Missed Translations

by Sopan Deb

  “It’s very difficult. When my father expired, there were only three brothers with him. The rest of the brothers were in Kolkata. Understand? I didn’t know what was going on. I saw my mother crying. I said, ‘Why are you crying? What is happening? What happened?’”

  While my grandmother was shocked by the death, Siddhartha wasn’t. Sachindra had told him about it before it happened. He prophesied it, from Siddhartha’s telling.

  “My father knew his time of expiration,” Siddhartha said. “Can you imagine it? My father knew. He told me at least two years before. ‘You are my youngest son. You are my very youngest son. I have only two years left in the world. I’m sorry I can’t give you education proper. I can’t guide you properly. But I bless you. I bless you. I bless you.’ That’s why every day, I pay my regards to them.”

  I’m more likely to believe in Superman than the blessings of my parents. I summoned the courage to follow up, but Siddhartha cut me off.

  “You have a lot of questions,” he said.

  “It’s because he doesn’t know,” Meera offered.

  I remembered that Shyamal referred to Siddhartha as his “best friend.” Truthfully, I had never in my entire life heard my father refer to anyone as a friend. I asked my uncle what his relationship was like with my father when they were children.

  “Your father was a very good student. With him, there was always a rivalry relationship between us,” Siddhartha said. Meera cackled upon hearing this.

  “He was the most favorite for the family among your mother and father,” Meera said, referring to my father.

  “He was a rival to me. He said, ‘Yes.’ I always said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Yes,’ always, he said, ‘No.’ Every time, we were in conflict.” Siddhartha mused. “He was the mooooost beloved guy of my parents.”

  Siddhartha grinned as he recounted trying to correct Shyamal in debates when he was younger, only to be rebuked by their parents, who could not believe Shyamal was wrong about something. Ah, so the root cause of that superiority complex my father referred to wasn’t difficult to figure out, as I pictured my grandparents saying, “Our Shyamal? He wouldn’t be wrong about anything! Go to your room, Siddhartha!”

  “That relationship converted to love because we are now ancient,” Siddhartha said, laughing. “We have love and affection between us. We are friends, rather than brothers. Next question.”

  “What was his personality?” I said.

  “Excellent. Very good,” Siddhartha said. He turned his chin slowly to dramatically glimpse at my sleeping father, which got a laugh from us. My uncle wasn’t a particularly jovial person. But every now and then he would pull out an unexpected quip, and it made us feel briefly at ease.

  Siddhartha opened his mouth and closed it. His eyes moved about the room as he deliberated whether to let loose what was on his mind. Then he looked down sheepishly.

  “I can’t say anything,” he decided.

  “Na, na, bolo!” I egged him on in Bengali. (“No, no. Say it!”)

  “No, no, no, no. But one thing,” Siddhartha said.

  He stopped for a few seconds and looked directly at us. All I could hear was an oscillating fan going back and forth.

  “A man is known as a man by his personality. If you have no personality, you are very much an animal. You understand? Now, go ahead, please,” Siddhartha said.

  I, what? It seemed best to nod and move on. I asked him about his relationship with Sachindra, my grandfather.

  “Wow. Brilliant!” Siddhartha said, before clapping. This was the first time in years of conducting interviews that a subject had applauded a question of mine. I was killing it journalistically, even while feeling slightly fearful of Siddhartha.

  “My father was always loving and affectionate toward me because I was the youngest,” Siddhartha said. He described how Sachindra would go to court and routinely bring home treats for him. Siddhartha also said that he parented his own two children—my cousins, whom I had never met—in the exact same way.

  “That’s why my son and daughter highly love me. Every day, they will make FaceTime with us. Your child always follows you. Remember it. Your child always follows you. Because a child always follows his parents,” Siddhartha said.

  Because a child always follows his parents. I am a prime example of the opposite.

  He encouraged me to ask more questions. This felt like a news conference. I racked my brain for what he hadn’t told me yet. Siddhartha had, until now, forcefully avoided discussing the less than savory aspects of the Deb family lineage. He was most excited about his loving parents, a perfectly normal sibling rivalry with a brother, and his pride in overcoming adversity. Speaking in a soft, measured voice, I settled on something uncomfortable.

  “When my father decided to move back to Kolkata, what was your reaction?” I asked. I thought he might avoid the question, especially with Shyamal in the same room. It might have felt like opening up old wounds and sullying the picture he had painted of our family.

  Siddhartha lowered his voice. I could hear the slightest quiver. “I told him not to leave U.S.A. Your two kids are there. Don’t come here.” He began to crescendo, regaining his authoritative stature. “You can’t stay here a long time, because of love and affection. Don’t come here. Don’t come here. But there are so many reasons he may say to come to India. But I repeatedly told him not to come. You will be sorry because you love your sons highly. You can’t live in their absence. But ultimately, he overcame these things.”

  It was a remarkable and circular thing to say: that my father overcame missing his children whom he chose to leave.

  Meera said Shyamal’s first four years were a struggle in Kolkata. He didn’t have a home and often stayed with Sudhirendra. He had trouble getting accustomed to the hot weather. He considered going to Bangaluru.

