Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (54 page)

This
us,
like every
we
or
us
I have ever encountered, disturbed me even at the time, partial as it was. My friendly "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning" community at Stanford had seemed racially mixed, with women of color as strong and visible leaders. But the mainstream queer world to which I had access through its institutions in Manhattan—a community center, free support groups and activist meetings, the big, organized Pride events—looked very white and often very male. Still, at a Pride party, I met a woman of color. Her skin was smooth and light brown, her accent bridged Puerto Rico and Yonkers, and she asked me to dance. When we were hot and sweating, we went out to the patio and kissed in the June night breeze. We made a date to see
Paris Is Burning,
the hot queer documentary that was earning rave reviews that summer.

Exiting the movie theater into the brightness of mid-evening, I felt aglow with anticipation. We stopped at my first gay bar; underage, I ordered a soft drink. Then we walked to the NYU apartment I was sharing with a dental student from Jamaica. My roommate was out. We went into my room, sat down on the twin bed. We were high above East Twenty-sixth Street, and from the window we could see the lights of Brooklyn.

"Do you know what two women do in bed?" my date asked me. She was older, and I had told her I was a "lesbian virgin."

I nodded, exuding what I hoped was confidence. I had no idea.

By the time she left, I did.

And I knew how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

I don't know where desire begins; whether it is with us from birth, latent as genes and destiny, or comes as gift and curse somewhere along the way. Whatever its roots, surely its particular expression in each lifetime is shaped by what touches us: culture, experience, relationships, history.

Had I come of age in a different time and place, perhaps I could not have named my desire. I might have suppressed it all my life; or married a man but engaged in furtive affairs with women; or chosen other routes of emigration from heterosexuality. Suicide, religious chastity, a lifetime of silence, or a subterranean and hidden sex life are some of the alternatives to Out, Loud, and Proud.

As I was coming out to myself, it was comforting to construct a narrative of childhood Otherness. The fact that I had never felt
normal
made radical queer politics all the more appealing. The norm was deeply flawed, not only about sexuality but at its core; we were right, and righteous, in raging against it with all our will. Queer theory, activism, and rage seemed to offer absolution for my childhood: I hadn't fit in because that safe suburban world was not worth fitting into; its values were corrupt and its hypocrisy ran deep. Liberation meant that I did not have to strive any longer to be one of that gang.

And yet, to migrate away from a community of migrants is to experience a particular kind of disorientation, a dual displacement. To free oneself from a family already in free-float means taking in a heady rush of air, the illusion of being an individual. One forgets the original nature of the longing, deep-rooted, almost atavistic, for clan, tribe, home.

A few weeks after my first lesbian affair, I was back home, sitting on the beige sectional sofa watching television with my parents. I was keeping the worlds separate as planets, trying not to let material from one atmosphere seep into the other, so my parents knew nothing of my summer adventures. Senior year was only a few days away; my mind was already in California.

My father stood up and turned off the TV. This was alarming because we had a remote control; in fact, it was in his hand. He set it down, then turned to look at me.

My mother said, "There's something we want to talk to you about."

"OK," I said, looking from one to the other with what I hoped was an innocent, or at least neutral, expression.

"This will be your last year in school," my father said, sitting down. "You've always known we would arrange your marriage. So it's time to start thinking about it."

"There's a boy in Toronto you've met," my mother began. "And that one in Florida..."

I started to cry.

"It's OK," said my mother. "When my parents brought it up, I cried too. We're just talking about it now. It won't happen until after you graduate."

She put her arms around me. I cried harder, my chest exploding in giant, noisy sobs that, combined with the inward pressure of her body, left me barely any room to breathe. I was trying to make myself stop, but sheer terror had set in.

One of them brought me a glass of water, a box of tissues. They exchanged glances, kept quiet, and waited until I had regained my composure, at least a little.

"Is there anything you want to tell us?" my father said.

***

I did not want to tell them, not then. And even if I had, where could I begin?

Would I start by reminding them of the day I was fourteen years old, when I had first said the No, and they had not wanted to hear it?

Could I describe how that No had melted over the last three years into a Yes, the Yes of my deepest self, a Yes to an alternate world so wide and sunny it left me, often, afloat with joy and possibility?

Would I mention the
aha
's from the feminist and lesbian books I'd been reading? The crushes and fantasies I'd suppressed and never acted on in high school, not wanting to risk my long-range plan? The secret money I'd been squirreling away against the day when I might be disowned?

I thought of my parents saying,
We trust you;
I thought of my last year of university, which would cost twenty thousand dollars, a sum I could not possibly afford on my own; I thought of the stories I'd heard of girls being forced into marriage, or sent abruptly to India, or kicked out of the house; and I kept mum.

I shook my head furiously. I sipped some water. I looked down into the glass. I sipped some more.

My parents exchanged looks.

"Well," my father said. "We were hoping you would be honest with us, but..."

In June, from Stanford, I had mailed a box of papers to my summer address in New York. Inside were books, a teddy bear, a binder of my writing. One issue of the campus feminist newspaper contained an essay I had written about my newfound bisexual/lesbian identity, explicit with details of my sex life. My journals noted sadly that my relationship with my parents was now "mainly financial."

Through a series of UPS mishaps, the box ended up at my parents' home in Michigan. It was tattered and torn; my parents had repacked it and forwarded it to me, without comment, over the summer. Now my father referred to it.

