Chapter 9
Dark Space
A few times during senior year, I invited friends over late at night. I told them to park their cars down the street or get dropped off a few houses away. I ushered them in through the back entrance to the basement, carrying liquor I smuggled down from the china cabinet. You and Papa slept upstairs, clueless that I was drinking and making out with boys two floors beneath you. I feared getting caught, but the risk was part of the thrill.
I think Dadaji noticed that I had been siphoning his scotch and whiskey. He never directly accused me of drinking, but during one of his visits, he said, “Prachi, I am worried about you.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“You seem lost,” he said.
“I’m fine, Dadaji.”
But Dadaji was right. By junior year, I regularly failed tests in almost every subject, including English. I even slacked off in art class. I got a C in precalculus, after which the administration made me retake it. I boosted my grade to a whopping C+. The second go-round, I sat in the back of the room and read Faust as my mild-mannered math teacher ignored me ignoring him.
I lived in a beautiful house and attended a swanky private school, with parents deeply invested in my future. I was bestowed with every opportunity that a kid could dream of. Why, then, did I feel so angry?
At home, Papa was a thunderstorm and I was a lightning rod. By the time I was in tenth grade, the same year Papa banned me from cross-country, he erupted over seemingly anything: Getting a B on a test, sometimes even an A-minus. But it wasn’t just that. Putting a glass of lukewarm milk back in the fridge. Wearing shirts with sleeves that went past my fingertips. Massaging my temples—or yours—to ease a headache. Not finishing the custard he bought me from a Rita’s Italian Ice. All signs of illogical behavior, he screamed. Papa claimed his anger was over my grades, but I felt like this treatment awaited me at home regardless of what I did. One “illogical” move, and I could be grounded for weeks.
I had always loved school. I didn’t need a strict parent to push me to excel. But for so long, I had obeyed Papa’s rigorous training plan because I believed he was leading me to success. But I was starting to question whether Papa’s temper, or his labyrinthine rules, were really about my well-being. I noticed that when I replaced cross country with extracurriculars like tutoring and an entrepreneurial club, Papa didn’t threaten to pull me out over my unsteady grades. These new activities supported Papa’s image of who I should be. Papa said that I was sabotaging my future, but I felt like he was the one undermining it.
I still wanted to do well at school, but I was too on edge all the time. I couldn’t focus. I feared Papa’s wrath, though, so I dedicated myself to doctoring my report card. A few times during the school year, I sped home to intercept the mail during my lunch period. I pushed our 1991 Honda Civic hatchback to its absolute limit, praying that its little lawnmower engine wouldn’t putter out as I hit ninety miles an hour. I don’t remember where you were during the day, Mummy—maybe at one of your classes—but I knew that you weren’t home at that hour. I skipped lunch on those days.
While Papa was at work, I created a fake template on Microsoft Word in his computer room, located conveniently above the garage. I listened for grinding metal as I swiftly issued myself new grades. I never gave myself A’s; Papa might suspect something. I carefully opened the manila envelopes, making sure not to rip the edges. I compared my printed copy to Yush’s immaculate, straight-A report card, checking the heaviness of the ink on both. I then ran my fake report card through Papa’s photocopier until the weight of the ink matched the original. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt giddy, using Papa’s own expensive contraptions and machinery against him. The next day I’d bring the mail inside after school, open the envelopes before you had a chance to examine the edges, and then hand them to you, pretending they had just arrived. Papa was feeding me a lie, and I felt little remorse feeding one back to him.
When he reviewed my report card, Papa screamed, threatened to send me to public school, and then grounded me for a few weeks. I let Yush in on my secret, and he kept it because he didn’t want to witness me “getting my ass kicked by Papa,” as he put it. If this is how angry Papa was when I got B’s, we both feared what he would do if he saw my actual grades.
I pulled off my charade until the very last report card of the year. You found the original in my purse while I was at a friend’s house and handed it over to Papa.
I think I know why you busted me: My defiance hurt you. You had become a casualty in the war between Papa and me. You worked so hard to keep the peace at home. And here I was, poking the bull to get him to charge. My antics made a mockery of all that you had put up with to provide stability. I wonder now if you perceived my behavior as a personal rejection, not just of your efforts as a mother but of my duty within the family. Everyone had a role to play, and everyone continued to play their part, except for me. It is true that I took out my anger in ways that were hurtful. I spat in the face of your sacrifice, and for that, I am sorry.
When Papa found my real report card, he called me on my cellphone. I was shaking. This is it, I thought. I will live at home for the rest of my life.
When I got home, Papa didn’t yell. He didn’t scream. Instead, he met me with a chilling coldness. This was the paradox of Papa’s anger: His temper flared over the smallest things. But now I had done something wrong. I had lied about my performance. I had no intention of telling either of you the truth. I deserved punishment.
