Chapter 23
Wanting It All
By the time you and I were back in touch, I had moved to a smaller website that offered better hours and better pay. Around six months into that job, I interviewed for a senior-writer position at Cosmopolitan.com. The role would be an enormous step up in my career: The woman hired would become the face of the brand’s political coverage throughout the 2016 election, regularly appearing on TV to discuss women’s rights for the most visible women’s magazine in the world. I did not believe I had a chance. But after a months-long interview process, the website hired me.
When I was growing up, I saw Cosmopolitan as a portal into another dimension. Occasionally, I picked up a copy at a drugstore, and at home I’d sit on my bed and study the world of smooth-skinned, cherry-lipped women who rode around in convertibles and summered in the Hamptons. As a girl, I had longed to be seen the way those women were seen. When the website welcomed me as its star political reporter, I believed that I finally belonged among them.
If Barbie lived in her Dreamhouse, then she worked at the Cosmopolitan.com office, a space manicured to Instagrammable perfection, with cute cat-themed mouse pads, furry pillows, and gold-accented furniture. A bright neon sign in the office’s lobby gleamed i want it all in capital letters, the motto of the quintessential Cosmo girl. In the 1960s, then-editor Helen Gurley Brown marketed the “self-made” woman as effortlessly glamorous, sexually voracious, and endlessly ambitious. Implicit in this influential messaging was that the ideal woman was thin, straight, and white, and she earned her way to empowerment by pleasing men in bed, performing well at work, and buying the products advertised in Cosmo’s folds. A woman of color had never held the editor-in-chief role at Cosmo. Still, when the website hired me to cover an election that I believed would usher in the nation’s first female president, I took it as a sign that the brand, like America, was changing.
The job was more exhilarating than I could have imagined. A few months in, I traveled to Qatar and Jordan with a documentary filmmaker to cover Michelle Obama’s first solo trip to the Middle East. I attended fancy galas and interviewed celebrities and leaders who championed abortion rights, fought against sexual assault, and spoke out against pay inequality.
I shared some photos and emails with you, but I did not call you and Papa to tell you much; sharing anything emotional—even positive—felt too scary, and I didn’t want to put myself through that pain anymore. Instead, I poured the love that I couldn’t give to you and Papa into my work. My reporting earned Cosmpolitan.com an award from its corporate parent, Hearst, and boosted the brand’s profile as a political heavyweight. The thrill of my job helped distract me from the pain of losing touch with both of you.
I tried to separate my personal life from my professional life, yet to write about injustice, I had to draw from the well of rage within me every day. And my well was bottomless. As I interviewed more and more sexual-assault survivors, memories I suppressed in my late teens and early twenties resurfaced. I became enraged: Angry at Arthur and other men for what they did to me. Angry that I had become numb to men touching me without my permission. Angry that violence was celebrated as strength, but the ability to endure violence was cast as weakness. Angry that being vocal about my anger made me seem unreasonable. Angry that, because of all of this, trusting myself felt like delusion.
That same fall, Yush called me, sobbing. I had not heard him cry since his suicide attempt. He told me he was pushed out of the company by men he thought of as brothers. The company served thousands of stores across the country, relying on technology that Yush had coded. The company replaced him with the tall white mentee who Yush had personally recruited and trained.
Yush was once again reduced to the boy he had been in our white Pittsburgh neighborhood: a smart brown kid who could help someone with their homework but wasn’t wanted for much else. At the height of his professional success, Yush learned that even then he would never really belong.
“I feel like I’ve been raped,” Yush said through his tears.
“Yush, I know this is horrible, but you weren’t raped,” I said. “Please don’t say that.”
“No, Prachi,” he said, voice cracking. “That’s really how it feels. Like they raped me. They took something from me, a part of me,” he said. I knew then that I could not share with Yush the memories that had been resurfacing. I let the phrasing go and tried to support him as best as I could.
Ultimately, Yush blamed himself. He continued to tell me that, should an asteroid fall on him tomorrow, it would be his fault, because it would be something he should have been able to prevent. He took responsibility for everything that happened to him—a burden I cannot imagine and an illusion of control that must have been crippling. I worried about how these events might trigger a depressive episode, but I said nothing, afraid that if I pried, he would shut me out just as he was letting me in.
A few months after my conversation with Yush, the New York City police department advised women to buddy up in cabs as a response to increased assaults by drivers. The condescending advice enraged me. I funneled my turbulent emotions into an essay that traced the lines between what happened to me at sixteen and a larger paternalistic culture in which survivors are made to feel responsible for the violations of others. I had never written about myself before. I wrote in a voice that was not my own, trying to imitate the anger of white women I admired on the Internet. I mentioned the pepper spray that Yush gave me. I hadn’t been able to control my body or even how I responded to the violation in the past, so I wanted to control how I got to talk about and understand it now.
