Chapter 15
Numb
After Yush moved to California to start his first job, I spent most of my weekends in New York City with Thomas, who was in his first year of residency. We had been together for about three years and had talked about marriage. But during residency, Thomas’s depression flared. He didn’t have time to see a therapist, he said, so I dedicated myself to taking care of him. I wanted to keep things peaceful and my needs small so that he could do his important, lifesaving work as a doctor. I thought this is what it meant to love someone well.
That winter, Thomas and I went back to Pittsburgh for a weekend visit. He made dinner reservations at my favorite restaurant, an upscale Asian fusion spot. We rarely went out to fancy restaurants, and when we did, we always split the bill, so when he told me he was taking me out, I suspected that he planned to propose.
After he paid and we left, I thought maybe the proposal wouldn’t happen that night after all. The temperature hovered around freezing. Thomas had a bad cold and felt feverish, but he suggested that we visit the Cathedral of Learning on Pitt’s campus. “Now?” I asked. “Can’t we go tomorrow?”
“No, I really want to go right now,” he said. I wondered why he was so insistent. We drove down to campus and walked for another ten minutes to the majestic tower. Thomas led me to a stairwell, stopping at the fifteenth floor. I recognized the spot immediately.
In our first year of dating, I had surprised him with a Valentine’s Day picnic. I’d brought a bottle of wine and glasses and taken him to that same spot, where a tiny window opened to a terrace on one of the towers. No one was allowed there, of course, but the window had not been barred shut. Thomas barely fit and had to wiggle his way through, but once he reached the terrace, we marveled at the view. The entire city stretched out before us, still and sparkling in the night.
When we arrived at the same window three years later, it was bolted shut. Flustered, Thomas said, “Let’s go to the top.”
Thomas was referring to the same window that Yush had once sought to jump from. I didn’t want to go there, and I was hurt that Thomas didn’t seem to remember that. But I didn’t say that to Thomas. I could tell he was anxious. Instead, I told him that I knew the windows up there were also shut. “Let’s leave,” I said.
Thomas insisted. I suppressed my anxiety. We arrived at the thirty-fifth floor. He walked over to both windows and tried to pry them open. I tried to stop thinking about whether Yush had done the same thing.
After he tested both windows, Thomas said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Thomas, it’s so cold and you’re sick!” I said.
“Let’s just go for a quick walk.”
I had grown irritated. I teetered down the sidewalk on three-inch heels, shivering in my thin wool coat, gray leggings and a long silky top. Thomas walked ahead and then stopped in front of Heinz Chapel, the stone building behind the Cathedral of Learning.
“Wait, I want to look at this,” he said.
I stared at the red door of the chapel that we had each seen infinite times, wondering if Thomas’s fever had made him delirious. Then Thomas got down on one knee. I saw a sparkling diamond, the ring I wanted, and he said a bunch of words—something about beautiful and smart and wanting to spend the rest of his life with me, I think, but I couldn’t focus and I couldn’t hear anything and I gave him my hand and he put the ring on it and then he paused and he asked, “Is that a yes?”
“Yes! Of course, yes!”
In building a life with Thomas, I could see a familiar trajectory: We would get married and then move to the suburbs and raise a family with two children by the time we were thirty, like you and Papa did. I had picked out a list of names for our future children—names that would fit into American society but also be distinctly Indian—and I knew that I wanted to take Thomas’s last name. The idea of starting a new family of my own with Thomas buoyed me in the face of our family’s chaos. I thought that he could save me, like a raft floating past in an ocean, giving me a place to rest as my own family drifted farther away. Marrying him would cut me out of our family’s dysfunction and place me in a new home that would be forever safe, secure, and stable.
I had always dreamed of having a large desi wedding. But now I was certain about one thing above all else: I did not want Papa to pay for our wedding. I feared that he would use that as justification to exert more power over me during married life. I had learned by now that I could not pay the steep, hidden cost of Papa’s generous and usually unsolicited gifts. Thomas and I decided to pay for a small wedding ourselves. We planned to celebrate our engagement with a few friends at a local dive bar.