Papa didn’t raise his voice—not even once. Instead, he lectured me long into the night about how I was ruining my life. At this rate, I was going to be a janitor, Papa said. As Papa spoke, I felt the truth of his words. This time I deserved the words he said, and this time I knew that what he said about me was true. My badness could not be rehabilitated. Papa had given up on me. I was no longer worthy of his anger, only of his scorn.
Papa cast my rebellion as typical American teen behavior. But, Mummy, real rebels would have laughed at me. I ditched class once—only once—and I had no idea where to go, so I drove to Wegmans, where an aunty saw me. I was so nervous she would tell you that I didn’t do it again. When you found a pack of American Spirits in my closet that I had bought to commemorate turning eighteen, you accused me of smoking. I didn’t smoke. I did try weed a few times, but I coughed so much that I didn’t bother doing it again—I later learned that I have pretty bad asthma.
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 felt so ashamed that I was—as I put it then—“bad at being Indian.” At the time I thought I was abdicating my identity. Now I see that I was asserting it.
Yush and I both thought that Papa’s anger stemmed from the pressure he felt as a single-income earner and the sacrifices he made to give us a good education—an opportunity that he’d never had as an immigrant boy struggling in a new country, and one that I was now squandering. Papa, too, framed his medical school debt and long hours at the hospital as a sacrifice that, like so many immigrant parents make, was in service of offering Yush and me a better future. But in reality, Papa was not a recent immigrant struggling to make ends meet. His debt was a result of a decision he had made to leave a lucrative career path for one he considered more prestigious, and he had intentionally chosen a partner who did not have a career to compete with his own.
Papa loved quoting Frank Herbert’s Dune in his lectures, particularly the line “Fear is the mind-killer.” Beasts were ruled by fear. Men weren’t. Papa would then ask me, “Are you man or are you beast?”
When Papa’s lecture ended, and I stewed in self-pity and self-hatred, Yush would creep into my room, look at me, and say, “Come on, Prachi, are you man or are you beast?” He’d puff up his chest, beat his torso with his hands, and huff like a gorilla until we both laughed.
It turned out that Papa’s eerie calm that night wasn’t resignation. The moment was an opportunity, like striking oil. A reservoir of fuel that would burn righteous anger for months. That night, he stored the fuel away.
The fire eventually returned. Later, Papa smashed the handle on my bedroom door, breaking the locking mechanism. I had kept my bedroom door closed for, as he put it, “too long.” When I began cleaning up my room by picking up my clothes first instead of my books, he screamed that this was why I would never succeed. After I rented a movie he considered too artsy, he berated me in front of you and Yush for what felt like hours and yelled, “At this rate you’ll never amount to anything! You’ll be a maid for the rest of your life!”
When Yush and I disagreed, we didn’t scream or throw things. We did sometimes say hurtful things that we didn’t really mean. But we both always apologized, learned, and listened to each other. Yush’s love taught me that a fight does not have to become a war that ends in the total annihilation of another.
But I had assumed that, because Yush was not in Papa’s line of fire, he had been unaffected by Papa’s outbursts. Now I believe that Papa’s anger scared Yush deeply. I now think that he saw Papa’s treatment of me as a threat of what might happen to him if he failed to succeed in the ways Papa expected. 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.
Though two grades below me, Yush took AP calculus BC the same year I retook precalculus. That summer, he would join a lab at Lehigh University, working alongside physicists and engineers in their twenties. As a high school junior, he enrolled in advanced math courses at Lehigh, competed in a nationally ranked math team, and taught himself how to speed-solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Despite this, Yush was popular, I think because he would rather make someone smile than try to impress them. At his high school graduation, Yush pranked the school’s headmaster, a white British man. Yush painstakingly taught our headmaster how to pronounce a vaguely Indian-sounding middle name that Yush had made up: “VakaDakaRamaPutna.” At graduation, our headmaster unwittingly called Yush Pal VakaDakaRamaPutna Gupta to the stage, and the room boomed with laughter.
Papa’s fascination with computers and technology had initially turned Yush off to studying them. He told me that Papa took over his school projects and then Yush felt like what was his was not his anymore. At the time, I didn’t understand Yush’s hesitation to follow Papa’s lead. I viewed Yush’s talent in science and math as a gift and wished that, like him, I was naturally skilled in the exact ways that capitalism rewards. I never thought about the toll that his success took on him or what kind of pressure he must have felt to maintain it. I thought Yush—whose name means “glory” in Sanskrit—was blessed. Now I know that he was cursed.
By senior year, I had long blown my chances of getting into the sort of college that I had once considered my destiny. But I found a back door: What if I could get into a great school through my art? I applied to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, telling Papa that I could then transfer to another college within the university and study something serious, too.
Papa supported my application. Maybe he thought my loophole was clever. Or maybe he just thought it would be fun to print slides of my artwork on his fancy printer. But, briefly, we felt like a team: He took photos of all my paintings, and then he carefully cropped them in Photoshop. He asked me for my opinion as he went through the photos, and side by side we assessed each of them in his study. As we worked on the application together, I began to imagine again. I had been so mad at Papa for squashing my dreams, but now I was closer to them than ever before, and he was helping me get there.
