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.
For the first time he looked to me like an old man. I had seen him as an oppressor, but we were trapped in roles and fantasies of each other that had to be demolished before we could begin anew.
"I always thought of you as my princess," he said. "I imagined your wedding would be the happiest day of my life."
It was the first time I saw him cry.
My mother burned through her anger till it wore her out, when she gave up and tried to learn to accept. My father's peacemaking yielded results. I grew up; we all did. After those first months of arguments, we never talked much about my sexuality. Somehow we came to an uneasy truce, and began reaching across the divide.
A month or two after Christmas, when I found my first post-college journalism job and moved away, my mother packed me a spice box so I could keep the tastes of home, and sent occasional care packages of Divali sweets, spicy fried puris, and mango pickles. That spring my parents invited the boyfriend to their house. My father asked him if he intended to marry me. Poor guy—he explained that he had proposed to me, but I had refused on the grounds that I was a lesbian. Later my parents met my serious female partners, cordially, politely.
Once or twice a year my mother, on the telephone, would mention that so-and-so's parents were inquiring about me. "I told them, I don't think my daughter's interested," she'd say. A pause. "Right?" And that little speck of hope, the rise in her voice, made me want to cry.
"That's right," I would say—firmly, I hoped. And gently, I hoped.
A wall still stood between what I thought of as my real life and what I shared with my parents on visits home or on the phone. To avoid constant conflict, I felt a pressure to blend in again: to reassimilate with their community's values, to disappear my sexuality, to continue to look and act like the good Indian child of the Hinduism workbook, even if it was a façade.
And yet, as I met other lesbians and gay men of South Asian heritage, dozens and then hundreds, I began bit by bit to integrate my warring selves. Integration: as different a model from assimilation as junior high school is from adulthood. We organized workshops, discussion groups, conferences. Those of us who had survived our childhoods and adolescences by whitewashing, suppressing, and wishing away our cultural difference explored new ways to reclaim it. Those of us who had been told our queerness was a Western disease began to retrieve our own histories, unearthing millennia of evidence of same-sex relationships in ancient South Asian cultures in stone, in text. And some of us began creating new texts, works of mythologized autobiography or poetry that spoke to the tension in our hearts. We took back or reinvented rituals; in 2002 I attended one of the first lesbian Hindu weddings in the United States, complete with holy fire and Sanskrit-muttering priest and a buffet banquet of delicious vegetarian fare.
Every queer South Asian conference featured an emotional session called Coming Out to Parents, or Relating to Our Families of Birth, or even Dear Mummy & Pappa. But the main purpose of our gatherings was often affirmation: to tell ourselves, against all assertions to the contrary, that we could be both Indian and lesbian, both Pakistani and gay, both Bangladeshi and bisexual; that we were neither traitors nor deviants nor heretics but merely humans trying to love. Among these peers, some of whom became close friends, I felt that perhaps I had found my own people—my home.
We continue to find one another. In 2007 I was thrilled to meet, at a conference, women who were overcoming great odds to organize and support lesbians in rural Gujarat, near my family's ancestral villages. From them I bought a poster, tricolor like India's flag, that proudly declares "Indian and Lesbian" in English, Hindi, and Gujarati. It hangs in my living room, framed and under glass like a precious artwork, or perhaps a mirror: totem, reminder, proof that I—we—exist.
I no longer wish to be Ann, or Marie, or even Gita. After half a lifetime of subtly Americanizing the pronunciation of my name, in the past year I have begun to say it the Gujarati way: Minal, mee-nalr. The vowels have a specific, rolling intonation; the final letter is a consonant that does not exist in English, somewhere in the borderland between l and r. Each time I say my name this way, I have the sensation of integrating language itself.
I have come to understand that queerness is a migration as momentous as any other, a journey from one world to the next. My earliest sense of alienation feels, now, like a source: a dual, twining root of both my queerness and my writing. For it is in such a splitting that the self becomes a constant observer, of both itself and others—first as a technology of survival, then as amusement, curiosity, habit, and finally for its own sake. And, observing, solitary, one cannot help developing ideas, critiques, leaps of explanation and imagination; narratives.
To write this book I traveled the world interviewing relatives, after more than a dozen years of keeping all my relations at arm's length. For one of my generation to be interested in the old-time ways and stories sometimes brought tears to my elders' eyes. It brought questions, too, including the ones I began dreading as soon as I bought my plane tickets: When are you getting married? followed shortly by Why not?
Mostly I evaded the questions with a simple "It's not for me." Repeated once or twice, it was usually enough. Sometimes I added a Gujarati saying, Sukhi jiv dukh maa laakhe; loosely translated, "Why throw a happy life into suffering?" and, usually, everyone laughed. Sometimes I resorted to my parents' well-worn excuse: I was busy with my work. On a couple of occasions I came out to relatives who I thought would understand, cousins and aunts to whom I could explain in English; I kept hoping the news would reach a key person who would tell everyone else, so that I would never have to come out again. But it seems I was unskilled in working the family gossip machine; and the truth is, I often passed up opportunities to out myself. Like any journalist I did not want to become the story I was reporting; I did not want my interviews to become focused on me. A combination of this desire, the language barrier, and simple cowardice stopped me. As a result, the questions continued.
