Chapter 20
Parts Unearthed
The winter that I broke off the engagement with Thomas, Papa had reached out to me with such kindness. I’d wanted to accept his support so badly, but I knew that it wouldn’t last. Instead, I told him that I needed some time and that I would get in touch when I felt more stable. I meant what I said. Papa said he understood. He said he’d be waiting for me when I was ready.
Maybe he interpreted my extended silence as an act of war, because a few months later I realized he had responded with his own: I had been excommunicated again. Some time over the summer, Papa shuttered his medical practice in Pennsylvania, sold the house I’d grown up in, and bought a condo in Toronto near where he grew up. Neither of you called to tell me this news. I found out about the move by happenstance, when Dadaji called me to say hi. Over the course of that year, this is how information trickled down to me in the family. I was a tumor that had been surgically excised and discarded. But this time, I did not know why I had been cut out.
I was confused. Building a medical practice was a decades-long dream that Papa had achieved only in recent years. We had all assumed that he would run the practice through retirement. After a lifetime of moving, our family had finally settled into a community. Dadaji was surprised, too, but then again, Papa had always been impulsive. “Who knows,” Dadaji said. “Maybe it will be good for him. Maybe he’ll finally learn to relax.”
Papa had told family friends and distant relatives that he was moving to Toronto to look after Dadiji and Dadaji. When I ran into one of the Indian uncles in the community, the father of a boy I’d had a crush on in middle school, he expressed admiration at what a good, dutiful son Papa was. I forced a smile, saying, “Yeah.”
It is hard to put into words how much the news of your move and the loss of nearly all evidence of my childhood—particularly the sudden way in which I lost it—devastated me. For years, I would avoid friends from high school. I couldn’t explain to them why visiting felt so painful. My parents moved didn’t really capture what had happened—that Papa made a unilateral decision and cut me out of the family to the degree that not only was I not personally informed, but I knew that I would have been forcibly removed from the premises if I attempted to visit.
Thankfully, I had kept my journals with me since college. But I lost nearly all of my artwork, awards, books, and photos. I wondered if those drawings and paintings, some of which had earned me a coveted spot in Governor’s School, ended up in a Goodwill, or maybe a landfill, or maybe on the walls of some neighbor or family friend. I mustered the courage to ask Papa once, years later, and he just said he had no idea what happened to my artwork, as if it had evaporated.
You did try to save my things, including some of my paintings and photo albums, for which I am grateful. Over the next few years, neighbors and aunties would contact me to say that you’d left boxes behind for me. Ambika Aunty, the relative of Papa’s who had encouraged her children to play with me when I was younger, reached out to deliver a few of them. She lived in New Jersey, just a short drive from my East Village apartment, and I thought that in the Indian tradition of treating a relative like a daughter, she might invite me to her home or attempt to meet with me in New York. Instead, she called me one day to schedule a drive-by delivery. She and her husband pulled up to the curb. He grumbled about how I hadn’t been able to find him a better parking spot. They both stayed in the car with the hazard lights blinking as I took out the boxes and dumped them on a puke-stained sidewalk. I slammed the trunk shut and waved an awkward goodbye. They left and did not reach out to try to see me again. I understood what it meant. I was bad now, so best to keep away from me.
For years, the boxes sat in the back of my closet. When I finally gathered the courage to open them, hoping to find my artwork, racing bibs, or yearbooks, I found mostly old clothes that didn’t fit me anymore and outdated costume jewelry. I don’t know why you chose these things to pass on to me, and I cannot imagine the stress you must have been under as you attempted to pack up your home of more than a decade within weeks. But the things that really mattered to me were not things that had any resale value. They were just scraps of paper or canvas that could never matter to anyone else except, I had thought, my family.
Seeing my childhood tossed out felt deeply cruel. I thought that maybe Papa orchestrated it, insisting that most of my artwork be thrown out because he wanted to drive that knife into my wound a little bit deeper. But then I had another thought: I wondered if I was making it about me when it was not about me at all. What if I was simply collateral? That thought hurt me even more—that Papa was so careless with the evidence of my childhood not to hurt me but because it didn’t matter to him. Had it ever mattered?
I would not be able to write or paint anything authentic for years, plagued by that question. I would struggle to believe that anything I created could ever really matter, because it didn’t seem to matter to the people who were supposed to love me the most.
In the fall, a few weeks after you and Papa moved into the new condo in Toronto, Buaji called me. She told me that you had threatened to jump out of the car as Papa drove down an eight-lane superhighway. When you arrived at the condo, you refused to go upstairs, afraid you might jump from the balcony. Papa called Buaji’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Priya, who studied at a local university, for help. As you struggled with thoughts of suicide, Papa dumped you with Priya because he said you were too hard to deal with.
