Chapter 13
Discovering Aliens
I worked as a business technology analyst, specializing in information management. I couldn’t explain to you what this title meant or what my job entailed, though, because I myself had little idea. After a week of training in Pittsburgh, the new-hire class flew to Orlando, where hundreds of recent college graduates filled a convention hall and learned about how impressive the firm was and how impressive each of us was for being hired by the firm. During that first month, I spent ten-hour days staring at PowerPoint slides in conference rooms alongside colleagues who struggled to absorb the information thrown at us. After I put in six more weeks making PowerPoint slides from home about terms I would ultimately never understand, in September, the firm placed me on a project in Boston.
Travel was a part of the job: I would spend my weekends in Pittsburgh, flying to Boston for the project, where I’d stay at a hotel from Monday through Thursday. I had been brought in for an urgent, mysterious task, but no one told me what that was. After an entire week, I still did not understand the project or my role on it, yet I was there until ten o’clock every night. On Friday evening, things became even less clear. The partner leading the project told the analysts to cancel our Monday-morning flights; we’d have to come up Sunday. “It doesn’t matter how much it costs, just do it,” he said. We estimated that Sunday’s work, whatever it was, would cost the client an additional ten thousand dollars. This is it, I thought. All of my new training and knowledge will finally be put to use.
We spent Sunday reformatting Excel spreadsheets. For six hours, we adjusted font sizes and colors and added borders to tables. This is when I realized that, while the firm promoted itself as an elite institution for only the best and the brightest, I had not been hired for my advanced knowledge, my depth of experience, or my riveting intellect. I had been hired because I was an overachiever who had aged out of a grading system and needed a new system within which to prove my worth. In this way, I suppose I had found the perfect job for me.
The call came three nights later, around midnight. I was asleep. I didn’t recognize the number. I ignored it. The phone rang again. I picked up, irritated but concerned. Why would anyone call so late?
“Prachi, this is Gabe, Yush’s friend. We found Yush’s suicide note—”
I knew that Yush’s friends often played pranks. Yush told me that he sometimes ran a “fight club” in his room, where he and his friends would wrestle or take swipes at one another, imitating Brad Pitt from the movie. I think he probably exaggerated swapping a few playful jabs with friends, but the idolization of violence still worried me. Yush dismissed it as “a guy thing” that I wouldn’t understand.
But this time they’d gone too far. I got angry. “Gabe, if this is some sort of joke, it’s not funny,” I said, my voice cracking with worry.
“It’s not a joke.” Gabe’s voice was urgent but calm. “Yush wrote a suicide note. His car is gone. We’re looking for him with the police. Have you heard from him?”
I started hyperventilating. I tried to think about how I could help.
“Do you know his license plate number?” Gabe asked.
“I don’t.” I got mad at myself. How could I not have memorized his plates?
Gabe told me they’d keep looking and give me updates.
Yush was trying to kill himself—or maybe he was already dead—and I was pacing back and forth, hundreds of miles away, in a Westin hotel room. The following minutes were agony. I left Yush voicemail after voicemail, crying into the machine, telling him how much I loved him, please don’t do this, don’t leave me alone in this world, don’t take away my best friend. I need you, I said. I love you so, so much. The machine cut me off. I called again. The machine cut me off. I called again. I had no idea if Yush would ever hear those messages. I was alone, and my fear strangled me.
I called Thomas and woke him up. He was calm. He was always calm. Sometimes I wished that he would get angry or scared on my behalf. I asked Thomas if I should call you and Papa. “Of course,” he said. “They’re your parents.” In my panicked state, I had hesitated because I wanted to somehow bring Yush to safety before I involved you both, even though, of course, I could not. I did not want to call you, Mummy, to tell you that your son was missing and might, in that very moment, be killing himself.
Ultimately, I called. Papa at first didn’t understand what I was saying, and then he said he was on his way. You both drove to Pittsburgh in the middle of the night.
I don’t know how much time passed, but Yush called me back. I had never cried so hard, and I hoped to never cry like that again. Yush was laughing maniacally, like a cartoon villain. There was something so off and so distant about his voice. Dark, sinister, twisted. He kept laughing. “I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry, Prach, I’m fine.”
Hours earlier, Yush had visited the top of the Cathedral of Learning, the tall tower on Pitt’s college campus, where I’d sat in class two years before. He had planned to jump from the top, but the windows were barred shut. He then drove to a gas station and filled up a carton with gasoline. He poured the gasoline over his body somewhere in the woods behind Carnegie Mellon, among the trails we had run through together countless times. When I was calling him, he was debating whether to light himself on fire.
