Chapter 6
Suburban Camouflage
At the end of seventh grade, we moved from the apartment to a five-bedroom house an hour’s drive north of Philly. After a decade of training, Papa joined a medical practice. The event was so momentous that, in the year leading up to it, Papa took Yush and me out of school early a few times to observe progress on the construction of our future home. The three of us followed Papa as he walked through the plot of land and visualized the rooms that appeared as a zig-zag of wooden beams: an expansive foyer, a large wooden deck, and a kitchen with granite countertops and floor-to-ceiling cabinets. Papa let me choose the pale-blue shutters and rosy-pink brick, small flourishes that offered the illusion of choice while ensuring conformity as one of the only brown families in a development of neocolonial homes. We had achieved the immigrant dream of suburban camouflage. After we settled into a new home that looked like success, I gushed to Papa, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry someone just like you.”
One day, Dadiji and Dadaji would move into the home of their firstborn son. When Dadaji visited that first year, he sat on the deck and cried, thinking of how he had cheated a destiny of servitude in Haldaur to get to where he was now: a grand house in the American suburbs. I had never seen Dadaji cry. I approached him and said, “You had nothing and built a life for yourself that gave your children even more opportunity. I was born with everything, so I would have to do something that exceeds what I think is imaginable in order to continue what you built.”
“Yes,” he said, “that is true. But even thinking this way, you have made me proud.”
We expanded into wealth as if we’d always had it. I could have bought a dozen pairs of Doc Martens now. You and I went on shopping sprees, and Papa never imposed any limit on how much we spent. Over the next several years, Papa bought a big-screen TV and cable with all the channels and a dozen computers and four cars and a fourteen-foot projection screen for a home movie theater and a professional-grade photo printer and several professional cameras. In the first floor guest bedroom, Papa would later hang a black-and-white pencil portrait of himself drawn by one of his patients. She had contacted the local newspaper, and they wrote a story on Papa’s surgical talent. In it, she swooned that she had seen many doctors over her life, but Papa was “just an extremely special person.”
Papa enrolled Yush and me in a private school where we met South Asian kids like us, and our academic success no longer made us targets for mockery. In that first year, we thrived: Yush’s new best friend threw him a large surprise birthday party that the entire grade attended. By the end of eighth grade, I settled in with a group of friends, won an award for my art, and earned a rare prize in social studies.
We hosted family reunions, too. At Christmas, all the cousins lined up foam mattresses in a row and we played under one roof for a week. One winter, Papa even rented a large tour bus and bought Broadway tickets to Bombay Dreams, taking all of us on an unforgettable day trip to New York City. When relatives like Ambika Aunty visited with their little kids, they encouraged the children to follow Yush and me around, hoping that our family’s exceptionalism would bless them, as well.
All of this perfection came at a hidden cost. At home, you were the one who paid the price. Every morning you woke up early to boil fresh chai, make us breakfast, and lay out Papa’s work clothes. You diligently matched Papa’s tie and shirt with the right suit. This was a fraught process, because if you chose something he didn’t feel like wearing that day or a color that didn’t match to his liking, Papa yelled at you, ordered you to come back upstairs, and forced you to choose another outfit for him until you got it right. This risked burning the tea on the stove or making him late, and then he might blame you for that, too. Meanwhile, he was nearly an hour late to work every morning, anyway, because he sat at the computer in his surgical scrubs, programming some side project for hours while you prepared everything for him.
At least once a month, Papa stomped around the house and demanded that you cut his nails, even if you were on the verge of sleep. This took at least thirty minutes, as you moved through the tools in a gray manicurist’s kit to cut, file, and polish every nail. I never saw Papa cut his own nails. I never heard him offer to cut your nails.
The consequence for speaking up, saying no, or falling behind was Papa’s rage. His screaming and insults were so commonplace that I can’t remember many incidents with any specificity—what he said, what triggered him, or how exactly you responded. 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.
I do remember the aftermath of one instance clearly: After Papa berated you in front of Yush and me, you started hitting yourself, punching yourself in the head and yelling that you were stupid and worthless and wrong and that he was always right and so much smarter than you. Then you fell to the floor and begged for his forgiveness. “Maaf kijiye! Maaf kijiye!” you cried, touching his feet in frantic motions.
I had never seen you turn violent toward yourself before, and it scared me. I watched in disgusted silence. Papa said nothing. He looked down at you and then grunted and walked away. It was easy to hate him. But in that moment I hated you a little, too, for what I saw as taking it.
In my mind, when one adult yelled, the other was supposed to yell back. There was a primal, animalistic equality to sparring. 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. I wanted you to rise up against him, hoping that if you did, the violence would feel less brutally unfair.
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. But my treatment of you wasn’t simply mimicry, either. It was a clumsy expression of anger over how mother was raising daughter to learn that to be good is to betray oneself, to forever contort oneself to fit into impossible, contradictory expectations of womanhood that felt stifling. On one hand, Papa wanted me to be high-achieving, attending an Ivy League school and then running a company as a CEO, an extension of his own greatness. But on the other, I was to serve him, as he expected of you.
One day, while I was at home during a break from college, Papa came out of his computer room and asked me where the batteries were kept. I stopped at the top of the stairs and said I didn’t know.
“You should be like Mom,” he said. “Mom knows where everything in the house is. Why don’t you?”
“Mummy moves stuff around, and I’m not even here that often,” I said to him. “You live here. You could learn where they are, too.”
Suddenly, Papa snarled and marched toward me. For a moment I thought he might push me down the stairs. A part of me wanted him to do it. Maybe then everyone would believe me about the anger I saw at home. I froze. Papa stopped inches in front of me, huffing. Yush came out into the hallway as a referee, inserting himself in the space between us. He convinced Papa to walk away.
You were not, by nature, quiet, meek, or resigned. You chased mice and roaches in our apartments with the ferocity of an eighteen-wheeler careening down the highway, thwacking them with your chappal without mercy or hesitation. You managed the home, handled the accounting, and organized our trips like a business executive. Papa could walk into a room and know how to fit in. But you could walk into a room and endear people with your genuine ability to listen and respond.
You disarmed others with your playfulness. When we went to Nova Scotia in seventh grade, you exclaimed excitedly, “I want to see a moose! I’m going to see one!” Every time we went on a hike, or even just walked down a regular city street, you announced this, sticking to the bit, getting more and more serious about searching for the elusive, grand moose, because you knew we’d laugh at your insistence. 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.
Every so often, Papa compared you to Buaji, stoking your insecurities by saying that she ran the household and was a doctor. She does it all. Why can’t you? I picked up Papa’s attitude: On a visit to Buaji’s when I was nine, she had set up pumpkins for us to carve. I saw that this custom was unfamiliar to you, but Buaji knew everything about Halloween. You began to help me with my pumpkin, and I said, “No, I want Buaji to do it.” My words wounded you, and you told me later, “Prachi, you really hurt my feelings. I don’t like how you spoke to me.” I was surprised by your words. 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. I am scared to think about who I would have become without that. What I mean to say is, Mummy, you taught us the most valuable thing of all: how to love and how to allow love in. You taught me that kindness in the world exists, and when I started to lose faith in that, memories of your love reminded me that there are people who are pure of heart. You are one of them.