Over a nice dinner at a restaurant, I told you and Papa about our engagement, and you both lit up. But Papa ran with his excitement, as if he was the one getting married. Seconds later he was already planning the party: who he’d invite and where to start looking for venues.
“Thomas and I want to pay for the wedding,” I said, interrupting Papa’s daydream.
Papa laughed. “It’s a nice sentiment,” he said, “but it’s just a sentiment. Nothing more.”
The father who had screamed at me for taking advantage of him financially now treated my ability to support myself as a mockery. I was angry.
But I had not seen Papa happy in years. Terrified that if I pushed too hard, Papa might hurt himself, that night I proposed a deal: He could do whatever he wanted for the engagement party, and Thomas and I would manage and pay for a small wedding. Papa agreed. I was proud that I’d brokered a compromise and staved off a crisis.
I worked among a group of men who proudly self-identified as bros—one even went by the nickname “Bro King.” They lived in central Pennsylvania but reveled in their big-city lifestyle, unironically raising their BlackBerry work phones in local bars while yelling, “Mansh! Mansh! Mansh!” in a huddle.
“The Mansh” was short for the Mansion, an ordinary suburban three-bedroom home in which they hosted Jersey Shore–themed dance parties in a dingy concrete laundry room. These were the exact type of men Papa had tried to shield me from and the very men I avoided in college, too. It felt ironic that success meant working alongside them now. To make my bleak reality slightly more palatable, with their permission, I started a blog ridiculing their antics.
Managers on my project worked nonstop. They lived in other cities but spent most of their weekdays in central Pennsylvania, drinking with these twenty-something bros every night. It seemed to me that success meant giving up one’s time, health, and relationships to make a rich corporation richer. After seeing how stress from work had affected Yush, it felt vital to not let my job take over my being. I no longer sought to rise within the firm. Instead, I wondered why I had been taught to make my ambitions so big yet keep my imagination so small.
I declined many after-work drinks and dinners because, every so often, I would get a call from you, frantic that Papa was suicidal. The calls weren’t frequent, but the fear of receiving one in front of my co-workers isolated me. One time, I had just sat down at a large table in a sports bar with half a dozen colleagues, when I heard from you.
“I think Papa’s going to do suicide,” you said through sobs.
“What’s he doing? What’s he saying?” I tried to keep a steady, calm voice, so as not to call attention to myself, but a co-worker noticed my expression fall and gestured to ask if I was okay. I waved her off. As I felt hot tears coming on, I blurted, “Sorry, I have to go.” I rushed out before my dinner arrived, without offering an explanation.
As I walked to my car in a nearby lot, numbed by the cold winter air, I let my tears flow. You described erratic behavior, Papa getting angry or violent. Rage swelled up within me on your behalf, but I felt so helpless. I tried to distinguish, through the phone, whether the behavior was in fact escalating to the point of self-harm, as you feared, or whether it was more of Papa’s commonplace anger that all of us had witnessed growing up. My effort to gauge which reaction was more harmful was futile. I validated your anger and fear, and then I criticized Papa with an eagerness that shames me now.
On the flip side, in these moments Papa called Yush and described you as volatile and screaming insults at him. Yush and I would receive contradictory sides of the story, then we’d call each other, attempting to triangulate the issues at home, both helpless because we couldn’t do anything from so far away. When we spoke to either of you again, everything resumed as normal.
Later, you’d call me up and say that Papa was angry about what I had said to you and that he didn’t like us talking to each other. You had embellished or misrepresented my words, telling Papa that I said I hated him, even though I didn’t say that. I felt betrayed.
“Why did you tell him that, Mummy?” I asked you.
“Prachi, don’t get mad,” you said, getting defensive.
