Chapter 8
Good Girls Don’t Have Bodies
One day, a girl named Swapna asked if I wanted to join a dance she had choreographed to a song from the movie Devdas. She was a grade above mine, so we didn’t know each other well. She needed one more person for a performance at the local Hindu temple, she said. I missed performing Bollywood dances and I wanted desi friends. I knew that you and Papa would approve. I said yes.
Swapna was the unlikely combination of smart, kind, and mellow. Her calmness drew me in. At dance practice, I met her friend Adya, a tall, light-skinned Gujarati girl who went to a neighboring private school. She was Swapna’s foil, the bubbliest person I’d ever met, bursting into laughter over the smallest comments. The three of us had an instant chemistry.
Dance practices spilled into hangouts, which rotated among our three homes. At school, Yush befriended Swapna’s younger brother, and we absorbed the boys into our group seamlessly. We told one another jokes and stories, mostly, like about the time an uncle gravely cautioned the boys to drink water during a garba, as if the festive folk dance were a marathon: “It’s nonstop dandiya! Stay hydrated!”
We laughed, but then Yush couldn’t stop laughing. He laughed so hard at the thought of intensely hydrating for dandiya that he fell onto the floor. Then I started laughing harder, until I, too, was on the floor. This is what our time together was like. You asked fewer questions about what I was doing or where I was going when I was with Swapna and Adya, which was good for me, because their parents were far less strict than Papa.
Most Indian kids I knew felt pressured to pursue engineering, medicine, or law, and most Indian kids I knew planned to carry out their parents’ wishes. But Adya wanted to become a fashion designer. Swapna wanted to become a novelist. Their parents supported their ambitions. At a time when virtually no South Asian artists, entertainers, or writers existed in mainstream American culture, finding Swapna and Adya made me feel like less of a misfit. Watching them chase their dreams made me believe that maybe I could one day pursue mine, too.
In my senior year, Adya laid my head on an ironing board and ran a clothing iron over it. I struggled to keep my head still as I heard a loud sizzle and felt the steaming-hot metal next to my ear. She insisted this would make my hair pin-straight and shiny: white-girl hair. I put on heavy black eyeliner and mascara, exaggerating my big brown eyes—my best feature, inherited from you. Adya draped me in one of your black georgette saris. We were going to the temple for some event called Parents Appreciation Day, but that was just the excuse for something else: meeting Drew.
Drew, who was now in college, had been one of Adya’s good friends in high school. I had met him at a house party the year before, and he’d mentioned to Adya that he thought I was cute. He was tall and blond, with a body cut like the side of a cliff. Boy-band hot. Unlike the other hot boys, however, Drew was nice. And he didn’t know that I wasn’t cool, because he had attended a different high school. I had been bugging Adya to set us up, and now, tonight, it was happening—well, sort of.
We stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and Drew dropped by to meet us. Within a few minutes, Drew told me I was very pretty and then Adya gave me a look of excitement, and I blushed, but thankfully my brown skin did not reveal how flattered I felt. Adya blurted out, “You know, Prachi doesn’t have a date to prom,” and I shot her a look that said, Stop embarrassing me! but also Thank you, I love you, and Drew said, “Oh, really? Well, I would like to go with you,” and that was it. Suddenly I had a date to senior prom.
I had tricked Drew into thinking I was pretty, but I knew that beneath the makeup and clothes, I was ugly. For the past two years I had been studying “hotness”—the ability to blend into whiteness. I bought makeup, hair products, and other tools to mute my loud ethnic traits. I wrangled my wild curls into barnyard straw with a flat iron, tacked on a heaving bust with silicone-padded bras, and tweezed my lush forest of brows down to twigs. At night when I was supposed to be studying, I started accounts on Match.com and RateDesi.com, a HotOrNot for South Asians. I A/B-tested my assimilated appearance and flirty new personas with adult men. After months of positive feedback, I knew that my efforts were working. I felt brave enough to face Drew.
Maneuvering dates with Drew was difficult because I was not allowed to date. I would tell you I was going to Adya’s, and then I’d go to Drew’s house. On our first date, he drove us to Red Robin. We shared a sundae and went to the movie theater to watch Taking Lives with Angelina Jolie. I felt insecure because I was ugly and Angelina Jolie was one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. I was sure that during the movie Drew would come to his senses and realize that he could have been out on a date with someone who looked like her.