  “Over time, he felt that he had to stay,” Meera said in Bengali.

  “It takes a lot of time to adjust. Now he’s more Indian than me,” Siddhartha said. “But one thing, he is a guy staying alone with purest scale of character. He is a pure man. He is a pure man! These are the characteristics of our family.”

  Shyamal still said nothing. He had his head buried in one hand, half asleep. I was out of questions for the moment, but more than that, I was fatigued. I had learned more about my family in twenty-four hours than I had in thirty years.

  After some more small talk, we said our goodbyes to Siddhartha and Meera. I promised we’d keep in touch. They promised they would as well.

  Wesley and I touched their feet and we left. Shyamal, for the first time in hours, seemed energized after napping through our visit. And he had some points of his own for us to follow.

  Ten

  “That country was calling me.”

  He arrived in windy Rochester, New York, the night of December 1, 1975. It was about nine thirty. The cabdriver who picked him up at the airport was also an engineer but moonlighted as a cabbie to help make ends meet. Shyamal, wearing only a thin overcoat, had never seen snow before. He said he had eight dollars in his pocket. (On this, I’ll quote Hasan Minhaj, one of the most prominent comedians of Indian descent in the United States, who said on his Netflix show, Patriot Act: “Every immigrant uncle has some insane story about how they came to America with an inexplicably small amount of money.” And my father had one too.) America was in a turbulent place: Richard Nixon had resigned the previous year, the Vietnam War had recently ended, and high inflation persisted. Also Jaws had created a nationwide fear of mechanical sharks.

  My father had a place to stay: an Indian acquaintance who had also come to the United States and happened to live in Rochester. Shyamal rested for the next twenty-four hours, then started looking for work immediately thereafter. About a month later, having not an ounce of luck nor money, he moved to Queens, where another friend took him in. In early 1976, he got his first job in America as a design engineer for Lorch (now called Smiths Interconnect), an electronics company in Englewood, New Jersey. Shyamal moved
to nearby Paterson and lived in the first residence of his own.

  Here he settled down and began his pursuit of the American Dream(™), hoping to follow the path of so many other immigrants. A year later, he went to work for the now-defunct Engelmann Microwave Company. He had worked with microwaves back in Kolkata and had some familiarity with the product. (In retrospect, this makes the pinewood derby tragedy even more confusing.) Professionally, Shyamal was finding some comfort, but there was a hole: He was lonely. While he had always seemed to live a life of solitude, at least in India he was surrounded by people who looked like him and shared his culture.

  “In America that’s not the case,” my father said as we sat again at his kitchen table. We had spent some time decompressing from the morning’s visit with Siddhartha, and now Shyamal was loudly sipping his coffee.

  My father was never supposed to be in America; the fact he had even made it there was an accomplishment. His family had other plans for him. And given Shyamal’s upbringing, plans weren’t suggestions.

  The first phase of the plan was school, and the instructions were made clear by his father and then, after his father died, by his brother:

  Attend school. Finish at the top of the class. Go to school for engineering. Finish a master’s degree.

  From a young age, Shyamal didn’t have many friends. It wasn’t important to him. He was a loner, and an arrogant one at that, by his own admission. He did dress well and took part in group events: Shyamal was good at sports and often performed music in public. But, by his telling, his superiority complex kept him isolated.

  “I somehow made myself very choosy,” Shyamal said. “I hardly had a friend.”

  I could relate to my father on this. When I was in elementary and middle school, I didn’t have very many friends either. When I sat alone in the corner of the playground during recess, I’d think that I was alone because I was smarter than all of the other kids, not because they didn’t want to play with me. It was the friendship equivalent of “You can’t fire me. I quit.” But the truth is that I was hurt to be playing by myself.

  I was relieved whenever I was invited to join the other kids’ games. We’d play Superheroes, a game in which we’d all pick a superhero and pretend to fight crime. The other boys would pick folks like Batman and Spider-Man. I’d always pick Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I couldn’t really help the other guys take on bad guys. I would just give them orders, like a good captain. (Look, I was a strange kid. What do you want me to tell you?)

  Whatever Shyamal’s feelings were, whether an actual superiority complex, or hurt from not being able to connect with other folks, they lingered to this day.

  “Even now, it’s like that,” my father said.

  He gave an example from his tennis game that morning: “Today, for example, a guy I was playing with, a very good player, but he made some comment, and I said, ‘If you repeat it, I’m going to get out of this court.’ Certain things I don’t like. But everybody cannot be like me. This is a bad quality sometimes. I don’t know what it is. It has always been my problem. I’ve been selective of my friends and associates.” My father isn’t a person who takes slights well.

  In the late 1950s, Shyamal arrived in Kolkata, where he attended Jadavpur University, a public school, and graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electronics and telecommunications. He called his college experience “super,” which is not a word a human being typically uses in a sentence unless he’s Clark Kent. Up through his first two years of college, he lived in Sudhirendra’s flat—or, as he put it, “under his influence, under his law,” as if his oldest brother was a drug or a dictator. Shyamal finished his coursework in 1967 and his thesis in 1968. When I was in high school, he gave me a copy of his thesis, which I still have. He showed great pride in handing it to me, as if proving his worth.

