by Sopan Deb
Why did I have a second child?” my mother repeated the question with a blank expression.
We were still in our kitchen, as Wesley prepared a new lamb curry recipe. Unlike the conversation with Shyamal, Wesley didn’t sit with us for this one. While she listened impassively, she felt it would be better if this talk was just between us. We were going to traverse sensitive material, and we didn’t know how comfortable Bishakha would be if the conversation got too crowded.
Bishakha was about thirty when she had my older brother, Sattik, in 1979. When I was born in 1988, she was almost forty. That means both of my parents had more than a decade of misery together before deciding to bring me into the world. It also means my mother was older than usual to have a child.
I asked my mother the same question I did Shyamal in India: “Why did you have a second child?” When I examined this with Shyamal, he said, “I loved both of you in the deepest core of my heart. Life is not about mathematics. It can happen to anybody. When you came, I was very happy to see you.” He added it was “hard to say” whether it was planned. He didn’t understand the question.
“Why have me?” I repeated myself to my mother.
“You’re my miracle baby. God blessed me with you,” she said, adding that the pregnancy was a difficult one.
“But why have a second child? Do you know what I mean? I’m not disputing that I’m your miracle baby and all that, but why have—you’re already in an unhappy marriage.”
“It’s very hard to say why. I cannot say why.”
Shyamal had said the same thing: hard to say. In fact, he used those exact same words when I prodded him about whether I was a planned child or not.
“It’s just because having another child is just a lot more work and you’re already tired, you’re already exhausted,” I said, but my mother interrupted.
“I got help from your dada,” she said. Dada, in this case, referred to my brother, Sattik. That’s what I used to call him growing up, which is how one addresses an older brother in India as a show of respect. “He helped me a lot. I’m grateful to him. I’m thankful to him. He loved you so much then. He used to pray in front of God and say, ‘I want my brother, I want my little brother.’ I was not even pregnant then. And God listened and I never, never, never, not a single moment, think that I made a mistake.”
“But you guys went out of your way to have a child,” I said.
“It just happens.”
“It just happened?”
“I cannot explain to you, it just happened after nine years.”
I realize that my line of questioning might seem insensitive. These questions may not be easy for any parent to answer, and I was pushing, straining to find a justification for my existence that might not exist.
And that was as far as I was going to get down this path anyway, so I moved on. I was a bit frustrated. Sometimes things are truly unexplainable. Maybe my parents’ marriage was experiencing a détente, and here I am.
“I don’t regret, Shambo,” Bishakha continued. “Never. I was so happy when I saw your face when you were born. I said, ‘Thank God, he is beautiful.’ You used to have beautiful hair, cuddly ears.”
“I used to. I don’t anymore,” I quipped.
“You were chubby. You were eight pounds, six ounces. You never smiled.”
For a moment, my mother thought about Shyamal. This was not someone she thought about often. She looked away. Once again, her chin rested on her palm.
“He’s happy there, and I’m a survivor.”
“You are a survivor, that’s very true,” I said. She was mistaken about my father being wholly happy in India. But she was right about being a survivor. She laughed.
“Thank God you got out good. I don’t want anything from my life. I just want you and Bimbo to stay well.” (“Bimbo” was my parents’ nickname for Sattik. Poor guy. I got “Shambo.” He got “Bimbo.”)
I had another topic to broach with Bishakha. I saved it for the end, knowing it would be the most difficult. When we were in India, and I sat at Shyamal’s kitchen table, I had one overarching question I needed to ask my father: Why did he leave the country without telling me? I wanted to know everything else about him, of course. But what I most needed an answer to, more than anything else, was why he chose to physically disconnect himself from me. It led to some of our most difficult conversations and some of the most revealing answers from my father.