Then I’d call Yush and vent to him about how much your behavior confused me: You treated Papa like the enemy one moment but were fiercely loyal to him the next. Eventually, after this cycle happened a few more times, I snapped at you. “If you don’t want me to hate him, then don’t talk to me about how bad my father is!” I yelled.
I am sorry, Mummy, that I didn’t understand that your back-and-forth was a reflection of how confusing it was to live with him. Without Yush and me at home as buffers, Papa was now your entire world. You felt responsible for his well-being, but you were also so angry at him for hurting you. I wonder if your decision to tell him some version of my thoughts was a way to share your own opinion passively, which was safer than directly saying that his behavior hurt you. We were all drowning, unintentionally dunking one another below the surface in an effort to lift ourselves up in a raging ocean.
I had opened up to only a few friends about what was happening within our family. With everyone else, I projected the image I was supposed to project, and so long as I did this, no one had any reason to think that something might be wrong. This is what I believed it meant to be okay: the ability to convince everyone else I was okay. But with the shortened days of winter, as I saw sunlight only as patches of light gray on my dark-gray cubicle wall, I felt increasingly unstable. For a few hours I’d keep my emotions at bay. Then, with a single comment or thought, in my head I raged at everyone who made me upset. Papa’s denial of the severity of his mental illness was destroying this family. I felt like I couldn’t talk to you about anything anymore. Worst of all, Yush and I were being forced to take sides. I told Yush that we couldn’t let our parents polarize us. This would ultimately prove to be impossible.
It seemed to me that everyone around me was unstable and it was my job to make sure that everyone was okay. I needed help, too, but you, Yush, Papa, and Thomas were already struggling with so much. Finally, I reached out to HR.
Angie, the woman who approved my time off, had once said something about therapy. She’d simply listed the options available to me as an employee: My company covered six sessions of talk therapy. But no one had ever suggested therapy to me before, and I so deeply craved some acknowledgment of the dysfunction in our family, and Angie spoke to me with such a sweet, concerned manner that I felt as if she cared for me.
At first, I had dismissed therapy because I wasn’t suicidal or battling life-impairing mental-health issues, and I thought therapy was really only for addressing serious issues like that. But now I needed to talk to someone—anyone—about this reality that I hid from the world. I booked six sessions with a white woman who appeared to be only a few years older than me. I described to her my family dysfunction. It felt good to talk to someone and have my emotions validated. At the time, I thought that was all therapy could offer me.
Ultimately, I lost my composure over a pizza. Just before I left work at seven p.m.—which was early—my boss asked me to order pizzas for the team members who stayed behind. I called in the order and then went back to my corporate apartment and ate what had become my usual dinner: handfuls of shredded Colby and Monterey Jack cheese straight from the bag and a half bottle of Yellow Tail shiraz. I turned on Law & Order: SVU and numbed out. One hour later, my cellphone rang. It was my boss. He sounded irritated. I had apparently messed up the pizza order. I ordered a chicken and veggie pizza, not a chicken and onion pizza.
After all the year had wrought, that phone call undid me. I was so livid that I could not sleep. I had reached my limit with family, with work, and with feeling horrible. All of the anger that I had repressed came rushing out. I paced around the living room and then wrote in my journal, gripping the pen hard, sloppy handwriting flowing. I stayed up all night writing and rewriting an email to my boss. In my rant, I noted that he never seemed to ask the men to order food for the team. I did recall, however, a male co-worker scheduling parties at the strip club after work. I was never invited to these—not that I wanted to go.
As daylight approached, I emailed my letter to a male co-worker I trusted and asked him to make sure it wasn’t offensive. I didn’t include the line about the strip club. I sent the email to my boss and cc’d his boss, telling them both that from now on the men on the team could place orders for themselves.
I had never done anything like it. I was not especially good at my job. After more than a year, I still didn’t understand much about data warehouses, SQL queries, or databases—information I had been expected to learn at work but had neither the interest nor the ability to focus on. Mostly, I expended my energy on suppressing my feelings. But I knew that the project suffered a shortage of workers and firing me would cause my boss far more work than he wanted to deal with.
