Unbecoming Read online

  “He slept with prostitutes. He gave me a venereal disease. I couldn’t have a child for years.” I remember how clinical her words sounded.

  And then.

  “He seduced me.”

  What the hell did she mean, seduced? I knew something wasn’t right, and I wasn’t sure how, but I knew this like I’d always seemed to know about Mom. There was a moment when I was conscious and present, and everything seemed clear. I’m not even sure how I knew this word.

  “Mom. Did he rape you?”

  She looked away and paused. Mom was no longer lecturing.

  “Yes.”I

  I was furious, mostly with my grandfather, who made sure that my mother married the man who “seduced” her. Indian custom wouldn’t have it any other way. Consent was not a factor. Sex before marriage—consensual or not—was like heresy, and choices were irrelevant for women. But Mom was resourceful. She found a way out of her marriage by converting from Hinduism to Christianity, a dramatic move that circumvented Hindu law and left her husband powerless to prevent a divorce. Still, she felt that she’d brought shame upon her family and disappointed her father by abandoning Hinduism for her freedom. Even after all of this, she worshipped her father.

  Mom’s revelation would be the beginning of a lifelong dance between us. She was stuck in another time and place, with rules and language that did not apply to my present. For decades, I wrestled with her story. A few years after our talk, I had the audacity to ask her again, as if I hadn’t heard it the first time, “Mom, did he rape you?” And she told me, “No.”

  I felt crazy. A teenage girl does not invent such horrors about her mother’s past and then rack her brain from that day on to try to understand how such a thing could happen. Why would my mother, this pillar of precision and discipline, change her story?

  Decades later, my mother still had an impeccable memory for details from her past, but did not remember that we ever had that coffee. In what coffee shop? she asked me. How is it possible for her to forget a day that I will never forget?

  And just when I thought perhaps I’d gotten it all wrong, she slipped again.

  Even if you don’t want sex, it happens. You get used to it. Everyone warned me he was a horrible man.

  It would take a long time for me to understand that trauma and memory are like that. Mom insists she wasn’t assaulted. She was slowly, methodically lured into a relationship by a calculating man. In my mind, he was a predator. I believe that my mother was abused more than she does. The details of how this man hurt my mother are not as important as the fact that she continues to hurt because of him now.

  I didn’t tell anyone about Mom’s past. I could have used a sounding board, but I could think of no one to confide in without heaping more shame upon my family. The thought of bringing harm to her and my ancestors caused visceral pain.

  Now that I knew about her first husband, Mom spent years either pushing me away with dramatic retellings of the same painful memories—You have no idea what I went through, she would tell me ad nauseam as I listened dutifully, without any choice—or detaching and dissociating, like the disciplined intellectual she wanted to be.

  Lost in her memories, she couldn’t stop herself from reminding me, “When I was your age, I was nothing. I was nobody.”

  “Mom, you were not nothing!” She didn’t believe me.

  As her anxiety and sadness spiraled out of control, she and Dad refused to recognize the lingering impact of her trauma. The worst was this: ever the economists, Mom and Dad saw the time Mom could otherwise have spent building her career as the opportunity cost of her marrying a scumbag. I was infuriated by their pragmatism. All I wanted to know was if any of her academic success mattered if she was still this torn up inside. Dad sidestepped these questions with typical cruelty: If only you would spend more time with your mother, she wouldn’t be so anxious.

  Mom was terrified of me making some horrible “mistake” that would echo her own experience. She saw red flags in every option I had, for love, for life. So she and Dad dug in hard. And that meant I could not breathe. I suppose they thought that my knowing about her past would be the end of the story. But they did not account for how much work would be necessary for me to trust or let them in again.

  Around this time I became aware that I could not allow them to touch me physically. I hated the feeling of my father’s lips on my cheeks. Mom’s arms around my rib cage felt like she was squeezing the life out of me. They left me feeling violated. I avoided them, locking myself in my room, storming by them when necessary, and rarely looking them in the eyes. I was done being the source of their comfort and the solution to whatever mistakes Mom thought she had made in her life.

