Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (53 page)

The war I had felt in middle school was somehow, by the time I left high school, transmuted to a clash of civilizations within me. On one side was the family, with its "Indian" demands of duty, obedience, tradition. And what was tradition but memory made rigid, the self strapped into the path of previous selves, so that none should stray, none could be lost? Almost all of my cousins, even those born and raised in North America, were having arranged marriages. Some even spoke of it with romance in their voices.

But when I imagined marrying a stranger, becoming a wife and mother, I felt queasy. I wanted something more, though for a time I could not name that desire. My sexuality was a deep font within me, hidden, an underground stream whose currents were too swift and dark to dip into without a solid footing on free soil.

And certain layers of the conflict remained invisible to me: the construction of American adolescence as a time of experimentation and rebellion, for example, which could not be reconciled with my parents' idea of pre-adulthood as a time to take on increasing responsibilities and accept guidance that shaped one's future. What I felt was America's siren call of freedom, individual and sweet. I was seduced; I could hardly wait to be seduced.

I did not argue with my parents—not in general, and certainly not about dating or marriage. When a cousin was seeing a woman outside the community, I heard my parents' disapproval; I remember my father opining, perhaps theoretically, that the boy's mother always had the option of kicking him out. I did not need a specific threat directed at me to take this personally, to fear disownment, to know I needed to guard the secret of my future rebellion. It would stay safe behind my wall, at least until I was prepared to strike out on my own.

As high school rolled on, my plan took shape. Education would be my ticket out, as it had been for my parents, for a generation of the Third World's best and brightest. I wasn't quite sure what I would do with my freedom, but I knew distance was imperative. I bided my time, kept my grades high and my reputation sparkling clean, and applied to the university of my dreams. I was possessed of a classic emigrant's push-pull impulse to find a better life for myself.

When I look back on how I felt about my parents as a teenager, it is as if we were continents. I was America, they were India, and there were no direct flights, phone lines, e-mails. We spoke in telegrams, blue-and-white block letters, urgent, frantic, devastating.

Of course the dichotomy was false. They were not India; I was not America. I am Indian in body, tongue, to anyone I meet in the streets, and increasingly even in my spiritual inclinations. My parents are American in their politics, their optimism, their belief in the dream—for they came to this country at a time more open and hopeful than any I have known. We could also list the ways in which I could be called un-American and they un-Indian. And all such lists are unsatisfactory, for they do not describe us in the end, not even a little. We are not portioned out in percentages; we are whole beings. Indian, American, Fijian, queer, et cetera—whatever we are, we are simply, in the end, ourselves.

Yet the dichotomy persists, is somehow useful to someone. Even today, young people in our community feel the pull of
American
temptations versus
Indian
values: as if adolescents in India harbor no desires, face no decisions; as if American parents operate without moral principles; as if the young everywhere are not capable of valuing, only of being tempted. If oppression works by dividing us from one another, then surely a primary split is this generation gap. The children of immigrants, the so-called second generation, grow up with an experience so different from that of our parents—and are encouraged somehow to blame both our parents and ourselves for the conflicts that such difference necessarily engenders. Since as a child I had no theories of race, racism, or cultural assimilation, I blamed my parents for the conflict I felt between the worlds; and, too, I castigated myself—the bad daughter, the selfish and ungrateful child.

And yet, something in me insisted on plotting a path toward what I saw as, quite simply, freedom. Toward myself.

I was seventeen years old when I traveled the nearly three thousand miles from my home in Michigan to Stanford University. It felt like a migration as momentous as any my ancestors might have experienced, from the crusty boundaries of the old world to the vast, romanticized horizons of the new.

Stanford was red and gold, adobe and clay, a celebration of light. The dorms were co-ed and there were no curfews. "We trust you," my parents said as they dropped me off. I heard it as an implicit warning:
Don't let us down.
No other daughter in our community had been allowed to travel so far alone, they told me; they were progressive, they believed in education, for girls as much as for boys. To my parents the opportunities ahead of me were academic, career-boosting, intellectual. I knew that they were also sexual, and that I had better not get caught.

