Chapter 28
When the Earth Splits Open
In the year after Yush’s death, I didn’t know how to be a person. I was nothing but a body, and sometimes I wasn’t even that. I was a collection of disparate parts, connected but unable to work in unison. I was a head, detached and floating in the sky, foggy and unable to think or speak for hours. Or I was my legs, moving against the ground but seeing only Yush in strangers around me. Other times I was just eyeballs, watching text and images roll in front of me but unable to process their meanings in my mind.
When Papa invited me to celebrate his birthday with him a few months after Yush’s funeral, I didn’t know what to say. A part of me wanted so badly to come together to remember Yush with you and Papa. But when I played out the fantasy of togetherness in my mind, I imagined Papa parading me around as his prized daughter among people I did not know, only because I was the child who lived. I could see that at the very moment when I’d begin to believe the performance was real, when I’d feel vulnerable and let my guard down and reveal myself, everything would turn, and the rage of my childhood would rush into the present. And even though I had been cast out so many times and survived, if he did it again now, now that Yush was gone, now that I felt so tremendously alone, now that I had shoddily patched up a bottomless crater that could never be filled, I feared that I wouldn’t be able to pick up and move forward.
I made up an excuse and said I could not go. Papa didn’t get angry. We both understood what it meant. He let me drift away. I was thankful for that, at least.
We saw each other only two more times after Yush’s death—once for Dadiji’s funeral, and once when Papa planned a trip to visit another relative not long after. You and Papa came to New York. As I walked with you through Prospect Park, I felt my grief and shame braided together as one. When I stood with you two, I had to face that this was our family now. Yush was never coming back to us.
A year later, you called me and told me you wanted a closer relationship with me. I cried, “Of course. I want that, too.”
“But I don’t want to live in the past,” you said over the phone. “I can’t go back to that dark place. I want to move forward.”
“I want to move forward, too, Mummy. But I am a writer. I have to write about my life, too, to make peace with the past.”
As briefly as the door between us opened, it shut again.
“Okay,” you said. “Never mind.”
It was the last time we ever dared reveal ourselves to each other.
When I hung up the phone, I sobbed—deep, snotty belly sobs—for all that I wanted to tell you but did not know how to say, for all that we wanted from each other but did not know how to give or receive. When we spoke on the phone, I felt a boulder in my throat, blocking my speech. But as I wrote in my journal, a river of feelings flowed around it, an entire valley of thoughts and memories emerged, hidden from you by a mountain of rocks. I did not know how to speak to you, but I realized that maybe I could write to you.
In college, I wrote a short story for a fiction class in which I tried to imagine our relationship from your perspective. The main character—a hardworking, smart, ambitious college student on break from Yale—wasn’t me but how I wanted others to see me: successful but aloof and oblivious of my immigrant mother’s sacrifices. But it is the description of her mother, the character inspired by you, that embarrasses me more now: a quiet, melancholy woman who wafted through the home, looking longingly at photos of her family in India while her husband worked long hours and her daughter was away at college. I had smoothed out the rough edges of our relationship with the good-immigrant narrative, imagining you as a helpless woman who sat back as life happened around her.
The hollow woman in my story was nothing like you. I gave you the short story for your birthday that year. When Papa read it, he said it was very good. I wanted to hear your reaction. You hesitated, quiet, and then when I pressed you, you said, “I don’t really relate to it,” or something to that effect. My heart sank. You didn’t elaborate, and, assuming you didn’t appreciate my gift, I didn’t ask you to. At the time I believed that I understood you because I could predict your reactions to many situations. But I realize now that being able to foresee what you might say or do meant only that I understood what role you were supposed to play: Woman as mother. Woman as wife. Woman as Indian immigrant. Woman as daughter-in-law. In turn, you sensed that your acceptance was based on your ability to play these roles. These assumptions bonded us to each other.
I wish now that I had seen your feedback over my short story not as an ending to the conversation but as an opening for me to begin to learn who you were. It was losing contact with you years later that made me want to know you. I finally have the curiosity to ask you all the questions that my assumptions about you once answered for me. I now understand that this type of unrestrained, nonjudgmental curiosity is the key to intimacy. But, like all learning, it began with surrender, with admitting that I do not truly know you.
For years, you felt my anger, my desire for you to rise up and fight and leave him. I believed—I still believe—that you are capable of so much. You navigated a new country and culture without any emotional support and endured so much hardship. Maybe there is no part of you that can forgive me for writing this, for broadcasting what you feel should be kept private, and for taking away your power to reveal what is yours when so much has already been taken away from you. But maybe there is also a part of you waiting to be seen, a part of you that has been buried, a part of you that hopes someone pieced it all together. I want you to know: I see what you have lost. I want you to know that you have not lost me.
But by insisting that you fight when you had chosen not to, I was, in a way, no better than the father I criticized. I was telling you that your choice had no value, that it wasn’t good enough for me. You must have felt my judgment, my lack of acceptance over who you are or what you have chosen for yourself. I had failed to see how, from your perspective, Papa and I were two sides of the same coin: He sought to mold you into some image of who he needed you to be for him. And I, too, refused to accept you as you are, not willing to listen when you made your desires clear to me. Instead, both of us held your own wishes against you, sending you the message that you were not good enough as is. That you should be something different. I am sorry that, for so long, I behaved this way.
