by Sopan Deb
As we settled into the orchestra section, I could see Bishakha’s eyes traveling around the theater as audience members filed in. Once the house lights came down and the curtain rose, she sat up slightly and I could see the corners of her lip turn upward. Gooding Jr. came onstage in character as Billy Flynn and yelled, “Is everybody ready? Is everybody here? Hit it!” Bishakha was wearing a broad smile as he broke into his big number “All I Care About.” He has that effect on people.
She didn’t like this show: She loved it. The murder scenes. The dancing. The singing. Cuba. She was into it.
“Baba, I’ve never seen anything like this. Wow,” she said to me during intermission. Every now and then, when I glanced over at her, she would have her chin resting in one palm, a slight grin on her face. Sometimes she’d pat her thighs along with the show tunes, just as she used to at the Indian concerts we went to in my youth. It was perhaps silly of me to assume she wouldn’t appreciate exceptional theater, but much of this journey had involved false assumptions.
After the final bows, we walked eight blocks back to my apartment, where Wesley was making dinner. We sat at the kitchen counter and began talking. As they had with Shyamal, the conversations lasted for hours and were startlingly honest and painful. But maybe because I had already gone through this with my father—and we both really enjoyed Chicago a few hours before—the exploration felt much smoother. I had more patience with her than I had Shyamal, and a bit less anger.
“I want to learn everything about you,” I said to her. Once again, I pressed a button on the voice recorder so it could begin recording. “I don’t know where you were born. I don’t know where you came from. I don’t know how many family members you have.”
“You ask me, I’ll tell you. Your grandfather died when we were young.”
I started with the same question that I asked my father: “When is your birthday?”
“My birthday is December 23, 1948. Actually, that was my passport birthday, but my real birthday is January 31, 1949.” (In an odd coincidence, the birth date that had been falsely given Shyamal in childhood was Bishakha’s actual date of birth, just four years apart.)
My mother’s recollection of dates from several decades ago was not wholly sound, but she did her best. With my father, the birth date discrepancy was a purposeful decision to make his age more palatable for professional and academic advancement. With Bishakha, it was a case of shoddy paperwork stemming from her immigration into Canada from India.
“Because when I came to Canada, someone made a mistake on the passport,” Bishakha explained. “We overlooked it. We didn’t care. And then all of a sudden we noticed that it was a big gap in between. I went to India with that passport, and then I called and they said it would take a lot of paperwork. They said, ‘Why don’t you keep it the way it is?’ I’ve been keeping it that way.”
I imagine the dialogue with an immigration official: Congratulations on your passport! And your new birthday! What? Your new birthday! That’s not my—Yes, it is. Congratulations on your new birthday! Okay, thanks.
Bishakha was born in Asansol, a city in West Bengal roughly 130 miles northwest of Kolkata. Her maiden name was Sarkar and she lived with her mother, Amiya, along with Amiya’s father, an aunt, and an uncle. The city is known for its coal, steel, and textile plants. It’s now a fairly developed city, but when my mother was growing up it was more rural than urban.
Her only brother, Atish, is about six years younger. He is someone whom we saw fairly often growing up. He immigrated to Canada too, although after my mother, and we usually made one trip a year to see his family in Toronto, where he still lives today. He is a cheerful, loving guy who provided one of the few truly warm familial interactions my brother and I had in our childhood.
Amiya was the only grandparent of mine I ever met. We’d see her when she was living in Toronto with Atish. My great-grandfather, Amiya’s father, was a doctor. Pravat Kumar Sarkar, my grandfather, worked as a supervisor at a steel plant in Durgapur, a city thirty miles away from Asansol. That’s where he lived as Bishakha grew up, but he visited Asansol often.
Bishakha said she was closer to Pravat than she was to her mother. They bonded over a mutual love of reading, which my mother described as his biggest passion. She said she used to have discussions with her father about the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. My mother and I never discussed the specific content of books, but she did insist I read a lot of them. She used to make us take weekly trips to the library when I was growing up. She was more insistent on me reading than any other subject. (Although I don’t think she intended for me to fall in love with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, as opposed to the rich works of, you know, the John Steinbeck types.)
“All kinds of books. It’s not only the Bengali books,” Bishakha said of her father. “He could tell you Shakespeare. He’d close his eyes and he could read that. He could tell you Taming of the Shrew. He could tell you Romeo and Juliet.”
Pravat may have been a quiet type, but my mother said he was also a “troublemaker.” Before Pravat and Amiya were married, my grandfather used to take part in protests in support of Indian independence, activities that landed him in jail before my mother was born.
Amiya was a teacher, but Bishakha didn’t know what subject she taught.
In Asansol, my mother attended a school run by missionaries, where her favorite subjects were history and literature.
My grandmother enrolled Bishakha in classical dance lessons, but my mother said she was mostly interested in burying her head in books.
“I didn’t have very many friends,” she recalled. This was something Bishakha had in common with Shyamal.
