Chapter 12
Homecoming
Yush attended Carnegie Mellon, living about a mile down the street from me at Pitt. We saw each other every week, at least once if not more, and his friends became mine and mine became his. During finals week my junior year, when I got severely dehydrated from the flu, Yush came over to my apartment between classes to check up on me. I could not walk, I could only crawl. He camped out on my bedroom floor and helped me get to the bathroom, nursing me to health with gallons of Gatorade and Miyazaki films he downloaded on his laptop. I am sure it comforted you and Papa to know that we were there looking out for each other.
Although Yush had initially hesitated to study programming, in college he discovered tech projects that had the potential to change the world’s future. He joined the Google Lunar X Prize challenge to build a spacecraft and land it on the moon, ran a hackathon on campus, and learned to program his own operating system. He maintained a stellar GPA while taking the hardest courses the school offered in computer science and electrical engineering.
But as college progressed and his course load increased, Yush turned away from his social life. Like me, in high school he had discovered a natural talent for running, which enabled him to run for Carnegie Mellon’s cross-country team. When he dropped out after freshman year, I urged him to reconsider. I encouraged him to ask out one of my friends, a pretty Indian American woman who had a crush on him. He dismissed both as a distraction.
He lived off a diet of pasta and five-hour energy drinks. He devoured cookies, milk, and beer before bed to pack weight onto his wiry frame—an effort to bulk up, he said. He mused that the overwhelming majority of men in his computer science classes meant that women were less capable in science than men were. I gently pushed back, but my own lack of talent in math and science didn’t exactly support my case. I found his insecurities and growing bias against women troubling, but at the time it didn’t feel like Yush was changing much. It felt like he was blasting off into the heavens, accelerating along the trajectory of his destiny.
The summer that I graduated from college, Yush rented an apartment in Venice Beach while he interned at SpaceX. He coded software for a space capsule that delivered cargo to the International Space Station, but Swapna and I joked that he made fireworks, because that was about the most complex projectile we could fathom. One night, Elon Musk took the employees out for drinks. Yush bought him a shot at the bar, toasting by quoting Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, “To infinity and beyond!” Musk laughed, knocking back a shot on Yush’s command.
America was a year into its deepest economic fallout since the Great Depression. As most of my classmates watched their futures collapse, I had accepted an offer from a prestigious management-consulting firm. Thomas narrowed down his top residency program choices to cities where I could transfer offices, putting New York City at the top of his list. As I secured my future with Thomas, embarked upon my new career, and witnessed Yush’s rise, I felt as if everything in our lives was following the course that Papa had charted for us.
But this confused me, too. I had succeeded both in spite of Papa and because of Papa. I didn’t know how to reconcile the shame I felt when I wondered to what extent the traits that made Papa so hard to get along with were traits necessary to attain the kind of stability and security that I now enjoyed. What if I needed his anger to motivate me?
To celebrate my new job, I planned a ten-day vacation to Prague with Swapna, which I paid for with my signing bonus. A few weeks before the trip, I reviewed my schedule with Papa over the phone. I planned to come home two nights before my flight, and after the trip I’d spend another week at home with you and Papa.
“I think you are cutting it a little too close,” Papa said. “You need to do all of your packing. Mom and I know what goes into packing, and you can do a better job here.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t really understand.”
I thought that maybe Papa would offer a checklist of essentials to pack. Instead, Papa’s temper flared. “Why is it that you never respect what Mom and I have to say?”
The stakes of the conversation had just changed. We were no longer talking about logistics or packing. I was now caught in an earthquake, struggling to find footing as the ground rumbled beneath me. I realized later that Papa had wanted to spend more time with me at home before I left for my vacation, but he didn’t actually say that.
My confused, rushed responses further angered Papa. As I relay it now, the conversation sounds so absurd that it almost makes me laugh. But at that moment I shook with righteous rage. The angrier Papa became that I would not bend, the more rigid I became, every bit as stubborn as my father. Then Papa threatened to call the police and report that I was driving a stolen car.
“Go ahead!” I fumed.
“That’s it, I’m laying down the law!” Papa screamed. “You are coming home on Sunday. And if you don’t, you’re not going!”
“You can’t do that!” I yelled back. “I paid for the trip with my own money!”
“I don’t care! You’re not going!”
Then I did something I’d never done before: I hung up on him. It felt forbidden and scary. Good Indian Girls did not hang up on their fathers. But it was also a luxury. Now that I had a job, Papa couldn’t threaten to cut off my phone access, or forbid me to apply to jobs that he didn’t approve of, or warn that he’d stop paying my tuition—all threats that he had made in high school and college to keep me fully dependent upon him. Hanging up gave me a surge of power. Stemming the fight really was as simple as pressing a button.
A few minutes later, you called me. You urged me to do Papa’s bidding. In the past you had helped me avoid Papa’s wrath, but sometimes you carried out his orders like a soldier. This time you felt like his co-conspirator, applying a similar pressure. In this instance, your desires aligned with Papa’s.