At the last minute, as I double-checked my application, I realized that I had misremembered the number of art pieces needed. My portfolio fell short of the required amount. In order to apply, I’d have to create three more paintings within just a few days. I panicked.
“Just use some of Dadiji’s paintings,” Papa said.
“Isn’t that wrong?” I asked.
“It’s not wrong,” Papa said. “Why is it wrong? No one will know.”
“But it’s not my work,” I said.
“Do you want to get in or not?”
I was shocked that Papa encouraged me to cheat. His suggestion was so casual, as if this was the obvious solution and I had been stupid not to see it. Until now, the small lies he told sometimes seemed harmless: On my thirteenth birthday, Papa took us rafting and purchased me a children’s ticket. In my excitement, I had protested, tugging on Papa’s shirt to remind him that I was thirteen now—a bona fide teenager. He snapped, “You think I don’t know that? Just shut up! I’m telling them you’re twelve so I can get a discount!” Earlier that year, Papa dumped Yush and me at a first-class lounge in the New Delhi airport without paying for admission. He ordered us to pretend we couldn’t speak or understand anyone so that we could stay there for free while he and you left to find a ticketing agent. Yush and I saw these little scams as clever ways to upend a system of arbitrary rules enforced by bureaucrats. But Papa pushing me to lie on my college application felt different. Papa said that he valued achievement, but it seemed like he was willing to bend the rules to appear that way—even if that involved cheating.
I was scared of triggering Papa’s rage. First, I scrounged for any unfinished works I had, hoping to sidestep Papa’s directive. I found two unfinished pieces, which I used instead of Dadiji’s paintings. But I still came up one piece short. I then reluctantly sorted through a collection of Dadiji’s paintings in the attic. Our painting styles were nothing alike. Dadiji painted large geometric shapes with crisp edges, and I strove for photorealism. I landed on a painting of a thick black tree on a hill, painted against a stylized brown sunset. Out of all her paintings, this was the one that might stand out the least among my work. I added it to my portfolio. I felt ashamed of my application; it was a lie. I never told Dadiji, or anyone else, what I had done.
Months later, Carnegie Mellon sent me a thick packet. You handed it to me with excitement: I had been accepted. Papa said I could go. To my surprise, he even offered to pay the full tuition, room, and board—a sum easily totaling two hundred thousand dollars. I was amazed by Papa’s generosity.
But in the next sentence he added, “After that, you’re on your own. If you ever need any help or support, don’t come to me.”
I didn’t expect to rely on Papa financially after college, but in his words I heard a threat: Papa might disown me if I pursued art seriously. I didn’t want to risk losing more of Papa’s approval. A part of me also now doubted whether I could become an artist on my own merit. What if Dadiji’s painting was the best part of my application? The accomplishment that was supposed to be mine didn’t feel like my own, anymore. I didn’t want to launch my dream on a lie.
I said I wouldn’t go. I threw away the letter. Finally, I let go of my desire to become an artist for good.
After rejection letters from all the other colleges piled up, I expected Papa to scream, but he didn’t. Instead, I sensed a quiet, seething disappointment, like on the night of the report-card incident. Only one other college admitted me: the University of Pittsburgh. Although I would later feel grateful to have attended Pitt, at the time, I felt ashamed. I knew that Papa had not spent tens of thousands of dollars on my private school education to send me to an undergraduate program that he did not consider elite.
Just before I left for college, Papa took us out to a fancy restaurant. In the middle of the meal, in front of you and Yush, Papa said, “I can’t be there to control what you do, but there are three things you’re not allowed to do.” I understood that if he found out, or even suspected that I was doing any of these things, he’d pull me out of college and I’d have to live at home. “The first is, you are not allowed to have sex.”
My face flushed. I fiddled with the crusted salmon on my plate. I think rule number two was “no drugs,” but I had stopped listening. I forget what rule number three was. What I heard instead was, You may be going away, but don’t forget—you are not your own person.
When I tried to picture my future, I imagined a black canvas. I don’t mean to sound dramatic. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t worried that my life would end. But I couldn’t picture how a single thing would look—how I’d dress, what I’d do, who my friends would be, what I’d study, how I’d spend my free time, where I’d live. Trying to fill that dark space with lightness and distinct shapes and vibrant colors was a futile and dangerous act that would only torture me with possibilities that I knew I could never have.
I don’t remember what conversations you and I had about college, Mummy. I hate that Papa controls my memories, too. You and I must have discussed it, but we all understood my education was his domain. Laced with your maternal concern must have been a layer of trepidation as a woman who had never lived on her own, unsupervised, as I was now doing at such a young age. But I did not feel nervous, as you must have. I felt relieved. I was not as excited for a new beginning as I was for a definite ending.