The campus police found him and took him to the emergency room, where he was treated for gasoline contact burns. Yush later told me that he had purposefully not reached out to me that day. He knew if he heard my voice, he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. My voicemail saved his life. If my phone hadn’t been charged, if it had been on silent, if it had been in my bag, if cellphones hadn’t existed, my little brother, my only sibling, my best friend, would have been dead.
The next twelve hours were hell for all of us. I was shaking all over. I was crying, but my face was too weak to move, and I emitted these almost choking sounds. I needed to wait out the time but didn’t know what to do. I took a long hot shower and stood there, my tears melding with the water, trying to understand what happened to a boy I thought I knew everything about. After my shower, I sat down with my laptop to research suicide. I spent a long time crafting an email to my project manager about why I needed to leave, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone what was happening, because I didn’t understand it myself. Yush was not dead, but he was not really alive, either. At least, not in my mind. Something seismic had shifted for all of us, and I didn’t know what it meant or why it happened or what came next, but I understood that nothing in our world would ever be the same. When sunlight returned, I went to the airport. It would be another six excruciating hours before I was in Pittsburgh with you and Papa and Yush.
On the plane, tears poured down my face, and my nose ran, and my whole body shook. An older white woman sitting next to me asked if I was okay. I shook my head no and she asked me if I wanted to talk and I said no. Nancy, who was Catholic, had once said she believed suicide was selfish, and in that moment I worried that if I told people my brother tried to kill himself, would they think less of him—or of me? I didn’t understand anything about suicide, but I knew that Yush was not selfish, and I could not bear the thought of anyone thinking that he was.
When I got to Pittsburgh, I collapsed on the bed in your hotel room. I sobbed into the comforter as you sat next to me with your hand on my back. It was strange how calm Papa was, and it bothered me. Show some emotion; this is not the time to repress it, I thought. Papa told me that it was important that when I saw Yush, I did not cry. Yush should not know how sad I was, because it would make him feel guilty, and Yush needed us to be strong.
The two of you had arrived as Yush was admitted to the psychiatric center that morning. Yush later told me that when he saw Papa, the father we both related to through intellect, Yush had little reaction and felt little emotion. But when he saw you, the mother who made room for our self-expression, he cried in your arms, his first emotional release. And when Yush saw me that afternoon, he crumbled. Our bodies folded into each other. He shook wildly, sobbing into the side of my head, and I held on to him with such force that he could feel, in his bones, that I would never, ever let him go.
It took everything I had to not lose my composure, but I didn’t let myself cry in front of my brother, as Papa had commanded.
Now I wish that I had sobbed and let my tears funnel into a stream that carried Yush ashore. I needed Yush to know that he was my world. I needed Yush to know that I would crumble without him, too. I needed Yush to know that crying was not weakness. I needed Yush to know that around me, he never had to pretend to not be sad. And I, too, needed to know that my sadness was not a burden on my brother, that it was an outpouring of the love we shared.
Yush stayed at the ward for the next two weeks. I planned my entire life around the two brief windows of time during which I could see him: once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. I had walked by the drab building countless times on the way to Thomas’s apartment but never really noticed it before. The women at the front desk began to recognize me. “No one comes by to see the family this often,” they said. “You’re a really good sister,” they said. If I were such a good sister, I thought, none of this would have happened.
Before entering the ward, we had to place most of our belongings in lockers. This included anything that could be used as a weapon, like pencils, shoelaces, keys, and coins. One of the few things allowed inside were books. But what kind of book do you buy someone who maybe wants to kill himself when he’s stuck in a place where he definitely can’t kill himself? I spent hours at Barnes & Noble trying to pick something, but nothing felt right. I bought six books, settling on a haphazard collection that included Through the Looking-Glass and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I knew that Yush probably didn’t feel like reading much, but I needed him to know that I cared.
Yush slept in a small room with a twin-size bed. He wore sweatpants and sweatshirts without laces, and socks but no shoes, because he didn’t leave the floor for two weeks. It seemed like a prison, but Yush said that the staff was kind, and he seemed to be relieved to have a break from functioning in the real world. I wanted to cocoon myself around my little brother and wrap him with warmth and keep him safe forever.
Yush didn’t want to think of the people in the ward as friends, exactly. The more he talked to them, the more he wondered how he could have ended up there—with people who came from horrendously abusive families and had real problems, he said. Yush took some assessment test, and the psychiatrist told him that he was probably the smartest patient he’d ever tested, another fact that made us feel like Yush was an anomaly, as if his intelligence meant that he should have been able to logic himself back to sanity.