You pleaded with me to come home earlier. You said that I had hurt Papa and that you were trying to calm him down, but this was so hard for you and you needed my cooperation. Your words tugged at my heart, but I would not budge. I must have been on speakerphone, because as I spoke to you, I heard Papa screaming, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” at me.
It is hard to convey the intensity of those screams. It was an uprising; a deranged, feral, guttural yell of an animal trying to escape from within the body of a man. Then Papa grabbed the phone and roared, “I don’t want to see you! Don’t come home!” I hung up on you both again.
I could have obliged. I have thought many times about why that felt impossible to me and why that impulse—the one that I had internalized as selfishness—served as the instinct that saved me years later. In that moment, Papa wanted me to react not to his literal words but to his anger. Even as I felt pathetic and childlike, defending myself in a rundown apartment that my father paid for, through a phone he had bought for me, I knew that something larger was at stake. Had I retreated, I would have validated Papa’s belief that bullying me was an appropriate way to get what he wanted. If I buckled now, I would be inviting into adulthood the very treatment that I had tried so hard to escape as a girl. I would be setting a precedent that I was still his to control.
You called the next morning to say that Papa was up all night, really hurting, and said that I didn’t respect him and that if he couldn’t be a father to me then he would have to cut me out of his life. You said that you didn’t want to cut me out of your life but you would do that if things didn’t change. I didn’t understand where any of this was coming from.
I learned later that Papa had rammed his head through the bathroom wall that night, repeatedly, leaving a gaping hole. The next day you had to find someone to patch up the drywall. You must have been so angry with me: I had the power to stop this, and I chose not to.
I felt like a routine phone call had opened a tenth circle of hell in mere seconds, and now an indestructible tie had somehow been severed. Yet I had never been so sure that I didn’t deserve to be treated like this. I was a good kid now. I was upholding my end of the bargain that—for years in high school, yes—I had reneged on. But my current success gave Papa so much to brag about. He even bragged about the money he saved by not sending me to an Ivy League school. I was far from perfect, but I was indisputably the sort of daughter that you both could finally be proud of in the Indian American community.
Looking back, I realize that this was the incident where I began to wonder if Papa’s temper and controlling nature were indicative of something extreme, a potential sign of an illness that none of us knew how to address. It was the first time I questioned if something else was at play, far beyond the image of strict Indian fathers that people around me had dismissed as cultural or the anger that Yush and I assumed was a byproduct of the stress of a sole breadwinner. I had never before heard of Papa turning his anger inward, and I had never heard you this scared.
Yush advised that I give Papa time to cool off and return the car Papa had let me borrow so he couldn’t use it to threaten me again. I followed Yush’s advice. I wrote Papa a letter to try to reason with him.
Papa emailed me a response, saying that I would never understand him. You called to tell me my letter was horrible.
I told you I wasn’t coming home. I hung up on you again. Any empowerment I felt from hanging up the phone on either of you had disappeared. All I felt now was deep shame, confusion, and sadness. I had followed the rules. I had done everything I was expected to do. Why was this happening?
It was after this incident that I first sought Buaji’s advice. I had never been particularly close to my aunt. I had been wary of her, reminded of Papa’s stories about how angry and selfish she could be, that she had once been a feminazi. But Buaji and Papa had set aside whatever differences they had as teenagers for the sake of family now. If anyone could help me navigate a relationship with my father, I thought, it was my aunt.
Buaji thought that perhaps Papa was acting out because he was stressed by all the change. His little girl was growing up, something that must have been bittersweet for him. Her advice: You can only control your own actions. Act in a way that you can be proud of, and you won’t have any regrets.
Every morning from Prague, I called home to say that I was safe. Papa would answer, say, “Okay,” and then hang up. He didn’t speak of our fight, and neither did I.
When I came home ten days later, Papa didn’t acknowledge me. When I entered a room, he drifted past without a word. It almost felt worse than the yelling. At least when he yelled at me or called me stupid, he acknowledged my existence. Now I felt like I didn’t matter to him at all. I took a Greyhound bus back to Pittsburgh the next morning. I don’t remember much about the following weeks, except that what should have been the most exciting summer of my life now felt like the worst summer, and I didn’t understand why.
A week before my birthday, Papa sent me an email. There was no trace of the enraged man who seemingly hated me. Instead, I recognized my other father, the loving father who doted on me. “I go to bed every night thinking of you and wake up every morning thinking of you and whenever I get a free moment, I turn to you,” it read. “I’m sure that the last month has been more stressful for you. Perhaps it is time for a new beginning. Let me know what you think.”
I knew that email must not have been easy for Papa to write. When we spoke on the phone, he said he was sorry. Then I said I was sorry, reflexively, because I thought I was expected to apologize to him, too. I tried to recall a time that I had ever heard Papa apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing to anyone but could not think of such an instance. The small gesture filled me with so much hope. The knot of anger within me immediately unraveled. I chalked up the incident to stress and believed his rage was a thing of the past. I knew that, going forward, Papa would treat me with respect, recognizing that I was finally the daughter that he had needed me to be. I flew back the following weekend, and the three of us sat as a family, flipping through my slideshow of photos of Prague.
I was home.