  If Mom had not been my mother, I would have been her ally. I would have been her advocate, and the one who raged on her behalf. But I was her daughter. When my mother got upset now, when she spaced out and drifted off, when something I did made her weep, my father mercilessly reminded me of the sacrifices my mother had made, like I was supposed to suffer for an eternity. I was suffocating. It was only a matter of time before I’d leave home and never look back.

  * * *

  I. Even decades after Mom’s abuse, marital rape not only continues in India but is widely condoned by the society and government. In 2017, despite marital rape affecting 40 percent of marriages, the parliament voted not to criminalize it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Are You a Girl with a Star-Spangled Heart?I

  I was eleven years old when Swati took me to see Top Gun. At fifteen, Swati would have donated a kidney for a minute alone with Tom Cruise. I’d been following her around since I was born, taking mental notes on proper Desi girl protocol the whole time. My dad had taught her dad economics. Her mother was a psychiatrist. They were more traditional than my parents. They spoke Hindi at home. They celebrated Diwali. Before major events, they blessed the gods. They were strict with Swati and her little sister, Smita. Boys were outlawed. So were school dances. Mom and Dad figured that nothing would happen to me under Auntie and Uncle’s close watch. Years later, even after we moved to New York City, Mom and Dad sent me to spend vacations with Swati and Smita so I would have a connection to my roots and a bond with other Indian kids.

  We snuck away that afternoon from Swati’s parents. I didn’t yet know there were reasons to be sneaking around. Telling Uncle and Auntie that we were seeing some mild-mannered comedy instead of a sex-filled military blockbuster felt like a horrible lie. The guilt and fear ate me up all the way to the theater.

  Like many Generation Xers, my introduction to military culture came in a dark, air-conditioned theater, chomping on buttered popcorn and guzzling Coke while watching a twentysomething Tom Cruise and a chorus of drunken sailors shamelessly serenade Kelly McGillis.

  You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips.

  And there’s no tenderness like before in your fingertips.

  I didn’t know any of the tools men used to hook women, nor did I know hooking by either side was necessary. In my mind, couples simply existed. Like Swati’s parents, or mine, paired off for decades in arranged or family-approved marriages that seemed both inevitable and unbreakable. This stunt, with dozens of boozed-up, muscled, virile men surrounding a stunned woman in a cramped bar with no way out came not long before Anita Hill testified about her former boss’s sexual shenanigans to the nation. After dancing in his briefs in Risky Business, Tom was the hottest a guy could be in Hollywood. Harassing the older, wiser flight instructor in public, even following her into the ladies’ room and cornering her against the counter, didn’t work at first. But in the end, she softened. The guy got the girl, the boys won the war, and all was well in the US of A.

  “Maverick” and his cut-up band of ass-slapping fighter pilots ushered a whole new generation of hungry young men into the US military. Even my preteen self recognized the recruiting power of Mav and his topless buddies playing beach volleyball in slow motion. But guys with rippling abs, joysticks, and bi
g guns were never really my thing. (My crush was Mav’s sidekick “Goose,” who was married and wore his shirt playing volleyball. At eleven, I was clearly missing the point.) Kelly McGillis, the female lead, had brains and beauty, but she wasn’t a fighter pilot. In the big picture, she was just Mav’s girlfriend. Even back then, I wanted role models and company deeper than eye candy.

  • • •

  Ten years later, I was an undergrad at Yale University and struggling hard. I wish I could say that I loved college. Instead, I was resentful, and sometimes downright bitter. I can’t tell you the details of what I studied, or the great conversations I had with my peers, because my primary feeling during that time was alienation. My classmates were smart, some of them geniuses. But what I remember most is how little I could relate to them, and that many were in pain, but no one talked about how or why.