At first you felt guilty, as if you had caused Yush’s mental illness because one of your brothers had schizophrenia. We didn’t talk about my uncle much, so I don’t know how you viewed his mental health and I don’t know how witnessing your older brother’s dramatic, heartbreaking change—from someone lively, smart, and funny, like Yush, to the heavily medicated, foggy uncle I saw briefly on the few trips we had taken to India—affected you as a girl. But once, when we were in college, Papa told us that you had been engaged to a man before him—a fact that stunned me for many reasons: because breaking off an engagement was so defiant, because I had thought of you as so traditional, because I was still learning new secrets about you. You said that you ended the engagement when you saw how the man’s family treated his mentally ill sibling, keeping him locked in a room and away from everyone else. Their actions were not unheard of in the context of the oppressive stigma and shame that mental illness carried in India, but seeing this disgusted you. Nanaji respected your wishes, even though I am sure publicly breaking an engagement must have damaged his reputation and yours. It must have been terrifying to watch your son and fear that, yet again, you might lose a man you loved to an illness you did not understand.
Papa felt guilty, too. He told us, for the first time ever, that he believed his family had a history of depression. Maybe that’s what caused Yush’s unhappiness, he said. Papa’s façade of omniscience cracked and he broke down, asking me if he’d been too hard on Yush. I had never seen Papa doubt himself before, and it made him finally seem human to me. As he confided his fears, I cried and I said, “No, Papa, you’ve given us everything, you’re a perfect dad.”
Ultimately, I don’t know how you made sense of Yush’s suicide attempt or his mental health. While I think it’s likely that Yush had a genetic predisposition toward depression, I believe that the pressures that led Yush to consider taking his life were complex and not summed up simply by genetics.
Over the next two weeks, Yush told me how he gradually lost touch with reality. All summer he had been working long hours to make sure everything was correct for his part in a capsule that would be launched to the International Space Station. But when he ran his code, something failed. He hunted for the bug for weeks, he told me, breaking apart his code and putting it back together again and again, unable to find the error. At the end of the summer, he learned that the mistake was not in his code but in someone else’s, causing Yush’s to fail upon execution. He realized this only after a colleague had fixed their code, after which Yush’s software suddenly ran smoothly. Yush had beaten himself up over a mistake he assumed was his, literally breaking himself to fix something that was never broken. He believed that the stress triggered psychosis. Yush knew that success wasn’t worth his sanity. When he was offered a job at the end of the internship, he turned it down without hesitation. He lost his mind and almost his life, but his flawless code ended up in the International Space Station.
He had known that he needed help. A few weeks before the suicide attempt, when he returned to Pittsburgh to begin his senior year, Yush made a series of appointments with the college therapist. Unbeknownst to me or Thomas, he swiped a few of Thomas’s antidepressant pills from a bottle in Thomas’s car. But none of us—including Yush’s therapist—had picked up on how unwell Yush was or that he was on the verge of a psychotic break. That is how good Yush was at meeting the expectations of others.
He began to imagine that he was a vigilante meant to fight for justice. He walked through neighborhoods with high crime rates in the middle of the night and tried to intervene in fights. He concocted a plan to fly to South Africa, which had one of the highest murder rates in the world. He struggled with violent, intrusive thoughts. Eventually, his delusions turned against him, and he believed that he was the true evil in the world. He thought that the world would be a safer and better place without him in it, and so, that fall, he decided he had to end his life. To him, it was all very logical.
I don’t have access to Yush’s medical records, but according to my journal entry, Yush was diagnosed with psychotic depression and medicated with an antipsychotic and an antidepressant. On one emotional-assessment test, he scored high for repressed anger. This meant that he didn’t know how to express his anger, so he became an expert at holding it in and directed his rage at himself instead. He laughed at inappropriate times, often at very dark, morbid things that were not meant to be jokes. He felt antisocial and disconnected from others. Life wasn’t meaningless, he said, but he just didn’t fit in; he was not connected to the world, while everyone around him seemed to be. He slept in odd increments, no more than four hours at a time. Silence made him uncomfortable. He was changing, but I didn’t know to what extent the change revealed a true self that he had always repressed or a self that was buried under severe depression.
Yush told me that high school was the last time he had felt truly happy—a time before he found computers, when he had a full life, with hobbies like drumming and cross-country and reading fiction and dating girls. He had been naturally good at this thing that society rewarded him for, but I’m not sure that he ever really wanted to compete or excel. I remember when Papa pushed him to apply to one of the prestigious Phillips Academy boarding schools, but Yush didn’t want to. Papa was adamant, because the school was an entryway to the Ivy League. Yush reluctantly interviewed. I remember, Mummy, that when a letter arrived securing a spot on the waitlist for Yush, you intercepted it and showed Yush in private. He told you he didn’t want to go, and you agreed. You threw it out, and none of us told Papa. At the time, I scolded Yush for passing on an opportunity for success that I would never have, a chance to be among the truly elite. But Yush was happier at home. I think Yush would have been happy with a simple life. What I think he didn’t feel sure about was whether, if he chose that simple life, he’d still be loved and respected.