When Drew picked me up for prom a few months later, I expected Papa to interrogate him. But Papa barely interacted with him. Later, though, he asked you, “Why would he want to go out with Prachi?”
I think you passed on statements like that as a way to tell me I was always being observed. “Log kya kahenge?”—what will people say?—turned into “Log yeh keh rahe hain.” This is what people are saying. When Yush and I took tae kwon do lessons as children, I “kiya-ed” with my whole body, screaming louder and for longer than Yush or any of the boys. After class one day, you mentioned that the moms at the studio had gawked at my loudness. You didn’t tell me to temper my voice, but in relaying this to me, you said that my noise embarrassed you. I never kiya-ed that way again. 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.
I understood why you told me Papa’s thoughts about Drew, and I understood why Papa said it. Papa knew what it meant to grow up here. He could have shown Yush and me how to love ourselves in the face of whiteness. But he could not teach us what he did not know himself.
In the bathroom at prom, one of the popular white girls asked me, “Is he your boyfriend?” and I said, “Yeah,” even though I wasn’t sure of our status. I could tell that I now held an esteem in her eyes that I had not before, like she was reevaluating everything she thought about me.
I learned that when I was seen as the object of desire of a tall white man, suddenly, I mattered. I became visible. People who had overlooked me—including my own father—now noticed me. Soon I relied on the boost I received when such a man wanted me, even if he could not fully understand me, even if when he saw me, he saw conquest or submission or exoticism or domesticity. For a long time that didn’t matter to me, because I was using him to perpetuate a fantasy, too. But as one such white man in college told me bluntly: “You’re pretty for an Indian girl—but Indian girls can only be nine-tenths as hot as a white girl.” Despite my best efforts to fit in, I could never fully belong. Instead, every time I submitted to the fantasy, I strengthened the power of my insecurities. Every time I submitted to the fantasy, I deepened my belief that I had to hide my true self in order to be desirable.
That summer, Drew invited me to his family’s beach house. I imagined holding on to his strong torso as waves crashed against us in the ocean or him rubbing sunblock on my back, but I was too embarrassed to tell him that you and Papa would never allow such a thing. You did not even know we were dating. I stopped calling him back. I reasoned that a guy who looked like him probably didn’t really like me, anyway.
The truth is, I had no idea if Drew could have appreciated me for who I really was. I never gave him the chance. I couldn’t accept myself, so how could I let Drew?
When I first met Swapna and Adya, I thought of them as the two cool, older girls with driver’s licenses who would take me out clubbing. Instead of the club, we frequented Wegmans, the grocery-store chain that doubled as our hangout spot because we couldn’t yet go to bars and the mall felt too cliché. We roamed the aisles at night; Adya picked up cans of chickpeas and yelled, “Eat chole!” chasing me while Swapna laughed at us. With Adya and Swapna, I felt like nothing bad could happen.
I had planned to take my first sips of alcohol in Swapna’s basement, where she and Adya could take care of me if I got too drunk. I know this sounds bad to you, Mummy, but when I look back on that decision, I see caution. That night, the rain struck the pavement like an army of arrows. We stopped by Wegmans first, where we ran into a friend I’ll call Arthur, who sometimes waited at the bus stop with Yush and me. At the grocery store, next to cartons of milk and orange juice, Arthur looked childlike and innocent and less like the hulking bully he could be at school. I thought that being smart was the same as being good, and though Arthur could be cruel, he was well read. Even his cruelty hinted at some secret knowledge about the world that I didn’t possess. Embracing the spontaneity of the moment, we invited him over. He rode back to Swapna’s with us and later asked if he could stay over, saying his mom would pick him up in the morning.
Arthur mixed the drinks. I chugged the noxious mixture of brandy and Coke as if I’d never tasted anything more delicious. I marveled at how my mind felt weightless and unrestricted. My body felt loose, like I was in a pool of warm water. That magical elixir subdued the incessant thoughts of how deeply my hairy, twiggy brown body and face must repulse everyone.
