly that either he or I was always on the verge of laughter. The constant pain from sciatica made him stiff, so he hugged not with his arms but with his hands, showing me how much he missed me with each light, excited pitter-patter on my back. Seeing as I was Prachi, the Goddess of the Rising Sun and Destroyer of Darkness, on gray days he’d say, “Prachi, where is the sun? Call the sun!”
“I tried, but the sun didn’t answer me!” I’d say.
He’d laugh. “Yes, the darkness is not done yet.”
As Papa told it, on his first visit to Toronto that year, I ran to the door and gave him a big hug. As the visit ended, I begged him not to leave. When he left, I cried. When he returned, I was again excited to see him. But as the ritual of Papa’s arrival and departure happened again and again, I stopped coming to the phone to take his calls. Then I refused to meet him at the doorway altogether. “When I came back,” he said, “you wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“Why should I?” I apparently said to him on his last visit. “You’re just going to leave us again,” and I walked off.
He always laughed when retelling that part. “That’s when I said, ‘Uh-oh, I have to watch out. This girl knows what she wants!’ ” Papa said that my protest convinced him to move the family to New Jersey, where he completed the next three years of medical school with us in tow.
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.
In New Jersey, the four of us settled into a small apartment by a park that hugged a river. We shared a wall with a man who you once saw put a knife to another man’s throat in the hallway, around the time that our apartment building began renting to outpatients of a local psychiatric facility. Anytime the neighbor’s door stood open, you rushed us through the hallway. Dadaji gave us his bulky brown Toyota Cressida, which you commanded from atop a pillow folded in half. Drivers did double takes as this behemoth car piloted by a phantom driver floated along the road.
Papa told his sister, my Buaji, that he needed some money to make ends meet. Like him, Buaji was raising children on a limited budget, taking on debt to pay for medical school. He then used her money to put me in a private school. After show-and-tell one day, when a girl brought in a photo of her house—a mansion—I came home and asked you if we were poor. We were not poor, but whatever wealth we did have was an illusion. Papa borrowed money to pay for a lifestyle that was beyond his means. He shielded Yush and me from the low-income upbringing he had as an immigrant boy in Canada, teaching us that, though we might not have wealth right now, we were to think of ourselves as rich people and learn their ways.
But it wasn’t extravagance that built my happiest moments. I relished our quotidian adventures: walking to the park with you and Yush while licking candy buttons off strips of paper, sitting on the couch as you read out loud to us, drinking your spicy and sweet shikanji lemonade on hot summer days. When you put us to bed, you sang us “Chanda Mama Door Ke.” Sometimes Yush and I begged you to sing these Hindi lullabies during the day because we liked to hear your voice in song. When Papa worked overnight, I crawled into bed and cuddled with you until I fell asleep. At the end of the school year, you, Yush, and I held hands and ran around the living room, the three of us screaming, “Happy happy joy joy!” like the cartoon characters Ren and Stimpy did, and then we fell on the floor, giggling. I saw you as one of us but older and wiser. When we asked you questions, you answered with consideration, never speaking down to us and rarely raising your voice.
One night, as you bent down to hug me good night, I grabbed your face and kissed you on the lips and tried to force my tongue into your mouth. I had never seen Indian people kiss—not you and Papa, and not in a Bollywood movie—but I had seen American adults kiss like this to express their overwhelming love. You jerked your head back and said, “Prachi, what are you doing!” As soon as I did, it felt wrong. But I told you why I tried to kiss you like that, and you laughed, running out of the room to tell Papa.
I am ashamed that, when I look back at my childhood now, I have trouble remembering specific memories and dialogue that we shared. For years I have not had you, Papa, or Yush to help me remember, and now the things unsaid between you and me have calcified and I do not know how to cut through to allow the memories of our joy to flow unobstructed. But I want you to know that when I think of you, I feel your warmth.
If our family were an organism, you were its heart, pumping blood into us all. Papa was the brain, the part that tried to stay in control, well attuned to the fears that threatened our safety. Sometimes the threat to our safety was palpable, particularly in the years after 9/11, when security stopped us at the airport and border crossings for so-called random searches. But most times Papa monitored the existential dangers that American culture posed to our delicate way of life.
You were the only one among us raised in India. In most of the homes we lived, you maintained a tiny altar with unlit agarbatti resting below images of Hindu deities. Rarely did you talk about religion, aside from casual mentions—that as a teen you got high while drinking bhang lassis on Holi, or when you told Yush and me not to leave our books on the floor because it was disrespectful to Goddess Saraswati. I wish now that I had asked you what tradition and culture meant to you.
Instead, it was Papa, not you, who defined and maintained Indian cultural values at home. One day you took me to Supercuts. I returned with a shoulder-length bob. At home, Papa screamed at you. My pride curdled into shame. After yelling at you, he turned to me. “You need my permission to cut your hair,” he told me. This is how I learned that Papa had rules about what our hair was supposed to look like.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because I know what’s best for you, and you don’t,” he said. “You have to have a purpose for cutting your hair. You can’t just do it without a reason.”
I considered this. Dadiji’s hair was shorter than both yours and mine, framing her face with a tight pixie cut. But Papa was a guru who dispensed wisdom that I didn’t fully understand. I feared him the way white people feared the wrath of their mercurial Western God, certain that behind his methods was a larger intelligence that I could not yet ascertain. It must have been such a burden for a man to take on so much, I thought, and still have to show us how to behave in the world.
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. Sometimes his affection beamed over me like a hot sun, and other times I was caught in a torrential downpour, unsure if I’d ever see sunlight again. 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.
Years later, as a teenager, I told Papa that I used to see him as a God. I thought he might find this surprising. I thought he might see that I was transitioning from childhood to adulthood. I thought our relationship may evolve to reflect this change. But in his response, I picked up a feeling of woundedness and a tinge of accusation. He said, “Why did you stop?”