Priya took you to a local psychiatric clinic, but when you looked around and saw that you were lumped in with visibly distressed people, you forced a façade of perfection and downplayed your symptoms. You told the clinician treating you that you were just stressed due to a move, nothing more. But you refused to return to Papa, so Papa asked Buaji to take you in. Papa then went off to take a solo vacation to unwind and recover from the stress of dealing with a wife who was too hysterical, he told Buaji. I felt helpless throughout, relying on Buaji, Yush, and Priya to tell me what was happening, because Papa still wasn’t talking to me, and you told Priya that you refused to speak to me until I “made up” with Papa.
You arrived in Winnipeg, where Buaji lived, with a bag full of pills, some prescribed by psychiatrists and some prescribed by Papa. Fufaji, who was also a doctor, found you an Indian psychiatrist. She told him to stop giving you those pills immediately and took over your care. Fufaji hired a home aide to stay with you while he and Buaji worked, so that you wouldn’t be alone.
Papa thanked Buaji and Fufaji for taking you in, but almost immediately he became frightened of losing you. After you began to stabilize, a few weeks later, he insisted that you return to Toronto. Your psychiatrist strongly advised against this. To appease Papa, over the next several weeks you flew back and forth between Winnipeg and Toronto on weekends. In Winnipeg, you met with the psychiatrist regularly, and she recommended you take self-assertiveness and self-esteem classes. As you recovered, in frequent phone calls and during your brief weekend visits to Toronto, Papa could sense your confusion. The invisible split deep within you was now visible at the surface.
After refusing to speak to me for around a year, you reached out to me from Buaji’s home. In regular video chats over Skype, I could see that you had space to think and feel. You began to wonder who you really were and what you wanted and how to figure that out. You didn’t know up from down or down from up, because to live with him was to live in a world that was constantly spinning on an axis he controlled, and you never had a chance to steady yourself. You came to this country upon marrying him, with no choice but to trust the person who governed your housing, your immigration status, and your access to any Indian community here. You were confused, saying he was such a good man one moment and the next saying you could not survive another thirty years with him.
Suddenly, you had to move from the only permanent home you’d ever had in this country, and you could not tell me about it. You had not wanted to leave, you revealed, but you didn’t tell me what pushed Papa to close his business or move to Canada—changes that appeared drastic and sudden to me. I do not believe that your threat on your life was an inexplicable hysteria, or simply due to change, as Papa characterized it to Buaji. I believe you made a desperate choice rooted in the bleakness of a reality you did not want.
You didn’t want Yush or me to see you so anxious, so we waited a few weeks and planned to see you in Winnipeg over Thanksgiving. You were looking forward to seeing us, and had asked Buaji not to tell Papa that Yush and I were coming. You were afraid of what Papa would do if he found out you had made plans to see us without involving him.
Buaji said she didn’t want to keep secrets, so she invited Papa to be with us, too. Papa declined her invitation.
Winter had settled in the city, draping the flat prairie landscape with a thick sheet of snow that would last until spring. Yush and I waited for Fufaji at the airport’s curbside parking, jittery in the cold, excited to see you. When Fufaji picked us up, he said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Hours after you landed in Winnipeg, and hours before Yush and I boarded the plane to visit you, Papa had harmed himself and gone to the ER. He called you from the hospital and demanded that you come home before seeing Yush and me. Buaji remembers the desperation in your voice, as you cried, “But they’re almost here, I want to see them.” Papa received a brief psychiatric evaluation but declined treatment and went home within twenty-four hours.
Papa needed help, too. But when he used his pain to isolate you from Yush and me, I felt only rage and betrayal.
Our reunion was not a happy one, but I was surprised by its warmth. The closeness I shared with you in childhood returned instantly, as if it had never disappeared. You sat cross-legged on a couch in Buaji’s sunroom, with a computer on your lap, and I nestled in next to you, resting my head on your shoulder and hugging you. I didn’t want to let you go. I set up a social-media account for you so that I could share some photos. You sent me an adorable test email called “facebook facts,” writing: “today i am going to do facebook and see whats out there and if i would like to get involved in wasting time like millions do.”
For the first time in years, I felt hopeful because I could see you stumbling back to yourself. You dropped the façade that you had been forced to maintain for so long, and you told me you were proud of me “for being able to stand on my own two feet.” I had thought I brought you only shame, but I understood then that you had split yourself into two and buried half in order to survive. That buried part of you, briefly unearthed, likely understood why I had run away from Papa that day just over a year ago. Your words became my North Star. I will always stand on my own two feet, for you.