With my mother, the subject gnawing at me the most regarded the last time Shyamal and Bishakha lived under the same roof. I had never asked my mother about what happened in eighth grade when we were in Howell—that extended period where she locked herself in her room unexpectedly, marking our first period of sharp disconnect. It set off a chain of events that permanently split our family apart, not that we were that united to begin with. We never mentioned it after she reemerged from her self-imposed isolation. Fifteen years later, one of us needed to bring it up.
“When I was in eighth grade, there was a point where you really struggled, I think,” I said, hesitantly.
“Oh yeah,” Bishakha said matter-of-factly.
“You didn’t come out of your room at all, except to go to work. Occasionally you’d come out and eat something. We didn’t talk almost that whole year.”
“At one point, I was thinking about killing myself at that time,” Bishakha said, again almost casually.
“I didn’t know what was happening. I never knew,” I said, as softly as I could.
“In that case, nothing really happened.”
“I remember. It came out of nowhere,” I said.
“Sometimes, that’s the way it is. That’s the way he was. I had never seen him in a good mood,” Bishakha said, referring to Shyamal. According to my mother, years of not feeling loved at home had taken its toll.
“So there was never a day of happiness in your marriage?”
“No, never.”
“There was never a trip you took? Never a dinner?”
She said no.
“What were you feeling like in your room? What would you be thinking about all day? Did you actually think about killing yourself at that point?”
“Oh yeah, so many times.”
“Especially at that point?” I said, keeping my voice calm and steady.
“Especially at that time,” Bishakha said. Her voice was beginning to crack.
“What was going through your head?”
“Lonely.”
“You were lonely. Did you feel like nobody loved you?” I asked.
“Oh, very much.”
It was a terrible thing to hear. She was living in her own house, surrounded by family, but feeling loved by none of them. During that period, she took my confusion as a lack of caring for her. This is what I mean by saying she deserved better from me.
Why didn’t we just all talk to each other and say how we felt? It seems so simple. All I had to do was go upstairs and knock on her door. Maybe slip a note underneath and tell her that if she needed anything, I was there. But this didn’t even occur to me. I was so focused on living my own life that I didn’t consider that my mother needed me. Things would have been so much easier. We would’ve relieved each other of so many burdens if we had just taken all of our internal anguish and made it external. Here was Bishakha, a woman who had so much robbed from her and had never been in love before. Even now, I wondered when was the last time she felt true unconditional love. When her father was alive? Her childhood? My guilt was real. I swore in that moment to never let my mother feel alone again.
“Do you wish we communicated more growing up? Because we didn’t really,” I said.
“We should have, but maybe it’s my fault, I don’t know.”
“This is not just your fault. This is not just Dad’s fault. This is not just my fault. It’s all of us,” I said.
I felt strongly about that. In order for us to mend—truly mend the family fabric—we all had to accept collective responsibility.
“Y
ou’re happier now?” I asked.
“I am happy, yes and no. I’m not happy. I’m not happy because I don’t have a family. I’m by myself. I’ve survived. Whatever I’m doing, I’m doing okay. Yes, I think I’m happy.”
“If you could do it over again, going back to when you were like eighteen?”
Bishakha laughed. It was true that she hadn’t thought at the time about what kind of career she wanted, but it didn’t mean she couldn’t think of one now. She said she would have become a librarian.
“I definitely would not have listened to my mother about my marriage.”
“Would you have gone to college?”
“I would have done that.”
My mother went on to say that her relationship with her mother became strained after she married Shyamal. In the late 1990s, Amiya had moved back to India. Shortly before her death, when I was in college, Bishakha went to see her one last time. Amiya knew she was dying, and their last conversation was very emotional.
“She cried and I cried,” Bishakha said.
“Did your mother ever say anything to you like ‘I’m sorry I made you marry him’?”
“No, but I’m sure she regrets it a lot. She did regret a lot,” my mother said, before continuing: “In her mind, she knew she made a big mistake. But she did cry a lot. And she said, ‘This is the last time you’re going to see me.’ And that’s what happened. She died before the year’s end.”