In South Africa, a distant aunt took me on an after-dinner excursion to her sister's house, where no one spoke to me and I was not introduced. My aunt spent ten minutes chatting with her sister, and then we left. I gave the mysterious interlude no thought until another uncle asked if we had been there, if a certain young man was present. Without knowing it I had been up for marital consideration.
There are people in my extended family who will read for the first time here that I am a lesbian. They will think that they do not know any other gay people, that there have never been any in our community, and they will be wrong. They will think my parents' hearts must be broken, and they will be only partly right. There will be a minor conflagration perhaps, a worldwide ripple of gossip and conjecture and rumor, and any number of personal comments and questions so odd I will not know how to respond. And then it will pass, and the next community scandal will take over: someone swindling someone, or someone's wife running off with the pool boy.
Someday I expect that a cousin of a cousin, a distant niece or nephew, or a close one, will come up to me and say, Me too. Until then I suppose a certain kind of loneliness will persist, alleviated by the new family and community I have made and by the gifts that have come my way. Grace, joy, love, gratitude: these too are elements of my path. When I touch my lover's hand in the dark, I know what the goddess wrote for me.
On the trip I also became curious about my destiny, and sought out an astrologer in India. He and his family were renting the house where my father grew up, which my grandfather had built with the proceeds from Narseys back in 1937. The date was engraved on its façade; it was still the family homestead, though none of us had lived there for decades. Inside, old photographs of my ancestors hung from the moldings. I sat in the front room among them, before a dark wooden desk where the astrologer saw his clients.
He wore a patterned silk shirt, his tools laid out before him: eyeglasses, calculator, pen, datebook, ruled legal paper. More businesslike than mystical, his manner was somber and polite. He looked at the chart he had drawn up, based on my birth, and gave me bad news. The name I had been given was the exact opposite of my raasi, or name-horoscope, a factor that leads to rage and volatility. To repair it, I ought to go back to something like Gita.
Astrologically, I was stubborn by nature, he added. I had probably had great difficulty in my education and failed several times, but had eventually succeeded by the grace of god. Having missed the most auspicious window for marrying early in my twenties, I ought to hurry. Probably I would marry a pale-eyed man, and we would have many fights. Also many children, mostly boys.
I could make a lot of money on the black market. And I would do well to open a gas station.
Somehow, as I walked away from my fate, I managed not to laugh out loud. Perhaps my parents were right, at least about astrologers.
A year later, the last of my father's brothers in Fiji was preparing to emigrate. Cleaning house, he came across artifacts from my grandparents, including my first horoscope: the one commissioned by my grandmother when I was born. It arrived in the mail, and of course I could not resist. My father sat with me to translate.
On a red printed form under an etching of Ganesh, a seer in India had sketched out in blue ink the position of the stars at the time of my birth: 7:42 P.M. July 12, 1971, America. This was translated to Samvat year 2027, day 5 of the waning half of the month of Ashaad. I was born under the moon-sign of Kumbh, the word for a water pot, roughly
equivalent to Aquarius in the Western zodiac. Based on the stars, the astronomer suggested five names for me: Saroj, Sashpu, Sudha, Gauri, and Gita. Mars was prominent in my chart, signifying a stubborn and difficult nature. My element was copper, and my footprint was auspicious.
I told my father I was curious what my destiny would have been if my parents had followed this horoscope. If I had been this girl named Gita.
He blinked.
"But dikraa," he said—dear one, daughter—"your fate could not have been any different than it is." What is written, by the deity and based on one's own karma, is written.
I felt a slight choking in my throat, as by this I knew that, even if he disapproved or had trouble understanding, he accepted my life.
Every migrant constructs, or spends her life seeking, a new definition of home. For me it is a word with many edges, multifaceted as a crystal or a goddess of a thousand and one names, an infinity of arms. It is the queer planet where I live, filled with gay men and lesbian women, the tattooed and the pierced, sissy boys, butch girls, people born with indeterminate genitalia, women who pass as or identify as or have become men, drag queens, interracial couples of all genders. It is the hearts of my lovers and friends, the created family that all free queer people know, the one we construct far from our original homes: filled with joy and true acceptance, not merely grudging tolerance, a safe place to name and learn to fulfill our truest desires. In one sense this queer tribe is on the leading edge of society, language, and medical knowledge; yet in another, we are the most ancient sort of village, a way of organizing our needs and relationships—human life and its elements, all of its purposes.
Home too is again my first family, to whom the others might all be freaks, my mother's cooking and my father's ideas, the web of relations and traditions that surround us on holy days and in times of crisis or celebration. And it is the home that exists only inside me, which encompasses and unites all that is held together by my fragile skin, and which consists of a constant, prickly sensation of traveling between worlds that seem forever irreconcilable.
Leaving India Page 39