That night you and I shared a bed, just as we did when I was little and Papa was working. This time I held you as if you were my child. You cried and told me you didn’t know what to do. You wanted to stay in Winnipeg for a few months and continue your treatment. But if you stayed, Papa would consider it tantamount to divorce. You didn’t believe you were capable of supporting yourself if he left you.
“Buaji and Yush and I will help you,” I said. “You can drive. You can work. You are healthy. You are capable,” I said.
“You have a choice,” I said.
“What choice do I have, Prachi?” you cried.
I didn’t know what to say. Neither option was good or easy, but I did not feel like it was my place to tell you that. I had a freedom that you did not have.
Buaji told Yush and me that you had to make the decision for yourself. She told us that if we pressured you to do what we wanted, then we were no better than Papa, denying your agency. I was angered by this advice at first, but later I saw that she was right.
The next day, Papa called you to say he had bought a plane ticket for you and demanded that you return to Toronto because he needed you. Yush and I couldn’t convince you that going back to him terrified us, for both his health and yours. We couldn’t convince you that you were not responsible for Papa’s choices. We didn’t know how to prove to you that we needed you, too.
After only twenty-four hours with you, we drove you to the airport and watched you go back to Papa. I knew then that, just as I had found you, I had lost you again.
The first night in Winnipeg, I’d vented my rage to Yush and Buaji, angry because I believed that Papa was manipulating you through self-harm. Yush had uncharacteristically yelled at me. “Papa is in the hospital, and you shouldn’t talk about our father that way,” he said, as he stormed out of the room. The next day, after he witnessed Papa twist your love against you in real time, Yush snapped in the opposite direction. He said Papa was dead to him. He insisted that you divorce Papa. You got mad at Yush for pressuring you.
Months after that visit, Yush would send Buaji and Fufaji a handwritten letter to thank them for how they had taken care of you. “I can’t stress enough how much of a blessing it is to have the two of you in our lives,” he wrote. “It is inspiring really, in terms of what is possible, and is one of the clearest examples of what real love feels like that I have ever felt.”
The next day, Buaji called Papa and again invited him to come to Winnipeg. “Your kids are here, and they want to spend time with their family,” she said.
You and Papa flew back to Winnipeg together on Thanksgiving Day. When Papa arrived, Yush refused to greet him. Although I was mad at Papa, too, I was troubled by Yush’s whiplash reversal.
Papa sat down with Buaji and Fufaji, and said that he harmed himself because the thought of you seeing his kids without him was too painful. He told them that a part of him had always wondered if he was different from other people. He said that he’d know for sure if everyone he loved told him he needed help. In Papa’s words, I recognized the question that he had once presented to Yush and me as a logic puzzle when we were kids. I felt both sad and disturbed when I realized that his question to us had not been hypothetical but an actual navigation tool that he had devised to move through life.
“You’re at that place,” they said. “You need help. If you continue like this, you’re going to lose your family.” He teetered on the edge of self-awareness for a few hours.
After Papa spoke to Buaji and Fufaji, he asked to speak to me. I was now in the uncomfortable position of playing intermediary within our family. I was scared of what Papa might say, but Papa saw my stiffness and said, “It’s okay, I’m not going to yell.” I didn’t believe him. I sat before him, tense, rigid, quiet.
“Beta, I know I haven’t always been fair to you,” he said. The words churned something inside me, something that I had numbed, but the churning stopped when he said, “But I never tried to control you. Everything I did, I did because I wanted the best for you.”
At the end of that week in Winnipeg, you went back to Toronto with Papa. From there, you snuck in calls to Buaji. You stole time every few days and begged her, Don’t stop calling me. Sometimes the conversations were short, like when you called Buaji from the bathroom of a restaurant, desperate to talk. Other times you talked for an hour, hanging up abruptly when Papa came home.
Papa continued to dedicate himself to the illusion of perfection and used you to help him maintain it. In Winnipeg, Papa had said you were both sick and needed help and you should get treatment together. But when you got back to Toronto, it did not take much time for Papa to convince everyone that he was sane and you were not. You told Buaji that Papa picked your psychiatrist for you. She recalls you telling her that he had rejected the first one because the psychiatrist wouldn’t allow Papa’s involvement. Papa found an older white man to treat you, a man who was willing to let Papa have his say. Unlike the Indian psychiatrist you had seen in Winnipeg, this man did not recommend self-assertiveness or self-esteem classes. I doubt that he had the cultural competency to even begin to understand who you were or what your life had been like. I wonder if he was aware that more than half of women seen in mental-health settings have experienced, or are currently experiencing, abuse from an intimate partner. In sessions, you spoke and this man mostly just listened to your self-censored speech, silently upping your dose of medication, slowly dulling your senses and further undermining your sense of reality.