Looking back, I see that, by tossing out Yush’s letter or buying me clothes that we both knew Papa wouldn’t approve of, you carefully chose when and how to apply resistance to Papa’s expectations. You subtly exercised your influence within our family system. In these moments I see your resilience. Now I see that your decision to endure, too, was a deliberate choice.
In the fragile months that followed, you and Papa and I worked as a team. Papa rented an apartment down the street from mine, close to the Carnegie Mellon campus, which we furnished with a glass-top dining room table and large sofa that I found on Craigslist. You and Papa spent every weekend in Pittsburgh to be with Yush. I reached out to Yush’s friends regularly to keep tabs on him. I called you and Papa every week, sometimes multiple times, to let you know how Yush seemed to be doing. Yush probably resented that we treated him like fine china that could break at any moment, but we didn’t care, so long as he was alive.
For the first time ever, I felt that you and Papa needed me. The following months cemented my deep belief that there was nothing more important than family and that the four of us, despite our differences in the past, were committed fiercely to one another’s well-being. I knew then that I never wanted to be too far from you and Papa or Yush. I left the project in Boston and asked to be placed on something in Pennsylvania, so that I was never more than half a day’s drive from any of you.
But a part of Yush had closed off, even to me. I didn’t know how to express concern or show care for him without poking at an insecurity. I sensed, for the first time ever, a distance between us: each of us sizing up the other to assess whether this person was telling the truth or hiding something, because each of us feared that if we admitted how we really felt, the other might withdraw.
As dedicated as we were to one another, we were bound by shame. Days after Yush’s attempt, Chachiji, Papa’s sister-in-law, had called to ask me about my new job.
“Hey, Chachiji!” I answered cheerfully, as Papa drove.
He mouthed, Don’t say anything. I nodded, already knowing that whatever was happening to Yush was to be kept a secret. I happily recounted my new job, splitting myself from the pain of something I didn’t yet understand. We didn’t know how to control the stories that others would tell about Yush or us, and so it was best not to say anything at all. We put up a wall between ourselves and everyone else while pretending there was no wall at all.
Success was supposed to make one immune to struggle, I thought. I had long understood that mental illness didn’t happen in high-achieving Indian American families like ours. In fact, both Yush and I had believed that part of what made us so successful was this ability to clamp down on our feelings and not let them out all the time, the way white people did so gratuitously. In my simplistic understanding of the world, it was this unfiltered outpouring of feelings that caused white families so much strife, and it was our emotional discipline that enabled us to work hard and succeed.
None of us knew then that what Yush dealt with was not an anomaly but a tragically common symptom of the pressures he faced. We didn’t know that Asian American college students are more likely to deal with suicidal thoughts and attempt suicide than white students—straddling multiple cultures, experiencing racism, and living up to narrow expectations of achievement exerts extreme stress on the mind and body. To navigate those pressures, Yush and I learned to repress our feelings and forge onward, as Dadaji did, as Papa did, as you did. None of us knew that this very survival tactic compounded our pain.
There was no way for us to talk about any of this, because we did not know these problems even existed. We found out about a problem like most families do, when it became so big that it exploded in front of us and we could no longer avoid dealing with it. And we dealt with it the way most families do: quickly and quietly. We swept up the mess, put things back as best we could, and continued to live in the same way, as if nothing had ever happened. We didn’t know that by trying to forget, we were more deeply committing ourselves to the very circumstances and problems that had caused the explosion in the first place. We didn’t know that we were teaching Yush not to resolve his pain but to find more-creative ways to hide it. Now I wonder what decisions Yush would later have made if he had been encouraged to talk about his mental health, rather than feel pressured to stay quiet.
Despite having missed a full semester of college, Yush would graduate on time, with honors.
But as our family struggled to find some sense of normalcy, I began to question the idea of normal. Yush’s best friend, who also lived with depression, said, “This is a dumb analogy, but it sort of fits. It’s like in Men in Black. If you don’t believe in aliens, you walk around like everything is normal. But once you become aware of depression and how it lies to your mind, it’s like you know about the aliens. You can’t go back to the way you used to think, and you can’t believe how uninformed you were.” It was not the most eloquent analogy, but it captured my sentiments. For the first time in my life, I began to wonder what else I had failed to see because I had blocked it from view.