  I realized suddenly how sheltered I’d been. I’d never been interested in alcohol, and now it was everywhere. It was a rite of passage for the kids around me. My first party with beer kegs in the dorm and I couldn’t stand the sight of my peers, half conscious and drooling. I left within minutes. This made me a prude and a loser. And because of that, a loner. I envied the ease with which other kids socialized, studied, and drank. But the truth was, the whole scene scared me. The boys who drank around me became larger than their bodies, aggressive and stupid. The girls became silly and powerless.

  Awful things happened at night on the weekends that I’d find out about in the morning in the hallway bathrooms we shared. In my first semester, one kid who’d been drinking down the hall from me was hauled away in an ambulance after blacking out. No one blinked. A few days later, a girl I knew had been raped by an athlete three times her size, and when I asked her, horrified, if she needed any help, she simply shrugged her shoulders and explained, “He was too big and too drunk for me to push him off. Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

  But I worried. I felt like something was wrong with me. And I was also still trying to figure out who I was and how I belonged. One morning I found my freshman roommate deep in discussion with another woman from across the hall. They were talking about a student who’d cut her hair short.

  “It means she’s a lesbian,” she said, with attitude. I raised an eyebrow. What were they talking about?

  “No it doesn’t,” I blurted.

  They seemed surprised I had a point of view.

  “Well, how would you know?”

  “Because I just do.” This did not satisfy them.

  “Because . . .” I’d never used this word. It felt odd coming out of my mouth. But it felt right to say it. “I’m bisexual.”

  My roommate became completely silent. And then she stormed out of the suite. I didn’t see her for weeks. The college dean called me in to tell me she had requested a transfer to another room but that he’d refused to give it to her. I felt the hurt surge inside me. I may have been in shock over this, but I was now accustomed to suppressing painful experiences and driving on. Besides, I had other pressures to contend with.

  My parents had regaled me with myths about universities like Yale since I was a child. There was no debate or discussion over what I’d be doing in college. When they took me aside a few months before my freshman year to tell me they would no longer allow me to play basketball, my heart sank. I’d received a tempting offer to join the team at another liberal arts college, a pipe dream for an Indian girl like me, but I barely considered it. It wasn’t an option I would have been allowed to consider. I wonder, even if I had known how to say yes, if they’d already made me too miserable to enjoy it.

  At Yale, Mom and Dad approved all my classes before registration—each professor’s reputation was considered and CV reviewed.

  “Ah yes, he’s quite famous,” Dad would say. Mother concurred. If the professor was unknown to them, red flags were raised and other courses were suggested.

  They furiously reviewed my grades at the end of each semester. I managed mostly As, but this was not enough. My interest in early Christianity and Buddhism threw them for a loop. When I announced that I wanted to major in religious studies, Dad got me on the phone while Mom listened in the background.

  “Re-lig-ious studies? No. That’s absurd. Why would you want to do that?” Over the years, this question would start to make me doubt that I ever wanted to do anything.

  “Because it’s interesting?”

  “It’s not something one studies in college,” he responded, as if it were obvious. Mother grunted approval.

  “But why not?” I didn’t understand. Was this an economist thing? Or an Indian thing?

  “Because it’s something one studies in graduate school.”

  I have no idea where these rules came from. Dad had strict opinions about scholarship and Mom agreed, usually with vigorous head nods. By the end of my first semester, I was deeply depressed and no longer wanted to be there.

  The only way out was rebellion. Ben was a skateboarder, a smoker, and a townie who worked behind the counter at Ashley’s Ice Cream in New Haven. By my second semester, he and I were dating. Ben was sweet and handsome, tall and muscular, older than me by several years, and Black. He had far more interest in weed and alcohol than in higher education, and we didn’t have a thing in common. I remember how his eyes glazed over when he was high, which was often. On some level, I must have known he was an addict. Still, he was a lot less threatening to me than the kids back in the dorms. I took comfort in the fact that the little I had with him was better than whatever I had with most of my classmates.