When she was about thirteen, my mother, Amiya, and Atish moved to Durgapur to be with my grandfather. Amiya quit her teaching job. About three years later, Pravat died suddenly of a heart attack while visiting Puri, a town that is the site of holy pilgrimages and known for its beautiful beaches.
“He died in front of everybody. I was not there, but my mother was there and others, like, my cousins. They were there.”
Bishakha said she had remained behind in Durgapur to stay with an aunt and uncle. She found out Pravat died through a telegram. “We didn’t believe it,” she said. “I thought they were making fun out of it and joking. It was a really big shock for us. And then when they burned the body, then we realized, yes, he’s gone. It was very bad, because he was the only earning member in the family.”
Almost immediately, she told me, she went to Canada at Amiya’s request.
“I came here first.”
“By yourself?” I asked.
“Yes, they sent me by myself.”
“Who sent you?”
“My mother.”
“Why?”
Bishakha paused.
“Because Canada was like—remember, I have an uncle? My uncle didn’t help me, but you met him.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember. Okay. He was here, and then in India, it was a very bad situation. Very bad.”
“You guys were not making money?” I asked.
“Not making money, plus political reasons. That they are killing everybody, you cannot go out. There was a lot of chaos going on in those days. There’s a lot of problems going on in that situation. So they said, ‘You come here.’”
This answer seemed a bit strange to me, but I ignored my instinct that something was being left out. From what I could tell of what Bishakha was saying: She had an uncle who was already living in Canada when Pravat died, who helped (or didn’t help) facilitate her emigration from India. Amiya, Bishakha’s mother, sent her to Canada to start a new life for herself. She was about sixteen years old and was sent to a foreign country where she didn’t know the language and barely knew anybody, almost immediately after her father unexpectedly passed away, someone to whom she was close. My mother hadn’t even been on a plane before.
“What did you think about comi
ng here? Did you want to come?”
“I was very young, I didn’t even know what was going on.”
“But you were sixteen,” I pushed. Something about this didn’t sit right with me.
“Still, in those days, sixteen, you were too immature.”
“But you didn’t have a say,” I kept prodding.
“I didn’t have anything to say. No, no, no, no, no.”
My mother saying “No” repeatedly reminded me of Shyamal.
“You couldn’t say, ‘No, I don’t want to go,’” I said.
“No. I didn’t even know what was going on!” Bishakha exclaimed. She was talking about this as if she was duped.
How could my grandmother essentially exile Bishakha away from her home? What mother could do that to her child with barely any discussion? Had Amiya packed Bishakha’s bags and put her on a jet? Just like that?
When Bishakha first arrived in Toronto, she lived with a family friend and began attending high school, then community college. But she was also tremendously (and understandably) homesick. Bishakha didn’t like the food in Canada. She didn’t know how to cook for herself. She missed Bengali books and her favorite curries at home. My mother said she cried a lot.
Of course she did. Who wouldn’t at that age, after what had happened? Three years after she arrived, from her telling, Amiya and Atish moved to Canada as well. Bishakha sponsored them. Atish was about thirteen.
“Ma didn’t want to go back, so I got stuck here. If they wanted to go back, I could’ve gone,” Bishakha said, barely hiding her regret. Incidentally, when I was growing up, Amiya did go back to India, which is why I only met her a handful of times.
When her family arrived, my mother stopped going to classes at the community college and took a job at nights as a switchboard operator at the Bell Telephone Company. She had to work to support Amiya and Atish on her own. And then over the years came other odd jobs, including a part-time gig at a library.
“When you were young, what did you want to do when you grew up?” I asked.
“You know what? I never thought what I wanted to be,” she responded. “Because I didn’t have time to think about me. Now I think a lot.” Every word seemed to be dripping with sorrow.
“So when you’re growing up, even when you weren’t busy, you never had thought, ‘Oh, I want to be an astronaut when I grow up?’”
“I didn’t have time.”
She wasn’t comprehending what I was asking. She knew what the words meant, but not the meaning of the question. Once again, this reminded me of the conversations I had with Shyamal. Choice, the concept of agency, was so foreign to both of them.
“Did your parents ever talk to you about marriage and who you were going to marry?”
“No. When I was growing up in India, you have to have degrees, right, and then they will arrange for your marriage. And the man’s family background has to be good, and then you have to see the man, what kind of job he has, because they have to provide. They will check all those things.”
“But I’m saying, your father and your mother never said, ‘Okay, at this age we’re going to arrange you off.’ Did you ever have a discussion about that?” I asked. I kept following up, my journalistic nature to pry fully engaged.
“No. It’s understood. It’s going to happen.”
“And you have no choice in the matter.”
“For me, I didn’t have a choice. I never even thought of that. It didn’t cross my mind.”
“Before you met Baba, was there ever anybody else that you were in love with or anything like that?”
Bishakha let out a laugh, the first I’d heard all day since Chicago. “Never.”