Even still, Bishakha did not seem critical of the institution of arranged marriage, saying that she and my father were just “one in a hundred.” For all their dissimilarities, this was one place where Bishakha and Shyamal saw eye to eye.
As we were talking, Bishakha noticed Wesley sitting in our living room, waiting while the curry simmered. She had been silent the whole time. My mother turned to her. “God gave me a good one. The best thing in my life, him,” Bishakha said to Wesley, referring to me. “Everybody asks me, ‘What is the best thing in your life?’ I would say him. Even if I died right now, I would say my best thing in my life, him.”
Bishakha, who was keenly aware I would not have picked up the phone to call her on Mother’s Day last year without Wesley’s prodding, was expressing her affection. She seemed resigned to the estrangement between herself and Sattik, which was cemented around the time of my college graduation, due in part to disputes over Sattik’s wedding.
“I am ever grateful to you and thankful to you,” she said to Wesley. “And if you ever get married, I am not going to interfere. I promise that.”
I was done talking for the day. We had covered so much in a short time, and now I just wanted for us to enjoy each other’s company. I turned the recorder off. If Bishakha felt relieved, she didn’t show it in that moment.
Wesley’s lamb curry was soon finished. I set out plates and scooped out helpings for the three of us before migrating to our tiny living room. My mother didn’t eat much, but she did heap praise on Wesley’s culinary skills. As we munched, I turned on the television and scrolled through various channels, trying to find something for us to watch. Perhaps a movie. Not Chicago, of course. I landed on the Pixar feature Coco, the animated story of a young boy who runs away from a restrictive home out of anger, ends up in the afterlife, and spends the film trying to get back home to his family. It was a little too on the nose, but it felt right nonetheless.
I couldn’t tell if my mother enjoyed the movie. She leaned back against our couch cushions with her hands interlocked on her lap in front of her and was silent for most of it. Maybe she was at peace. After the movie ended, happy ending and all, we decided to call it a night.
The next morning, I took Bishakha to a Sprint store and purchased her first smartphone. She was still using the flip phone I bought for her from the mid-2000s and was overdue for an upgrade. I had flashbacks of teaching her how to use email, and I hoped this process would be quicker. This time, I’d have to teach her text messaging, emojis, apps and—gulp—social media. I cringed at the prospect of her calling and asking me to explain memes to her. But I started easy, selecting a basic Samsung, rather than the most up-to-date iPhone. Crawling before walking seemed appropriate.
On the sidewalk outside, I showed her basic functions as I walked her to the Port Authority bus that would take her back to New Jersey. Here is how you call. Here is how you take pictures. Lesson two would include “How to Retweet.” My mother beamed and thanked me. We embraced and then she headed home.
It felt like we were all getting an upgrade.
Sixteen
“There were stories I heard.”
Bishakha handed Wesley and me a handwritten card in her New Jersey apartment two days before Christmas. It read: “Dear Wesley, you are my sun, the moon, and the stars. To Shambo, Merry Christmas.” Shakespearean affection aside, Wesley and I had come to celebrate the holiday with her a few weeks after our kitchen table conversation. This wasn’t something I had done in ten years or so.
We had arrived with gifts enough to make up for lost time: candles, fancy bath soaps, homemade fudge, and the crown jewel—a framed picture of the three of us. After she excitedly unwrapped them in her living room, my mother placed the frame on my childhood piano. It was the only picture in her apartment, but it felt like the start to a collection.
Bishakha seemed galvanized. One sign of this was the huge containers of Indian food she piled in our arms as we left a couple of hours later. I knew how much it meant to her to be able to cook for us.
In exchange, we gave her some more lessons on how to use her smartphone. That day’s seminar was titled “How to Send a Text.” It was the next logical step. Just like the email tutorial in college, it was a painstaking process. I’d take her phone, write a sample text, and give it back to her, and she would try to mimic what I did. This went on for a while, with minimal progress, and then Wesley and I had to go. I wasn’t sure if she would be able to do it.
