Unbecoming Read online

  I was just the smart girl. But smartness had no currency in this world; it was only back home with Mom and Dad that it was both everything and never enough.

  • • •

  Every Indian family seemed to have a story about a handsy Indian uncle or neighbor. Stories about sexual violence were told in whispers, if they were told at all. Without any talks about birds and bees, I had no way of knowing the difference between sex, love, and violence. I had to find out on my own.

  At thirteen, Bianca was one year older than me, and very thin, with budding curves around the hips. She wore shoes that adult women wore, with tapered toes and heels. Her jeans fit closely to her legs. I could spot Bianca in a crowd of kids by her bright-red lipstick. It drew out the green in her eyes and the dark brown in her hair. Bianca was some kind of Italian goddess, and I would never look like her.

  Bianca was crying this morning, and our teachers had surrounded her. Mascara was dripping down both of her cheeks. She had a complexion that was beyond white. It was the kind of porcelain I saw in museums, where security guards warned us not to touch anything. A face like Bianca’s inspired great art, and grave concern.

  The news reached us like the telephone game, from one child’s seat to the next. On her way to school, a strange man attacked Bianca, touched her in some harmful way. Bianca was still crying audibly, surrounded by a ring of adults.

  I wondered who this man was. I imagined him as handsome. Even then, I recognized what jealousy felt like: a narrowing of my chest and heat behind the eyes.

  • • •

  Mom got a PhD in economics in the 1950s from Harvard, on full scholarship. The saris Mom wore to work in Cambridge were delicate and elegant, like her. She carried them in a single leather suitcase on a ship from India to the States. My favorites had flowers and plants, tiny elephants, and peacocks. They reminded me of the stone sculptures in our home, where the gods were animals.

  In New York City, at her new job as a professor at Columbia, she was going through a wardrobe change. I accompanied her to department stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, where she tried on all the latest pantsuits by designers from Italy, because they were the best. Mom’s red bindi powder remained unused now on her bedroom shelf. The elephants and peacocks came out of the closet only on special occasions.

  There was that day when, early on in her tenure, Mom stopped by a colleague’s office. He was a senior faculty member in the political science department, a large white man with a big reputation. He stood up to greet her. Then he unzipped his pants. She flew out of there before he could go any further. Mom told Dad immediately, and then reported the man to the dean, who said, “That’s the way he is.” Nothing was done. She wouldn’t speak about it in public till she retired forty years later, after the guy was dead.

  • • •

  I was a quiet, good girl. Sex was forbidden to me. It surfaced in hidden places, where adults didn’t roam.

  When I was five, my camp counselor sat me on his lap on the train back from swimming practice. The others were doing kid things. Singing songs. Picking their noses. Zack embraced me in his sun-tanned arms and planted a warm kiss on my lips. Whatever line he had crossed with me was blurred by my sense that I was wanted. I adored him.

  Three years later, my friend Sophie and I were hiding under a bed in my parents’ apartment, with jigsaw puzzles, cards, and board games. Sophie told me to stay quiet and take off my clothes. I did. She got close, touching me in places I didn’t know could be touched. I was shy, and willing. She was gentle, and very focused, as if she were following a script. Something was exciting me, and hiding from my parents and whispering was helping that. I didn’t say much. She was in charge.

  I was safe with Sophie, but something about her was unsettled. Mom and Dad spoke about Sophie seeing a therapist, which was apparently a serious thing. She sometimes picked her eyebrows clean off her forehead. Unlike Mom and Dad, I looked at Sophie’s face and saw a face just as it was supposed to be.

  I was accustomed to the rumblings at her enormous Park Avenue home, the raised voices, her mother’s anxiety, her stepfather’s scoldings. Sophie’s anger with them was quick to burn. I could not yet relate to this anger, though when she cried afterward and refused to eat, I wondered what would make a child so sad.

  • • •

  For a teenager in New York City, taking the subway from home to high school and back was a pride-building rite of passage. Long gone were the days when my mother followed me like a private investigator, across the avenue and half a block behind, to make sure I looked both ways before crossing the street.

  I spent most of my hours drowning in homework and a rotating schedule of extracurricular activities that would get me into the Ivy League. I went to Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious math and science public school, so Mom and Dad didn’t pay a dime. It was okay to be smart now. Even the mean girls got good grades. I was surrounded by kids from poor, working-, and middle-class immigrant families whose hell-bent focus on hard work and getting into college was familiar. Asian kids made up the majority of the student population, and whiteness held less sway over me now—I sought refuge in my community of multicultural nerds.

  One particular morning there was too little room on the train to open a book. So I shoved in and made my way to the pole. On its way down to the financial district, the train was crammed with brokers and briefcases and black-and-white newspapers held up and folded just so to maximize readability and space. There was no moving until doors opened and people forced themselves out, elbows, hips, and shoulders violently carving a path to the platform.

  In this crowded subway car, where a person could barely breathe, someone was touching me before I even realized that I was being touched. His hand was up my skirt and his fingers were roaming on the surface of my panties, pressing and rubbing into me.

  I looked up suddenly, wild-eyed. I only saw heads looking beyond or down into a sea of newspapers. Did I imagine it? I must have.