For years I did not understand how so much suffering was possible in a family who had prioritized success. After Yush died, I realized that this was precisely the source of our suffering: that we never understood ourselves, or one another, beyond our capacity to meet these expectations.
In my grief, I felt suspended in air, floating without family or cultural history to tether me to the ground. In my desperation, and upon my therapist’s encouragement, I turned to my history and the culture that I had distanced myself from when I’d distanced myself from Papa. I had struggled to see a place for me within the same culture that Papa used to enable and justify his behavior. But part of rising from the ashes of grief was learning how to reclaim my identity.
To my surprise, I discovered a rich history that placed me within a deep and ancient context. I had related to Indian culture through the dominant Hindu narrative of the Ramayana, which equates Sita’s measure as a wife with her ability to sacrifice herself over and over again for Rama. But when I revisited even that version of the story, I realized that Sita was not the submissive waif I had always assumed her to be. She had agency. After Rama imposed yet another brutal trial upon her, she said no to him. Instead, she chose to leave her husband and children behind and return to Mother Earth. The earth split open and swallowed her back.
I learned that, like culture itself, the Ramayana has never been a static story. It is a diverse tradition, where, for centuries, people from different cultures, castes, and religions across South and Southeast Asia crafted their own versions to address social issues and pass on their values. I was especially inspired by the fourteenth-century text, the Adbhuta Ramayana, in which Sita manifests the ferocious Kali, the Destroyer of Illusions, to save Rama from death. She slays the demons who attacked Rama and plays with their severed heads as thousands of female deities spring forth from her skin. Rama, humbled by her awesome power, bows down to his wife and becomes Sita’s devotee. There are seemingly infinite Sitas and Ramas and ideas on how people can exist, but many of these versions have been overlooked or ignored in the mainstream because they don’t support what people in power want us to realize about who we are and who we can be in this world. They don’t want us to know that we can write our own stories. They don’t want us to know that we are infinite.
This world of scholarship, once unknown to me, introduced me to stories about my cultural history that were so different from the ones upon which I had been raised. When I saw that this ancient past could hold my present-day experiences, too, I wondered why I had not encountered myself in my own history before and why it had been so hard for me to piece together. From the tension of this inquiry, I began to articulate my story.
The truth was available to me, had I searched for it, but how does one seek answers without knowing what questions to ask? My history had been rendered unimportant, completely erased, and then replaced with stories of my inferiority. Though from time to time I experienced a fuzzy dissonance, a nagging feeling of something-isn’t-right-here, underscored by shame, the story that I was caught up in—that everyone around me also recited and reenacted—was so powerful, so omnipresent, that the right questions could not arise until and unless something happened that forced me to punch a hole in the wall of that story and be shocked to find that something else existed on the other side.
I had thought of love as a taut chain with a tight clasp that carried our weight as we clutched one another, no matter what dragged any of us down. I had believed that when I love someone, I should hold on regardless of what else I have to give up in order to keep them. The more one gives up, the greater the love, I thought. To love someone well was to perform perfection for them, and to be loved well was for them to perform perfection for me. But that is not true love. That is self-abandonment masquerading as love.
Now I understand that intimacy can form only when I accept someone as they are, not as who they can be for me. I cannot summon you and Papa back into my life in the form that I would like you each to take. I can only acknowledge that what I so deeply wanted is not reflected in what I know to be true. And this is another hard truth: That even though I did not get what I wanted, I am still okay. And being okay despite not having your closeness does not mean I never needed either of you, or that I do not love you both, or that I do not long for you two still. I know that you both love me with your entirety, as I do you. I know that letting go of my fantasy of togetherness does not mean that I do not want the best for you and Papa or hope that each of you finds your way back to me. I still want all of that. But I no longer live in the space where I tell myself that if I silence or shrink myself, I can one day have that ideal relationship with you both.
I told myself that I wrote this for you. I fantasized that you would read this, and I thought that if I could share my real self, maybe you would recognize my shape through the darkness and embrace me. But now I see that I wrote this for me. I wrote what I needed to face that I had avoided looking at for so long. I wrote this to understand what stands in the way of sharing love with the people I long to share it with the most.
I had once thought that I came from a line of Gods, and I had punished myself for failing to be Godlike. But we were not Gods, and I was not the avatar for our family’s unraveling. I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief, and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.
For a long time, I felt ashamed of who I was. I didn’t know what it meant to be me, only that to be me was to be wrong. I was rejected for speaking my truth, because it was not what anyone wanted to hear. I was rejected for who I am, because I did not portray an image that people wanted to see. I thought people could see an ugliness in me that I had to work hard to hide until I appeared flawless to them. But when I finally achieved what I thought was such perfection, I learned that, even then, I did not belong.
Now I feel grateful for that rejection, because rejection forced me to learn to find value in myself, value that I had jockeyed to receive from others. I learned that I am not defined by how others perceive me. I learned that the limits of their acceptance are not a symptom of my failings. I am grateful, because not only did I survive, but I expanded. I grew in infinite directions. I learned that I am not done growing. I am just beginning.