When Yush saw the essay, he was furious. He didn’t acknowledge the sexual assault at all. “You make me regret caring for you,” he told me over Gchat. “When you use the love that your family has for you to further your agenda of hatefulness towards men, you are a professional victim. You can use that as a quote in one of your articles.”
I don’t know what to say to you about that moment, Mummy. It felt like a confirmation of everything that Papa had always said about me and that you had tacitly endorsed. That I was too selfish, too emotional, too much, too hard to love. And it destroyed me, because now these words came from the one person in the world who had never made me feel that way growing up. This time, it must be true.
I broke down at my desk and cried. I was so deeply ashamed that I couldn’t find a way to hold on to the last person in our family, the only one I had left, the one I had thought I’d have in my corner forever, the one who I had promised to always protect.
Over Gchat, I told Yush that his words really hurt me and that I needed space from him. I blocked him and signed off my email. I left the office and walked in the cold from the Cosmopolitan.com office on 57th Street to my apartment in the East Village. I was finally becoming the woman I had always wanted to be, but I was heartbroken that Yush seemingly hated that woman. I knew, too, that I had crossed into a new identity: I was not trying to learn how to change myself to win back Yush’s approval. I wanted to learn how to live with the fact that the person I loved more than anyone could not love the woman I was becoming.
I did not have much faith in therapy. I had seen how therapists failed to catch the severity of Yush’s depression and how Papa manipulated therapy to deepen your self-doubt. In my own life, therapy had been a form of witness, a place where I could be honest when I had no other space to speak my truth. But therapy had never been a place where I learned new coping skills, gained insight into my behaviors, challenged myself, or found a sense of peace.
I had always put my faith in people I admired, people whose judgment I trusted above my own. For most of my life, Yush had been one of them. As I saw Yush turn into a person I didn’t recognize and didn’t like, I needed someone to tell me if they saw what I saw and, if so, why did I feel like I was losing my mind? Was I trapped in a delusion, as Papa appeared to be?
There was a hunger, a want, a rage inside me, but I could not let it out and I did not know how to. I desperately wanted someone to tell me where to situate the dysfunction: Was it in my Indianness? In my Americanness? In my womanness? A combination of these things? Even if I managed to parse any of this—a maddening, anxiety-inducing task that was both futile and impossible—I’d be confronted by circular, ontological questions: What did it even mean to be Indian, or American, or a woman—complex identities that are socially constructed? I felt confused, and then isolated by my confusion, embarrassed by how my questions fed into racist, one-dimensional beliefs, as if I relied on white people to tell me who I was and what was normal.
My sense of culture was so fragile that, for years, I identified with anything that vaguely suggested “Indianness”: the ornate paisley-mehndi print that, when added to any graphic design, alluded to South Asia, or the Samarkan font that gestured toward Hindi. When a relative from India visited us and saw that font, he was confused. “What is that supposed to be?” he said, trying to make sense of this strange type that was not satisfying as either English or Hindi. Papa explained to him that it was an English font imitating the Devanagari script.
“But it doesn’t look like Hindi,” the relative had said. I could tell by his reaction that he was confused. Why did one need an English font that gestured toward Hindi when Hindi…already existed? The font was once a useful assimilation tool for a new population of immigrants, but it had become widely used for “namaslay” pendants and advertisements for ubiquitous white-owned yoga studios, alluding to some vague notion of Eastern spirituality.
As a white-bred Indian American girl, I triangulated what it meant to be Indian by Papa’s expectations and these limited cultural signposts. When I began to sense how anemic my understanding of my own history was, I became threatened by the way white people appropriated South Asian cultural traditions in part because my relationship with Indian identity felt almost as appropriative. My insecurity over my identity had turned culture into a performance rather than something I inhabited authentically.
I had to find a therapist who would not interpret this ordinary, everyday confusion over identity and culture as self-hatred and who would not further stoke the internal division by treating these conflicts as brokenness. After seeing the effect that an Indian psychiatrist briefly had on you and seeing how a white psychiatrist failed you, I searched for Indian American therapists in New York City. PsychologyToday.com listed only one woman in Manhattan: Reka. On her website, she identified as a feminist and Buddhist. I emailed her, desperately hoping that she could help me.
I did not mention therapy to you or Papa. We now spoke sporadically over the phone, and none of us dared to share any aspect of our lives that felt remotely vulnerable. You always said that you were doing well and that Papa was doing well, and I never believed you, but I never pried. We never discussed the past. We never discussed Buaji’s family.
