My dad was the youngest of eight kids in a country still recovering from the fallout of independence, and he paid all the tolls, material and emotional, of being the youngest in a family already stretched pretty thin. My family is Vaishya, which is the caste of merchants and craftspeople. The middle class. And the thing about being middle class is that youre generally doing about as well as your country is. In other words, my dad was poor. My dad was ambitious. He was the valedictorian of his high school class and later of his pharmacy program, though he nearly didnt get in because he was a few minutes late to the post office on the day he was mailing his application. The post office employee, with all the callous indifference of bureaucrats, wouldnt take it. Thankfully, his immediate superior did when he saw my dad sobbing helplessly in the lobby. My dad was ambitious. He loves history, like I do. When he was growing up, he saw the 1965 biopic of Genghis Khan starring Omar Sharif. My dad is a peaceful and progressive man, but hes spoken about Genghis Khan in hushed, admiring tones for as long as I can remember. Understand how a man can admire someone who waged bloody war across two continents to build an empire that collapsed overnight and youll understand a lot about my dad. Two years ago, I gave my dad a copy of Team of Rivals and of the selected speeches and writings of Abraham Lincoln. Hes calmed down a little bit since. My dad was ambitious. When he first came to the U.S. in the mid-70s, not long after Jim Crow, he could only find work in the poorest parts of New York and Jersey City. But my dad was ambitious, and the Indian diaspora is well connected if nothing else, so by the time I was born, my dad owned several pharmacies across the tri-state area and paved the way for most of his brothers and sisters eventually making their way to America. Then we moved to India when I was four years old, and spent seven years trying our hand at business there, and they were some of the hardest years of all of our lives. In so many ways, weve been recovering ever since. My parents and I have spent most of our lives feeling like we were shouting at each other over a chasm. Plenty of the gulf between has been about culture. More has been about class. In many ways Im grateful that my parents business ventures failed to the degree they did, because if they had their way, they would have raised me to be a rich one-dimensional idiot. Like many parents, mine were so obsessed with giving me the things they lacked that they forgot to give me what they had— a life of complexity, autonomy, engagement and constructive challenges. Lucky for me, life found ways to provide. But thats another story. My parents struggles and my brief share in them (I say brief, but how long its felt) have given me an inescapable sense of my privilege as a native English speaker living on the northeast coast of the United States. My dad was ambitious, and my life could have turned out so, so differently if he wasnt. He’s never let me forget it, for reasons not always selfless. Ive spent my whole life with the third world hovering a few inches away from me, constantly encroaching ever so slightly on my reality like an alternate universe in a Star Trek episode. I am constantly aware of what it means to be American. I am a fish who thinks about water. My dad probably isnt going to see any of this, which is good, because I dont know how much of it he wants seen. Although, to be fair, ever since he got used to the idea of my being a writer, hes occasionally suggested that I might help him write a memoir someday. Hes floated the idea with the strange, innocent presumptuousness of Indian parents, who so often and so blithely make demands of their children as payment for their sacrifices. Its never occurred to him how much revisionism hes added to his own story. And how painful it might be to rehash it. And how much we might fight about the details, and about the role my sister and I play, and about how much of the pain and loss in our respective lives hes actually responsible for. Most importantly, he doesnt understand how much of good writing is about telling the truths we dont always want told, and how much easier it is to see through certain kinds of lies in print. Anyway, maybe someday Ill get used to the idea. Happy Fathers Day, dad.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 23:25:02 +0000
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