Her brain just wasn’t wired that way. Where I have spent years dedicating brain space to crafting the perfect way to ask someone out on a date or constructing the perfect cover letter for the next job, it never occurred to my mother to find a husband on her own or to think about pursuing her own goals. She never had her own goals. My mother just had to survive. I can’t even comprehend what a burden that must have been.
Familial pressures controlled my parents’ plights, but Bishakha had the opposite experience of Shyamal in leaving India. Shyamal wanted to do it, but his family forbade it. But for the first time in his life, as he told me, “The steering wheel was in my hand.” So he had at least found he had the agency to take his fortune in his own hands, even if that meant alienating his family. My mother didn’t want to come but was, essentially, shoved off to Canada at a young age. She was forced into what her family thought would be a better life, far away from what she considered home.
The steering wheel was nowhere near her hands. Bishakha faced a responsibility far beyond herself, having to keep Amiya and Atish afloat. This experience might speak to why they had such different approaches to life: My father left to go back to India because he was used to doing things his own way, even if it alienated those close to him. Maybe Bishakha didn’t ever go back to India permanently because she didn’t think she could.
Hearing about Bishakha’s feelings of loneliness growing up in India, feelings that were then compounded by her move to Canada, put her marriage to Shyamal in a completely different light for me. What struck me wasn’t so much that she didn’t have many choices growing up and as a young adult. It was that it didn’t occur to her to even think in those terms. Bishakha had spent her life as a human ping-pong ball, being batted through life by other people. In my head, I thought of a terrible analogy: a sheep raised in a farm solely to supply wool and then forced into the wild. In the moment, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anger toward Amiya. How could a mother have put her daughter in that position?
And then came her marriage, which she also didn’t want. Yet another major life decision that was not her own.
“When your mother answered the ad, did you know she was doing that for you?” I asked Bishakha.
“No.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No, I was a bit surprised. When your dad came, my mother called and said, ‘Somebody came and would like to see you.’ So then he called me at the office. I was really shocked. I didn’t know who that guy was. He said, ‘My name is So-and-so and your mother gave me the number and I’d like to meet you.’ So I said, ‘I don’t know you. I don’t want to meet you because I have to go home.’ He said, ‘So, that’s okay, go home, then we can see you there and we can go out.’ I didn’t like it.”
For the most part, aside from some details, Bishakha’s story about how they met was the same as Shyamal’s. They were both in sync on one particular detail.
“He was desperate!” my mother exclaimed. “He wanted to get married as soon as possible, which I didn’t because I wanted to wait.”
“Why did you want to wait?” I asked.
“I didn’t know your dad!” she said. She said that before committing to marriage, she wanted Shyamal to meet other members of her extended family, like her aunts and uncles.
Bishakha described her first meeting with Shyamal as “not good” and said “it didn’t go well.” She smiled as she said that. My mother didn’t like the way my father carried himself.
“You know your dad,” Bishakha said. “He is very aggressive, and I’m aggressive. I think I’m aggressive but not in front of people. I cannot be that kind of aggressive. I was not interested in marrying him.”
“Did you tell your mother that you didn’t want to get married to him?”
“Oh yeah, I told my mother.”
“So why did you end up getting married to him?”
“I didn’t have a choice. I don’t blame my mother, either. She was very sick. She was worried about me. She was in the hospital. She thought, ‘If anything happens to me, who is going to take care of her?’”
I found this incongruous with my mother’s story about being sent to Canada by herself, but I didn’t press. Amiya wanted Bishakha looked after and cared for, and yet Bishakha was the one who was taking care of the family at the time
. She was shouldering the burden so that Amiya and Atish wouldn’t have to face their struggles alone. This was apparently too much for Amiya to bear.
My parents’ wedding ceremony took place in Pearl River, New York, in 1977. They were married by a local priest in front of around fifty guests. My mother was in her late twenties at that point. She had been an immigrant for more than a decade.
“Are you angry that your mother made you get married to him in hindsight?” I asked.
“At the beginning, I was not angry,” Bishakha said.
But as the tensions with my father set in right as the marriage began, Bishakha’s resentment for Amiya grew. The end result of the wedding was ironic: Amiya urged Bishakha to enter into marriage so my mother wouldn’t be alone. Decades later, she was.
Fifteen
“I am happy, yes and no.”
A thought ran briefly through my head in my conversations with Shyamal and Bishakha: I wish I had never been born.
I don’t mean that in the way it comes off. I’m very glad I was born. I love living and I’ve been afforded luxuries the vast majority of humans in the world don’t enjoy. I’ve been in love. I’ve been heartbroken. I’ve been able to pursue my professional desires, then switch gears when I wanted. I didn’t grow up poor. I’ve traveled to most of the United States and some of Europe.
What I mean is, I wish my parents hadn’t met each other and had instead found different paths, the by-product of which would mean I wouldn’t exist. I don’t blame myself for my parents’ marriage, of course. I saw that episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. But after hearing their stories and realizing just how unfit they were to be with each other, I wanted to take a time machine to 1977 and beg them to meet other people. They deserved better. Better from their parents. Better from each other. And yes, better from me.