Some papers had "fallen out," he said. They had read them. Was it true?

I kept my eyes down as I nodded, mute and angry and afraid.

***

Dear Mummy and Pappa,

I want to tell you something ... I am the same person I was before you read this letter...

I had written the lines two years earlier, a feminist studies class assignment in empathy, based on the premise that the personal is political: Write a letter to your parents coming out as gay. But my letter was real, and I had spent hours and nights agonizing over it. Long after that class ended, I was still struggling with how to tell my parents I was not the good Indian girl they had raised, the daughter who would become a wife and then a mother. I would break the link of generations. I would be what no one else in our family, in our whole community, had ever claimed to be. I would break their hearts—but I had neither the words nor the will to tell them this.

Whenever I had thought of coming out to my parents, I thought of every other South Asian family I knew: My schoolmates, mostly heterosexual, who snuck around on dates living in fear that someone would see them and report home. My parents' friends who forbade their son from seeing his white girlfriend and kept him on a short leash, checking the miles on his odometer to see that he drove only to and from his college. My cousin whose mother was so desperate to stop his love marriage that she sent away to South Africa for witch-doctor potions that she put in his food. I knew that, for my parents, the fact that I was having any sex at all would be as deep a calamity as my queerness.

But every time I thought of yielding to my parents' wishes, I thought again of the families I knew: husbands and wives who shared nothing but caste; women who ate last and served their men in every way; young girls sent into marriage barely knowing the rudiments of menstruation and pregnancy, let alone sexual pleasure. It was a vision shaped both by my experience and by white feminism, a vision that was, like much of what an adolescent knows, both wholly accurate and far too simple; but I could not, would not, fit myself back into it.

Now I no longer had to decide when and how to come out. In a way that fact was a relief, and in retrospect it certainly is; it might have taken me years otherwise. But I still did not know how to communicate across the gap between our worlds, which had become a chasm in the three years since I had left home. For the children of immigrants are also migrants; we cross the waters daily. Some of us become seasick. Others close our eyes and inhale the salt wind. Its fragrance is always bittersweet.

What they really wanted to know was why, and how could I, how dare I. Later they floated other explanations: it was California, it was America, it was my stubbornness. But that night they asked other questions.

Had I told anyone in the family, any of my cousins, or my friends in the local Indian community? No; that, at least, was a relief. My reputation and the family's remained intact, at least for now.

"What about AIDS?" said my mother.

"I know more about AIDS than you do," I said. I had gone to safe-sex workshops at school; I learned about condoms and dental dams and sharing bodily fluids. "I'm not a kid."

"You're an educated idiot," my father said, disgust and disappointment mixed in the lines of his face.

Then he had a question. "Bisexual—does that mean you sleep with boys
and
girls?"

"Yup," I said. I was angry too. "That's what it means."

My parents had already paid fall tuition, so I went back to school for one quarter; they made it clear they would not subsidize my "lifestyle" beyond that. We fought over the phone; I hung up on my mother and felt it was an act of liberation, even though I cried for days afterward. It was around this time that my parents learned that my brother, who was in university in New York, had been secretly dating Heidi for years.

I can see now that my parents, like most parents, deeply loved us and wanted only the best for us. They were not engaged in a lifelong conspiracy to suppress our true selves, as it sometimes seemed to my brother and me in our adolescent fury; really, they only wanted us to be happy. They believed our happiness would take the same shape as theirs: outward assimilation and material success in America, inward Indianness and a hewing to tradition in private life.

But just as education separated my parents from their own families, something separated my brother and me from our parents. Call it the Sexual Revolution, the Generation Gap, the United States of America—whatever it was, surely it deserved capital letters. Like our parents, we believed we were "choosing the best of both worlds." To them it seemed (as perhaps it seemed to their parents, before them) that we were abandoning their world entirely.

My mother wrote us both a letter, several pages long, which she photocopied, keeping the original in a secret place not even my father knew. In it she called us ungrateful and said she wished she had never had children. I sent home a couple of my poems about the beauty of lesbian love, trying to explain myself; she told me she didn't want to read that filth. My father tried to make peace, but the rest of us were having none of it.

In our misery, my brother and I grew closer than we ever had been. I took eighteen credits and graduated in December with a bachelor's in communication, Stanford's name for the department that included journalism. I didn't get my minor in feminist studies; I would have needed the rest of the year to write the required thesis.

It was the recession of 1991–92, and journalism jobs were scarce. I moved back home and sent out dozens of résumés. My mother's eyes were red and teary all the time, and probably mine were too. She took me to a gynecologist who tested me for hormonal abnormalities, to see if my sexual orientation could be cured by modern medicine. "Don't worry," the doctor said as she pulled my blood, "you look like a normal woman to me." I was oddly passive in my consent to this procedure, and relieved when the tests came back normal. Since I was still seeing my college boyfriend, the doctor also put me on the Pill.

At Christmas, for the first time since we had moved to America, my parents made no preparations. My brother and I went out and bought a fresh-cut tree, hauled the decorations out of the garage, and put them up ourselves. No one baked cookies. One afternoon my father and I were alone in the house.

"I thought I would help you invest your first paycheck," he said; after his heart surgery, he had decided to leave the academic pressure cooker and become an independent financial planner. "I never thought my own daughter would put it in a savings account for, what, two percent interest?"

He shook his head. He rested his elbows on the dining room table and lowered his chin into them.