In a private meeting, my boss told me that it was offensive that I had called him sexist. He said he was not sexist. I said okay. He never asked me to place food orders for the team again.
I left the office early that day, still fuming. I didn’t like who I was becoming. I complained about my boss every day, but in a way I also needed him to be a jerk, because otherwise I had to face the real source of my pain: that I felt like our family was falling apart, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I needed one domain within which I could change or control my circumstances. I decided that I needed to leave this project and go feel human again.
It all happened quickly after that. Angie from HR said I would likely qualify for unpaid leave because of what I was dealing with at home. This meant that I would still have a job and I would continue to have health insurance for two months.
I talked it over with Thomas. He supported me. I told him I wanted to try to become a writer. I did not write anymore, except for that bro blog. I didn’t know how to write what I really wanted to write about. Writing demands conviction. But the last thing that I could put on my page was me—not that I even really knew who that was. I prided myself on my ability to be a chameleon: to change myself to reflect what others needed of me when they needed it. This, I thought, was the quality that made me unique—that was what made me me.
But I knew that, for as long as I could remember, writing helped me make sense of the world. My journal was the only place that felt safe. I believed that deep within me was something I needed to coax out for my own survival and that writing would help me do that. I wondered if it was possible for me to feel the way I did when creating as a kid, or if that was a relic of childhood I had to give up as part of being an adult. I didn’t know the answer to these questions, but I knew I had to find out.
I know, Mummy, that you once kept a journal, too. I have a vague memory of a comment Papa made in passing when I was thirteen or so, so faint that I thought I might have conjured the detail out of a desire to feel closer to you. But I don’t believe I could have imagined it.
Even then I felt that there was something significant about you writing. I had struggled to see myself in you beyond our shared physicality. This tiny detail suggested that more of me came from you than I’d realized and alluded to a rich emotional life unknown to me.
“You know, Mom used to keep a journal, once—when she first moved to Canada,” Papa had said.
“Mummy, why did you stop writing?” I asked you. I wondered if the day you stopped writing, you stopped believing that your story could ever matter.
You said nothing.
“I don’t know,” Papa said, answering for you. “One day she ripped it up and threw it out,” he said, shrugging. You remained quiet, blank. “You should start writing again,” he said offhandedly. You looked away.
Ripping up a journal is ripping up a soul. Shaken by the violence of the act, I wanted to know everything: when you started keeping a journal, how often you wrote, why you wrote, what you wrote, why you stopped. What Papa dismissed as an inexplicable fit of hysterics was, I imagine, a response to something sinister that he did. But you would not tell me then, and I know that these are questions I cannot ask you now.
A few months after Thomas and I got engaged, I forced myself off the project by applying for the unpaid leave of absence. I didn’t tell you or Papa about my plan.
I feared that if I continued to follow Papa’s expectations, I’d end up as isolated and angry as he was. He had raised Yush and me to see the world as a place where our accomplishments, money, and social status defined our worth. The events of the year had prompted me to question this outlook. I saw that, despite all that Papa had accomplished and how intelligent he was, happiness and peace were strangers to my father, and that same drive for achievement had nearly killed my brother. I needed to prove to myself that I was capable of living beyond Papa’s shadow and that happiness was achievable some other way—or at least that it was possible to live without feeling this horrible all the time. I was miserable at my successful job and did not see anything particularly extraordinary about the work I did, only that we created a work culture that told us how extraordinary we were to mask how unhappy we all were.
The day I left the project, a colleague approached me and asked me what I was going to do with so much time off. It wasn’t a question.
“You’re going to be so bored,” he said. “You’re going to feel so empty. You’ll see.”
I laughed—a real, deep laugh. The thought that this job was supposed to give me purpose in life was so absurd that I found his comment hilarious. “No,” I said, “I’m going to finally be happy.”
He looked at with me with pity and then walked away.