  “So what happens after 1968?” I asked.

  He stopped and deliberated for a few moments before speaking again.

  “That’s a good question. That was something I like to keep private, but it was the most dramatic experience of my life, which I do not forget even today,” Shyamal said. He turned his head upward but emotionally inward. His voice shook.

  Siddhartha had hinted at something like this in our conversation earlier that day.

  “What? Dad, I can’t write this without you opening up,” I said.

  Shyamal relented. After graduating from Jadavpur, he received a scholarship to go study in Canada at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, to get his PhD. His other choice was to stay and work a less prestigious job in India. “Unfortunately, I did not get any support from anybody in my family,” Shyamal said. “So I took an ordinary job in India.” “Ordinary,” in this case, by the way, meant working as a run-of-the-mill designer and development engineer in Kolkata. Remember my father’s description of himself: a slight superiority complex, a feeling of unique ability. To be one of the crowd did not suit him. He wanted to see a world outside of India. But his family, notably his oldest brother, wanted him to stay. So he did.

  “I was demoralized by some people. My youth and inexperience was exploited by my family members,” Shyamal said. I could taste the bitterness.

  “Why did they want to stop you?” I asked.

  “No details on this. It will become a messy story,” Shyamal said. “Average person. I didn’t want to be average. I knew I was a bright man. But I had other qualities. I was aggressive. I was dynamic. I was forward looking. This did not suit me at all. In that process, I lost the most valuable seven years of my life.”

  I couldn’t get him to divulge more, but I did connect some dots in my own mind between his need to be above average and his conspicuous lack of friendships. He eventually applied to immigrate to the United States in 1975 against the wishes of his family, in the hopes of proving his true worth.

  “My mind was set there. Most progressive country. I could use my energy, my strength, my knowledge. I could gain knowledge. That country was calling me every second of my life,” Shyamal said.

  “Why did the United States call you and not your other brothers and sisters?” I asked.

  “At that time, in the 1940s and 1950s, people used to go to England for higher studies. From the 1960s onward, America opened the door for people like us,” Shyamal said. (The United States passed legislation in the mid-1960s radically overhauling its immigration system. Instead of basing it on ethnicity-based quotas, the country began favoring attracting skilled workers. This created the contemporary immigration system we know today and the one that would draw my father to leave home.) “The most developed country in the world. Everybody had a dream. Even today, every Indian man has a dream to go to the United States.”

  Shyamal’s family didn’t agree with his view at the time. Emigration was an expensive process, and they wouldn’t give him the financial support he needed, so he scraped together the money to go himself, with a little help from Siddhartha, his youngest brother. This dynamic reminded me a bit of the scene in The Godfather: Part II, when Michael Corleone tells his entire family he’s decided to enlist in the war. Everyone reacts with outrage, telling him that he is supposed to do what his father, Vito, has laid out for him. The only person in the room who congratulates Michael and supports him is Fredo.

  As I listened to Shyamal talk about his move to the United States, the word “choice” kept popping up in my mind, as if the word was a long-lost friend I had just come to appreciate. It made me think of how differently we approached the concept.

  “Choice,” as I thought about it in this context, referred to the pursuit of, well, whatever we want. It can be found in the inconsequential. For example, in middle school and high school, I used to watch Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the improv show hosted by Drew Carey. There were times when my stomach would hurt from laughing too hard. I considered segments like “Scenes from a Hat,” during which the show’s cast would perform short scenes in quick bursts suggested by the audience, to be a national
treasure. I’d think to myself: I want to do that someday. It made sense for a kid who coped with every tense situation by making jokes.

  The aspirations were fleeting. Something else was in the cards for me, or so I thought. Maybe I’d be a history teacher. Perhaps I’d pursue the piano and become a musician. Or journalism, because I wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Becoming the brown Mike Breen seemed like an ideal life for me.

  I pondered what life I would choose for myself. For myself. It being my choice was such a given that outside interference didn’t even enter my mind. If I wanted to become an improv comedian, I could’ve joined a troupe on campus and then, in theory, devoted my life to finding stage time. If being a musician was how I wanted to spend my life, I could have auditioned for music programs around the country or outside the United States and let the chips fall where they may. If I followed through on sports broadcasting, after graduating college, I could have started calling minor league baseball games and worked my way up.

  Instead, I chose to go a different route, which is how I ended up at the Boston Globe after college. Eventually, I chose to leave television altogether. And who knows what happens next? Maybe, by some twist of fate, I do end up as Mike Breen, just hopefully not broadcasting Knicks games like he does. I’m a masochist, but even I have standards.

  The career choices I took for granted all through my life were opportunities my father never had. In some ways, yes, I had a difficult upbringing. But I was able to take much of my future into my own hands, in part because of the autonomy I had because of the rockiness at home. Dealing with the fallout from my parents’ lack of choice gave me the strength to carve my own path, whether choosing a college or a profession. I never even asked my parents before making critical life decisions. I just made them.