  My parents didn’t know about Ben’s substance abuse issues, but what they did know was enough to make them nuts. They had been steeped in racist, classist immigrant lore, an Indian caste-based worldview that supported institutional racism in America. You were born into your caste, and you generally stayed there. Karma could be cruel that way. I did not understand them. What I did understand was that they did not send me to the Ivy League so I could waste my time with Ben.

  During sophomore year, a friend of mine, an opera singer who was equally disillusioned with her college experience, had organized a surprise birthday party for me. Ben took me for coffee while a bunch of kids from my dorm and my parents, who’d driven in from New York, hid in my cramped suite with cake and candles. At the appointed time, Ben walked through the door, with me piggybacked on top of him, laughing and clutching his collarbones, to a chorus of singing. I saw my parents sitting in the corner under a storm cloud of judgment, and I knew nothing good was going to happen.

  When the others left, I got an earful. My father was standing over me with his furious eyebrows and thick glasses. I hid my face in my hands, trying to block him out.

  “And what on earth are you trying to do to your mother by spending time with this man? He’s uneducated! He’s beneath you! He’s, he’s . . .” My father, who was never tongue-tied, was desperately searching for words.

  “He’s a go-rill-a!”

  My dad’s Neanderthal reaction ensured I stayed with Ben for another two years before boredom got the best of me.

  I was miserable, and my rage toward them was nearing a tipping point. The threat of my dropping out of Yale made them back off, temporarily. Their vision of my future was simple: college, grad school, marriage, kids. I was straying desperately from that path, and the shame that would bring hovered over all of us. Terrified, they agreed to let me take a semester off.

  During those few months away from Yale, my parents forced me to see a shrink—my mother’s, as it turns out, although for what reason she was seeing him, I’m not entirely sure. They were convinced my sadness was abnormal. He was a tiny, odd little man with many interests. He was a former Catholic priest, a gynecologist, and a psychiatrist. I was horrified by the whole scene.

  The shrink prescribed me Zoloft, an antidepressant. A few weeks in, I felt numb, and no less alienated from the life I did not want to be leading. I tossed the pills out and never took them again.

  I’d given plenty
of thought to transferring schools, but had the instinct that if I didn’t graduate with a degree from Yale—if I transferred to some small, lesser-known liberal arts college—I would hate myself even more than I hated myself now, and my family would never let me forget it. Fear of that dishonor was greater incentive than anything else I knew in the world. I already felt like I’d failed my parents. My joy was tied up with theirs, and it was often hard to tell where theirs ended and mine began.

  I returned to Yale after my semester off and survived, in part thanks to joining the rugby club, where I met a group of ferocious and tender women around whom I was completely shy and intimidated (some of them were all-American athletes and twice my size), but who accepted me despite my awkwardness.

  I finished Yale with my head bowed low to the ground, majoring in English—oddly on my parents’ approved list of undergraduate fields—and graduating with honors. But I was depleted and uncertain.

  • • •

  After college, I wandered around Latin America, climbing mountains, trudging through a hot jungle with a machete, and studying Spanish. My parents had footed the bill, despite enormous resistance that I was wasting my time. I had notions of following guerrillas into the jungle and writing about Latin America’s oldest power struggles. But my folks were having none of it. Under pressure from my father, I ended up applying to graduate school, even though I had no desire or reason to go.

  Graduate school for a girl like me was inevitable. I could have gotten in anywhere, but my father decided, with a sense of urgency, that it was in my best interest to enroll at Columbia, the university where he and my mother were professors. I did not know how to say no to him.

  I ended up back in New York City, enrolled in a double-degree journalism and international affairs program. I shared an apartment with Swati, who had thus far survived her parents’ expectations and was now working as a health care consultant. Aside from the comfort of being around Swati and her enormous cat, Oliver, I was just going through the motions.