In our family, therapy suggested that someone was potentially suicidal. Therapy felt shameful. I don’t know what you believed you were supposed to gain from therapy, but on my intake form, I wrote that I wanted to learn how to be at peace with what I could not control and find a way to be happy.
Just as I began therapy, Donald Trump emerged as a top contender in the Republican Party presidential primary. He was unlike any political candidate I had ever seen. Like many of my peers, I was taken aback by his overt bigotry and his blustery speech. You and Papa could not believe that such a grotesque man could ever become president. Neither could I.
I didn’t say this to you, but behind his off-putting display, I recognized something in this man. He presented his feelings in the moment as the definitive truth, no matter how much evidence proved him wrong. He demonized anyone who attempted to expose or correct him. He took advantage of social norms to get what he wanted out of people, leaving them blindsided and confused after he no longer needed them. I did not have formal journalism training, but I had the training of a lifetime of dealing with someone who played with reality in this way.
It was sobering to watch a majority of white America uphold Trump’s bullying as the ideal form of masculinity and leadership. I had underestimated both Trump’s appeal and the allure of that kind of power to men like Papa. Papa would never be accepted by someone like Trump or his base, but within our home he mimicked the same behavior and reigned as king. When cable news outlets treated Trump as entertainment and journalists failed to hold him accountable, I felt a visceral rage.
In an election stoked by fear of immigrants, many brown women confided to me that they felt safer talking to me because of my identity. As Trump gained popularity, I wanted to use my platform to counter some of the false and dangerous narratives being spread by mostly white commentators on TV. Cosmopolitan.com appeared more progressive by featuring these perspectives, but the site forced me to decline every TV opportunity discussing Trump. I demanded a reason. It was too controversial to weigh in on Trump, I was finally told. I pushed back. This isn’t the Prachi show. When another Hearst site sent a white male writer to discuss Trump’s proposals on a cable-TV panel with a politician who embraced white supremacist views, I understood that what was controversial was not Trump, it was me—a brown woman speaking candidly, moving the political beyond the realm of theoretical and into the personal. Cosmo, which had an image to maintain among its white readership, was unwilling to rock the boat with advertisers by letting a brown woman criticize a popular presidential candidate on national television.
About six weeks before the election, I had an opportunity to interview Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, over the campaign’s paid-family-leave policy. The policy was meager, but because America is the only developed country without federal paid leave, they presented the policy as groundbreaking. Setting up Ivanka as its face enabled the campaign to frame a candidate publicly accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women as a champion of women’s rights.
When my phone call with Ivanka began, she launched into a script, repeating the talking points from an op-ed that she had published in The Wall Street Journal. I interrupted her to say that I needed clarity on her policy. She continued with her talking points. I interrupted her again, and then I asked her about details of the policy—specifically, why the policy excluded paternity leave for men. I asked her if her father still felt, as he had said before, that pregnant women were an inconvenience in the workplace.
She said my questions had a lot of “negativity.” She insinuated that I was lying about the pregnancy comment. Later, on Twitter, Ivanka criticized the magazine, and then her father, the future president of the United States, told Fox Business News that I was “a non-intelligent reporter,” had been “very rude,” and “really attacked” Ivanka. Their angry comments motivated a slew of his supporters to harass me online.
An executive at Hearst had cut a portion of my interview where I interrupted Ivanka. I was livid and demanded a reason from my editors. “We don’t want it to appear like you are bullying her,” they told me. I protested and I pushed back again, further cementing my reputation at work as a difficult woman, as a stubborn woman, as a woman who refused to accept what she’s told. After all, Ivanka projected the image of the ideal Cosmo Girl, and I did not.
I was the only reporter to poke through Ivanka’s polished veneer during the election cycle. The brief interview generated international headlines, brought an extraordinary amount of traffic to the site, and elevated the magazine’s reputation as a news outlet. As we celebrated, another editor stopped by my desk and said, “Your family must be so proud!” The polite, innocuous comment took me aback. I didn’t know what to say. I mumbled something like, “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
I think you and Papa were proud of what I had accomplished. I think you both were proud that the world was impressed by my work. But the beliefs of the woman who had produced that work—I worried that woman shamed our family.
Yush reached out to me to say he shared the interview with his friends. His friendly email filled me with hope for reconciliation. I asked him if he wanted to work on our relationship and try to start talking again. He wrote back, “I don’t think we can be friends—and at this point I don’t want to be. You’ve dedicated yourself to a political worldview, and one of its founding principles is hatred and disrespect towards people who are very much like me.”
His words shattered me all over again.
I told him I liked the woman I was becoming. I told him that even though we didn’t share the same views, I promised I wouldn’t try to change him anymore. I told him that I would be here when he was ready. I told him that no matter what, I loved him.