The distance between my campus and my parents was deeply reassuring. Before leaving Michigan, two girlfriends and I had been talking about what we would do once we reached the faraway paradise of university. One wanted to get drunk; one wanted to do mushrooms; and I wanted to lose my virginity.

Within the first week—before freshman orientation had ended—I invited a boy back to my room. We fumbled around awkwardly, and afterward, the smell of him still on my crisp new sheets, I called one of my high school friends to report, "I did it." I wept, but not with grief. My tears were one part relief, two parts jubilation. I felt as if I had shed a burden, as if I had tasted my first freedom. As a bonus, I hoped my forfeit would make me unmarriageable in Indian terms, whenever that time came.

Within a month, my father was in the hospital for a triple bypass operation on his heart. Suddenly I felt guilty; had I somehow, with my wild behavior—my secret betrayal—managed to physically break his heart? My rational mind tried to assure me he could not have known what I was doing; but the emotional entanglement between my parents' expectations and my own desires would take me years of practicing freedom to undo.

I slept around, and felt myself opening. I soon acquired a boyfriend, and when my parents visited for a weekend, my freshman dorm conspired to keep my secret. I discovered, in the arms of others, that I was not an ugly, shy loner of a girl. I could be beautiful, witty, brilliant, flirtatious, coy, sensual, myself. I discovered power, and the power of surrender. I drew new outlines of my moral life: respect, communication, honesty, but not chastity. And of my body: mine.

My parents' values came to seem increasingly foreign, unreasonable, even oppressive. I took feminist studies courses that provided a theoretical landscape for my feelings and gave me one way to understand the great divide: it wasn't India, or even my parents, but patriarchy that was attempting to regulate, neutralize, and shame me out of following the true thread of my desire. Feminism offered, too, a righteous outlet for my anger, and a political justification for my yearning to break free of the community patriarchs who called me Daughter and demanded their tea. I rejected the idea of marriage as the only proper housing for female sexuality. From there it seemed a small and logical step to a women-only sex life; as a movement slogan put it, "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice."

Of course, life is rarely as simple as it seems in theory to an eighteen-year-old. As soon as I declared myself a lesbian, I was beset by male suitors, one of whom became my next boyfriend. This sexuality business was, to say the least, confusing.

I believed, in those years, that to be a good Indian girl meant to live entirely without sexual desire; that my longing itself, let alone any action to fulfill it, made me bad, wrong, and un-Indian. My entire understanding of my culture was that transmitted by my parents, who in turn passed on what they had been taught, at a level they considered appropriate for a child; I did not learn about my father's erotic art until years later. Their version, steeped in duty and obedience and propriety, was of course only a fragment of Hinduism and of India itself, not a totality. But it was a dominant and authoritative, self-authorizing version.

My father quite literally wrote the book on being a good Hindu American child: a workbook for earning a Scouting merit badge in Hinduism, which he developed while my brother was a Cub Scout. It discussed sexuality—
kama
—as a canon, one of the four major elements of a Hindu life, if practiced strictly within marriage. Otherwise it described kama as an impediment to merit, a hindrance—not a sin exactly, not in the Judeo-Christian view of sin, but an obstacle to spiritual development, enlightenment, and being good.

This hegemonic view was one of my sole windows into "Indian culture," yet my body told me another truth. I have proofread multiple updates of this workbook over the years, filling it with the copyediting marks I learned from my high school journalism teacher, the first woman on whom I ever had a crush. It was no wonder I experienced a split self.

To understand myself better, I started going to a support group for "lesbian, bisexual, and questioning" women, led by the student health clinic's first openly lesbian therapist, whom I had carefully scoped out by writing a profile of her for the
Stanford Daily.
The group included a fellow
Daily
staff member; a woman who was so infatuated with one of the Indigo Girls that she traveled from city to city to cheer at their concerts; and a pretty, dark-haired medical student who asked me to dinner.

She had a car, so she picked me up at my dorm. "Oh, you dressed up," she commented as we embraced in the foyer. "You even wore pantyhose." I was embarrassed, and tugged at my short skirt. I had thought it was a date. But over dinner she told me about her tortured relationship with an on-again-off-again, currently-trying-to-work-it-out girlfriend.