Then one day that winter, the calls to Buaji stopped. She phoned you repeatedly over the course of several months, but you never answered, and we never found out why.
Slowly, your therapist convinced you that you were not an abused woman, you were simply an anxious wife whose biggest problem was having too much time on her hands. I had feared this would happen, and I knew it did when, six years later, I read what both of you had written in a lawsuit defending Papa’s upstanding moral character.
Papa’s cousin had contested a will that named Papa as the sole beneficiary of her father’s estate. The news of the will had surprised Dadaji, who’d encouraged his brother-in-law to write one for years, to no avail. Buaji, Fufaji, and Dadaji wrote affidavits in support of Papa’s cousin, offering their perspectives on why the circumstances around the will seemed suspicious to them. In response, Papa collected testimonies from friends and relatives who vouched for his integrity, presenting evidence that reflected no undue influence. They settled the lawsuit with Papa retaining control of his uncle’s estate, finding no wrongdoing. But the documents submitted exposed our family’s messiness in such plain language that it startled even me.
Through these statements, I learned how you and Papa characterized your weeks recovering in Winnipeg. Papa wrote that you had a “nervous breakdown,” which was true enough, but he presented it as some inexplicable craziness that you had brought upon yourself. In your “confused state of mind, at the time, she blamed me for her problems,” he wrote. He described you as chronically anxious and himself as your benevolent caretaker: “After many years of medical intervention, my wife realizes that I was simply trying to help her all those years ago when I suggested professional assistance.”
You accepted some responsibility for Papa’s actions, too, writing, “I was devastated that he would do something like this, and that my actions may have led him to trying to take his life again.” You wrote, “My therapist helped me realize that I was not an abused wife and that [my husband] was correct in telling me that I needed professional assistance to manage my anxiety.” Even though I already suspected that this was how Papa cast an alternate reality, my stomach dropped when I saw what you had written. I wondered if Papa pressured you to write that or if you now really believed that you were the source of Papa’s problems.
For so long, I was embarrassed by how little I was able to recall about you. I was tortured by what I could not remember, left with strong feelings but little dialogue or specific interactions to tack these deep impressions onto. I thought this said something ugly about my love for you. But now I realize that the haziness of my memory was by design. Papa was a storm casting a perpetual fog around you. He did not want us to ever really see each other. Instead, we knew each other by how we anticipated and responded to his actions. We have known each other as small echoes of our own voices.
If I was an outsider reading the conflicting affidavits, I am not sure whose version of the truth I would have believed. The accounts presented such polar-opposite interpretations that it was clear someone was mistaken—but, with everything presented as fact, how could any objective bystander begin to determine who? The familiar childhood feeling of not being able to trust my own senses returned.
By now I had distanced myself from most of the Indian community I’d grown up with, particularly those who viewed Papa as “a saint,” as one close relative once called him. I didn’t slip away from these relatives and friends because I looked down on them or because I didn’t care about my family or my culture, as Papa likely portrayed it. I have wonderful memories of their kindness and love, and it is hard to articulate how much I miss celebrating with them the holidays that rooted me in some sense of cultural identity. But I remained standoffish because everything you and I experienced at home ran counter to how Papa presented himself to the world, and around them, I had to either silence myself and play a role to sustain Papa’s performance or risk sounding like a conspiracy theorist to people who had seen nothing but his generosity and kindness. Every time I performed normalcy and denied my reality, I fractured myself; every time I spoke my truth to people who denied it, I fractured myself. Eventually, I had to distance myself to preserve myself.
I understood how scary it was to trust yourself. For me, the hardest part was not dealing with Papa’s volatility or verbal onslaught or even the physical violence; it was the way in which our realities were denied and rewritten, how I felt so confused when I spoke the truth. A seemingly benign interaction could snowball into something where my sanity slipped and I couldn’t explain what happened or why: When he threw me out of the house over some perceived slight and then complained to friends and family that I was too self-absorbed to ever visit him, their limited interactions with his increasingly withdrawn daughter confirmed the impression that I was cold, heartless, and ungrateful, as he foretold. The more I tried to explain my version of events, the more deranged, bitter, and angry I sounded. The pain of being seen through that lens by people I cared for hurt too much. I knew that they could never see what you and I saw, and so instead of bargaining with them, I let them go.
When I last saw you in Winnipeg, you had been trying to make the same calculations: You were wrestling with whether to perform normalcy and what that might cost you; whether to speak your truth and what that might cost you; trying to determine whom you could trust with each warring part of yourself. I wondered, though, if when you returned to him, you gave up the fight and surrendered to his all-consuming power.