I didn’t know when to stop drinking. Soon I wobbled and hammed up my dizziness and said, “Oh my God, I’m soooo drunk!” Arthur looked at me with disgust, and I felt embarrassed. We set up pillows and blankets in a row on the floor, the same way that I did when our cousins visited during family reunions. Arthur was to my right and Swapna and Adya to my left. By now the room had started to spin. As we went to sleep, I blacked out.
The memories came to me in the morning, in flashes. After Arthur left, I told Swapna and Adya that I thought something had happened. I had never seen or touched a penis before, but now I had memories of one in my mouth. I somehow knew what semen tasted like. I knew it had happened, but I didn’t remember it happening.
You picked me up, and you knew immediately that something wasn’t right. The hard, stale stench of alcohol emanated from my skin and my hair. A part of me wanted to tell you. I didn’t, because I knew you’d tell Papa. Even now, the thought of Papa’s reaction instills fear in my body. Everything he feared would happen had happened.
When I got home, I stayed in bed all day, terrified because I didn’t know what a hangover was or how long this feeling would last. Yush kept coming into my room and asking what was wrong, and I told him to go away and leave me alone, that he wouldn’t understand. His concern for me only made me feel dirtier. I went into the bathroom, then I fell asleep on the floor, and you came and got me and told me I needed to snap out of it. I said, Okay, you’re right, sorry. I told you not to worry, that nothing bad happened. I don’t think you believed me, but you didn’t press me any further.
Using the phone that Papa had bought to protect me from being raped, I texted Arthur. I asked him if what I thought had happened did happen. He said yes. He didn’t apologize and I didn’t expect him to. I asked him if I was any good. He said no. Too much teeth.
I had been unconscious.
I disgusted myself. I didn’t understand how I was so sexually repellent one moment, a sexual object the next.
Though Yush and I talked about almost everything, I hid this incident from him. I had learned that to be a good woman is to be chaste, and he had learned that to be a good man is to protect a woman’s chastity. Before I went to college, he bought me pepper spray and told me sternly that I needed to carry it to stay safe. Silently wondering how, exactly, pepper spray would have protected me from Arthur that night, I told Yush I’d carry it if he did. He said he didn’t need the spray because he was not a target for sexual violence. While this was statistically true, I didn’t know how to tell him why that burden felt unfair. I dropped the tiny canister in a drawer. When Yush noticed later on, he scolded me. “I’m upset that you’re not taking this seriously enough,” he said. I apologized, putting the pepper spray back in my purse as he watched. When he left my bedroom, I took the pepper spray out and stuffed it in a different drawer—one he wouldn’t open.
I imagine that, as a woman, you innately understood what I hid from Yush and Papa, and why. Our womanhood created a bridge between us. Anytime you accompanied Papa to a gala or party, you changed out of your usual khakis and collared shirts to wear an elegant sari. I loved helping you prep. Together we looked through your walk-in closet, each of us pulling out saris we liked. We laid them out on the bed, weighing your options, taking the weather and the event’s theme into careful consideration. You and I had the same preferences in food, colors, fashion, and home design, turning us into mirrors of each other.
When we landed on one that we both liked, you began the elaborate process of wrapping yourself. I watched, mesmerized by hands that strummed across the fabric as if you were a harpist. You separated the pleats with ease, while I struggled to pin unwieldy fabric to your bodice without clumping it. We moved to your vanity in the bathroom, where I rummaged through your muted-rose blush palettes and pastel-blue eye shadow, colors that I associated with white women. I tilted your face gently and plucked any stray hairs along your naturally thin brows. Then I steadied my hand to line your pomegranate eyes with kajal and filled in your brows with the same black tint. I stepped back, admiring your beauty, hoping I might look like you one day.
Moments like this form my strongest, most intimate memories with you. I used to believe that was simply because we shared a gender. But now I see a deeper reason: These memories stand out because they are the few in which we were alone, unsupervised by Papa. Free to be ourselves. The rituals of femininity were the only moments between us that Papa did not insert himself into.
I wonder what we would have discussed beyond the outsize influence that directed both of our lives. I can imagine a scenario in which I told you what happened to me that night at Swapna’s house. It’s possible that you might have blamed me for drinking or become overprotective in response. 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.