Nevertheless, she came back to my dorm room afterward and, in the spirit of mutual support, asked if I would help her by mirroring the affirmations her therapist had prescribed. We sat cross-legged facing each other on my not-too-lumpy futon mattress, which lay on the floor and was covered with a colorful Mexican striped blanket I had purchased from one of the many vendors who filled the campus's main plaza on weekends.

"You are beautiful," she said, looking into my eyes.

"You are beautiful," I repeated dutifully. We were to maintain eye contact, as this would help her see her own reflection.

"You deserve love," she said.

"You deserve love," I repeated, shifting slightly on my seat.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you," I whispered. It was becoming very intense. I had never even kissed a girl, as I'd confessed to her earlier in the evening, yet here I was saying "I love you"—although the
I
and the
you
were both her, not me. Weren't they?

"Thank you," she said.

"Thank you," I said, which was funny, but neither of us laughed.

There was a pause. "You've never been kissed?" she asked.

No, I confirmed.

"Well—would you like a kiss?"

I nodded. It was a generous offer.

She leaned forward, still cross-legged on the floor, and pressed her lips to mine. They were pink, soft; pleasant. Then they were gone. I opened my eyes, not knowing when I had closed them.

"Thank you," I said again, feeling truly grateful; feeling one step closer to being who I wanted, or was meant, to become.

By late sophomore year I was describing myself as bisexual or lesbian to myself, to my friends, and to most of campus. I didn't mind my boyfriend, but I felt I was merely marking time with him until I figured out how to be with a woman. I had seen a therapist at the student health center, who reassured me I was normal; taken almost enough feminist studies classes for a minor; and helped found a feminist literary journal and our university's tame version of the radical organization Queer Nation.

All of this took place, not in secret exactly—I was wildly, recklessly, open about it on campus—but separate from my family, outside their domain. The two worlds, and who I was in each, became mutually exclusive. On visits home I was the good daughter, successful student, on track for my parents' version of the ideal life. On campus I was the radical bisexual lesbian feminist, writer, activist. I was so visible that I still run into strangers who know my name from those years; I counted the miles again, nearly three thousand, surely more than enough to protect me from my parents' gaze.

The construction of these two selves felt exhausting, necessary, and oddly familiar. In a way this secrecy, this silence, was merely an extension of my earlier splitting: home/school, Indian/American. Straight/queer: it seemed the only way to keep each aspect of myself safe—an illusion that, though it served me at the time, was bound to collapse. I don't know why I did not see the inevitable collision coming; perhaps I did, but thought or hoped I could control its timing. Or maybe the split self was the only trick I had; I believed it would work because it had been at work all my life.

For all my parents knew, I was spending my semesters earning A's and working as a student journalist at the
Stanford Daily.
This was also true, and earned me a summer internship at
Time
magazine in New York between my junior and senior years.

Nineteen years old, alone in Manhattan, I went to my first grown-up Queer Nation meeting and marched in my first gay pride parade, shouting slogans ("We're here, we're queer, get used to it!") alongside more than a hundred strangers in the radical Lesbian Avengers contingent. The atmosphere on the streets and in the city's gay neighborhood was electric, in a way that for previous generations it could not have been. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, which had claimed gay men as its first victims, a fierce movement based on defining oneself by one's sexual identity had arisen in the United States in the 1980s. S
ILENCE
= D
EATH
: I can still see the white-on-black lettering printed on T-shirts that seemed ubiquitous by the summer of 1991, when a miniature version of it adorned a button attached to my backpack. The words referred to both AIDS activism and our sexuality itself; and if silence meant death, then being and speaking out was the only way to live. O
UT
, L
OUD, AND
P
ROUD
went another slogan: more T-shirts, more buttons, and huge roaring chants that we shouted in angry, exhilarating street demonstrations. Pride was to be the remedy for a history of shame. Because of AIDS, gay Americans like me, as our most ardent activists argued, could no longer afford the luxury of hiding, of assimilating. Coming out became an urgent political act, a statement of integrity, a life-and-death matter with real money at stake for AIDS treatment and research at a time when the federal government seemed content to let
us
die.