In the hours afterward, I ignored my phone while Wesley and I were driving to Sattik’s house, where we would spend the rest of the holiday. When I finally checked it, I saw several text messages. All from one source: my mother, who had proven a quick learner.
Well, sort of. The first string of text messages went like this:
Hi
Hi Shsmbo
Thanks
Hi shambo
Hi shambo
Hi shambo thank you
[blurry picture of the living room floor]
She had some work to do to expand her texting repertoire—and learn to wait for answers!—but, then again, self-expression was never her strong suit.
That gift was inherited by her younger brother, Atish.
For many years during my childhood, Bishakha, Shyamal, Sattik, and I would climb into our car and make the almost ten-hour drive from New Jersey to Toronto to visit him. Greeting us as we exited the car like stiff, bedraggled nomads was the ever-smiling Atish, his wife, Sima, and their son, Sagnik, who is a couple of years younger than me.
The visits were the highlight of my year. They lasted about a week and usually took place during summer break or at Christmastime. Atish and Sima lived in a small apartment in the downtown area of the city, and I can still smell the carpeted lobby of their building: a damp leather combined with the chemical scent of a car air-freshener. Atish, whom we call “Munna Mama,” is a portly, jovial man with a mustache and an enthusiasm that bristles with every sentence he utters. He never said, “Hey Shambo.” It was, “HEY SHAMBO!” He always bought toys to spoil Sattik and me, everything from computer games to Pokémon cards.
Sima—or, as we call her, “Mami”—doted on us. I never felt nervous around her, as I did around other adults, including other members of my family. She was calm and steady, and her cooking was top-notch. Her best dish was a butter chicken we would beg her to whip up, even if she had just made it the night before.
Atish and Sima loved us, and we loved them. Even the socially awkward Shyamal looked forward to going north of the border. Whatever turmoil w
as going on at home seemed to dissipate during our Toronto visits, flushed out by a cold Canada chill and the warmth of Atish and Sima. Simply put, being around them wasn’t stressful, and that wasn’t something to take for granted when it came to our family. The most comfortable memories were of sitting around inside, a crucial element of Indian family gatherings. Brown family reunions usually aren’t destination events. We don’t go camping. There aren’t fifty of us renting a cabin in the Poconos. We head to whomever has the closest living room.
My family preferred to squeeze in on Atish and Sima’s couch, gabbing endlessly about anything and everything while sipping chai, rather than going out and experiencing the city. Sometimes my family would ask (er, command) me to sing a classical Indian song while playing the harmonium in the living room. Those were the moments where everybody fell silent, as I ran my fingers up and down a keyboardlike instrument about the size of small treasure chest. Bishakha and Sima would close their eyes and bob their heads back and forth as I sang.
When we did leave the apartment, we would do quintessential brown things. We’d go to Indian clothing stores, where saris adorned the windows, and Indian restaurants (when we didn’t have an Indian dinner at home). In the evening, we’d go to the homes of other Indian family and friends, where we’d wear Indian clothing and eat more Indian food. At this point, I still felt my brownness. I liked the food. I didn’t mind singing the songs. I enjoyed the living room soirees. I took pride in being able to speak Bengali fluently. It felt like a core part of who I was.
There were other stops too, and these were less of the brown-specific variety. Atish loved department stores and wholesalers. Whenever he could, he used to take us to a chain called Zellers, where he’d revel in scouring for the best deals and finding treats to buy for us. His fascination with Zellers had something to do with being an immigrant, I think. Bishakha and Atish didn’t grow up around Costco, Target, Sam’s Club, or Zellers. It was the kind of store where Atish could walk in and say, “Look at all this stuff. There’s so much of it!” For someone who grew up like Atish, department stores represented the kind of largesse he had in mind when he first came to Canada.