  And as I settled back into the rumbling of the train, it began again, this humiliation I could not verify through eye contact, this pushing, searching, probing over and into the fabric of my underwear. I searched the crowd again, silently, and it stopped again. Still, I found no one to validate my experience. No witnesses to this scene, not even the guilty party.

  I imagined I must be insane. My senses had heightened and my voice had disappeared, a combination that was infuriating in its biological design, making me feel useless. Any trust I had in myself eroded rapidly, like the safety in my childhood, like the certainty that I could succeed at anything by trying hard enough.

  It continued like this, for minutes that seemed like hours, till the train came to a stop and the doors opened. Faceless, nameless bodies poured out and others rushed in. I stood at the pole, frozen and silent.

  I told no one about this moment. I don’t know why. What would I have said? And to whom? I packed this morning away in the darkest corner of my memory and didn’t think about it for twenty-five years.

  • • •

  As high school continued, I became increasingly aware of my ugliness. When curves arrived officially one summer, my father called me fat and disgusting.

  I can’t even look at you, he said, storming out of the bedroom and far away from me. I was used to this. Dad had always hated my curly Indian hair and grimaced when he saw me wearing it loose around my shoulders. It didn’t matter that his hair was like mine. Or that he was far from thin. In fact, the only one who was thin and would always stay that way was my mother, who avoided things like butter and desserts and made sure you knew about it, too. My father’s addiction to fried food and pastrami had already given him one heart attack. But none of this mattered. I was the one out of control.

  I stood looking in the mirror, studying the rolls on my belly. The only thing worse than his cruelty was my self-hatred. Too ashamed to look into my own eyes, I vowed never to be fat again.

  I disappointed my fa
ther in other ways because I loved sports, and by high school had become obsessed with basketball. I captained my team several years in a row, but this meant nothing to my folks. Dad may have disapproved of my body, but exercise was beneath him and organized sports were a waste of time. My straight As were irrelevant. Dad was fed up with the number of hours I spent training and became exasperated as I watched Patrick Ewing and the Knicks run back and forth on TV. Dad would storm into the kitchen, stomping his feet, gesticulating at the enormous men on the television set, turning it off while yelling my name. I would just turn it back on after he left.

  I rarely went to school without a Georgetown Hoyas baseball hat, the rim curved just so, tugged down over my forehead and ponytail. I began to wear black, gray, and navy blue. My pants became baggy. I wanted to hide.

  There was also the matter of my period, a monstrous thing filled with pain, hiding, and more silence. For as long as I can remember, that time of the month was excruciating. I hid in library corners, withdrew to bathroom stalls and private rooms, clutched my knees to my chest, and writhed in pain. My muscles wrapped around my intestines and squeezed until liquid gushed from every orifice in my body.

  The toilet was my refuge. Urine-stained rims and dark brown halos below did not deter me from sprawling on bathroom floors. I emptied out my guts from both ends, as if to exorcise some demon possessing my body. When the pain turned from hot and searing to sharp and metallic, I vomited again and again. Sometimes too late to make it to a toilet, I wrapped my mouth around the nearest available bottle, filling it with stomach bile out in the open. I threw up so much that in the end, there was nothing left but empty heaving.

  Through this private physical upheaval, I cultivated a long-suffering patience. I became an expert at masking pain. I thought this was my lot in life. And so I told no one. No other woman revealed any personal stories about pain to me. My mother had done a brief but shocking tampon demonstration for me when I was twelve, but aside from that—I was mortified to learn that she had private parts, more than anything—she had shared little with me about life outside of her academic obsessions.

  As far as I knew, I was the only girl on earth who felt like I was being drawn and quartered from the inside out every month. No one told me it would be okay. For all I knew, nothing was okay in this world.

  • • •

  I was sixteen when I met Sam. She was point guard to my power forward. She was calm and moved like water, paving endless routes to the hoop without seeming to try. She didn’t know how good she was.

  She had shy eyes, except for the occasional glint of mischief that grew from a political sensibility about what was right and wrong with the world. She didn’t like her whiteness. She believed white folks had irreparably harmed the world. At only fifteen, she took responsibility for that harm, even if she didn’t cause it, even if it hurt.

  I had my head lost in books, assignments, and expectations about my future. And then, suddenly, my world was Sam. She was everything I thought I was not—cool in the face of hysteria, unfazed by the pressures of striving for academic perfection. She rejected the systems that made book-smart people powerful. She preferred poets and writers who shaped minds and created revolutions off the syllabus. There was a vibrant world beyond school in which Sam seemed alive, a world of protest and revolution. I didn’t know that world but I wanted in.

  Sam told me I thought too much. She was present, and real. She took me to dives in the East Village that became places of refuge from home—holes in the ground with heaping pots of Middle Eastern lentils and hot pita bread, giant black bean burritos with fresh salsa, natural soft drinks in flavors I’d never imagined, like ginger beer.

  That winter was my wonderland. Basketball was where I felt alive. I spent any feelings of inadequacy and rage on the court. One evening after practice, Sam and I walked with heavy book bags to one of her havens. Our faces were red, hair slightly matted from sweat, the backs of our chairs overflowing with scarves and hoods. As we ate, she grew quiet. Then she looked up from her plate and told me.

  “I’m falling for you.”

  I didn’t know what this meant. I shifted in my seat. I avoided eye contact. I chewed excessively.

  I knew what this meant. Sam was my best friend. And Sam loved me. Did I love Sam? What would it mean to love her?

  I don’t remember how it happened. One week we were giggling, following some rich old lady in a mink coat down the street, yelling at her that she shouldn’t wear fur. The next week she was in my arms, wrapped up on a sofa, and everything was quiet and still and warm, and I was in her hair, and all I could smell in my dreams was her.

  Somehow I knew that what I felt was forbidden. No one else knew about us. But my mother was suspicious.

  “Sam is a troubled teenager.” And then, “Why are you spending so much time together?”

  When Sam was over on weekends, my mother hovered and glared at us like we would burst into flames. Her anxiety turned into paranoia and then hatred.

  On a mandatory family trip to Mexico, I pouted. I was silent and distracted. I wandered away for hours at a time to be alone. This infuriated my parents.

  One night my mother stormed into our hotel room, sobbing, waving her arms around like some rabid beast. She declared that she had read my diary.

  “You’ve written about her . . . her hair!”

  She cornered me into admitting the truth.

  I did. And then I wished I were dead.

  The rest was a blur of tears and silence interrupted by fits of my mother screaming in my direction. I don’t know how we got to the airport. On the flight back to New York City, my mother told me of the shame I would wreak upon her family in India.

  “Two women kissing. It’s dis-gust-ing.” And then, before I’d fully digested all of this, she said, “If you do not end this now, I will kill myself.”

  She looked away wretchedly, and that was that.

  I sat next to my father on the plane, crying, while my mother sat in a seat across the aisle, in some desperate, wild-eyed fugue state.

  There was no question of who held the authority here. My mother had the only and final word. There were no opposing points of view to be had. No question of my mother’s intentions, or her ability to follow through with this threat. Her ultimatum came from deep beyond her own language, as if brought forth by our ancestors. There was no question of my responsibility. My dharma.

  My father was strangely gentle with me. He never raised his voice. He did not disapprove. He did not remind me of my unbearable shame.

  Back home in the city I left my suitcase at the apartment and called Sam from the phone booth on my parents’ college campus.

  “I can’t see you anymore. My mother found out.”

  Sam accepted this news, too quickly, too quietly.

  At school that week, Sam avoided me, but I found her during lunch hour, pulled her into an empty classroom, and explained how much I still wanted to be with her.

  She was detached and cold. I was hysterical. I crumpled up a piece of paper from my notebook and threw it at her. It was all I could do to connect to her, this pathetic act of violence. I hated her for being like this, for pretending I didn’t exist. God, I loved her.

  The next winter, my senior year and her junior, Sam didn’t show up to our first practice. I was devastated. I found her in the hallway that week and asked why she wasn’t playing ball with us this year. She said nothing. I was desperate for an answer.

  “Is it because of me?”

  “Yes.”

  I had lost her. Some part of me shut down then and never woke up again.

  • • •

  Silence over things that mattered most had held my family together for years. I had my secrets, and I discovered my parents also had theirs.

  The sense that my mother was carrying some larger-than-life pain had weighed on me since as long as I’d been conscious. She said nothing in my childhood to explain the reason for her sadness. I assumed, because I
was never told otherwise, that it was my fault.

  My mother was capable of moments of great joy, but they were often interrupted by longer moments of melancholy. Dad was in his own intellectual world, oblivious to the full impact of her moods. Mom handled every challenge in her life by throwing herself into her work, obsessively. When they were together, my parents spoke for hours about international relations, economic theories, and famous thinkers, but no one ever explained why that’s all they talked about. When I walked into their conversations, I became their audience. Who could blame them? They lectured for a living. They had no off switch.

  My mother’s sadness was my sadness. Her long, frequent moments of staring out into space became my responsibility. Her pain seemed to be provoked by me and my inability to do things right. Her tears came often, and hard, hitting me like giant waves and taking the ground from beneath my feet.

  I was about sixteen when she told me she wanted to talk over coffee. I remember how strange this felt. My mother and I did not “have coffee.” We had no mother-daughter dates, or heart-to-heart talks like I saw on television and imagined my high school friends having. The space between us was uncomfortable and vast.

  In a coffee shop in the neighborhood, we sat on stools before large windows. Mom’s revelations had no warm-up phase, no adjustment time.

  “Dad and I thought it was time you knew,” she said. “I was married to another man. In India.”

  I do not remember most details from this day. Whether Mom sipped coffee while she told her story. If she looked at me while she spoke. I don’t remember what we wore, or the season, or the year. I just remember a feeling of falling.

  As I sat there trying not to listen, my mind created ways to escape Mom’s confession. I thought, Oh god, is Dad not my father? Please tell me I was adopted. These cannot be my parents. It would have explained everything. But I was not adopted. And in fact, Dad was my father. The narrative came at me like floodwater.