Missed Translations

by Sopan Deb

  My uncle had a particular fascination with baseball, a sport that wasn’t common in India. Atish grew up with cricket. He loved throwing tennis balls to us in the narrow apartment hallway, and we’d field them with mitts on as if we were on an actual diamond. One time he took us to what was then called the SkyDome, the home field of the Toronto Blue Jays, for a game. I ran the bases with my younger cousin Sagnik afterward as part of a promotion the franchise was throwing for kids twelve and under. As we finished our faux home-run trots, Atish was at home plate cheering us on.

  Even though Atish and Sima went out of their way to spoil us, they did not live a life of luxury. Their apartment was physically small, and they were frugal with money. My aunt and uncle didn’t buy clothes very often. Gifts from Atish and Sima were thoughtful but not extravagant. Instead of spending money on lavish meals, they avoided eating out when they could. This is part of the brown experience. We rarely went to sit-down restaurants growing up. In fact, if I ever tagged along with one of the adults to the mall when they went shopping, I’d repeatedly stroll by the Chinese fast food restaurant in the food court and grab samples because it was so unusual for us to eat outside the home. On the rare occasions we did go out to eat in Canada, there were always fights among the parents over who would pay the check. This is a common immigrant thing too: It’s a point of pride to pay the bill at dinner or go above and beyond to be gracious hosts. At night, we found spaces on the living room floor to sleep. Atish snored terribly every night. It sounded like a duck was trying out for an a capella group inside his nose. But I didn’t sleep much anyway, because I’d be up late with Sagnik playing the computer games I didn’t have at home.

  But this was family. For one glorious week out of the year, we weren’t disjointed. We were warm, safe, and cared for. When the visits took place during the winter, I got a taste of the Christmas spirit I saw in movies. We didn’t sing carols or sip eggnog, but we laughed over curries and opened gifts from Atish and Sima.

  As I got older, the visits to Toronto became less frequent and then eventually stopped entirely as things got worse at home. I drifted away from Atish, Sima, and Sagnik. The more distant my relationship with my parents became, the guiltier I felt about the idea of being close with Atish and Sima. Furthermore, the two of them seemed like relics from a past life. I wasn’t that kid anymore who loved sitting in their living room. The one happy thread I had tying me to my brownness gradually frayed. After the divorce, Bishakha and Shyamal lost touch with Atish too. With my father, it was a natural result of the divorce. With my mother, it was the result of a dispute involving my grandmother’s property in India. Yet another casualty of the tumult.

  Sattik and Erica, my sister-in-law, usually host the holidays at their cozy two-story house in Howell, and Christmas 2018 was no different. I have spent Christmas and Thanksgiving with them every year, dating back to college, unless work got in the way. My mother was rarely there, a result of her own complicated relationship with Sattik, which is why Wesley and I visited her before joining the festivities.

  Holidays, in my adult years, have always been a source of conflicting emotions. I’m grateful for the strong relationship I have with Sattik. He’s always been my advocate and biggest role model. I enjoy being at my brother’s home with his family celebrating holidays and birthdays, but at my core, I still feel a sense of longing. The holidays are supposed to remind us of what we have and to be thankful for it. But for me, they’ve always been a reminder of what I lacked. Sattik had Erica and his own children. I’ve always felt like a distant cousin when visiting them: late to the party, accepted, but a fleeting member of the group. I take part in the traditions: sitting around the Christmas tree and exchanging gifts, sipping whiskey and watching holiday movies, the ham dinner, all of it. But many times, I’ve felt a sense of emptiness in these situations, as if I was a stray family member recently picked up for the ride.

  That’s not a reflection on Sattik and Erica, mind you. They’re wonderfully welcoming, as is Erica’s family. It’s a reflection of how unsettled I felt in my parents’ absence, even recognizing how unhappy I felt when they were there. In my twenties, I never celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas. I tolerated them.

  Sattik’s approach to the relationship with Atish and Sima was the opposite of mine, even as he too drifted from Bishakha. He correctly recognized that they could be grandparent-like figures to his children, Tessa and Braden (then seven and four years old), and he made the effort to stay close to them even as he fell out with each of our parents. It’s been important for Sattik, he told me, to re-create the experiences we had on our Toronto visits and pass them on to his children.

  So there I was, after all these years, cramped on a couch with Atish and Sima, catching up around Christmas. In recent years, Atish, Sima, and Sagnik had begun making the trek down to New Jersey around the holidays.

  When I walked into Sattik’s house, a thirty-minute drive from my mother’s apartment, I heard the familiar “HEY SHAMBO!” of my childhood. I touched Atish and Sima’s feet and introduced them to Wesley.

  Part of Erica’s family is Italian, which means a traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. It is easily my favorite part of the holidays: an opportunity to pig out on linguini with clams, crab cakes, fried fish, homemade lobster bisque, and whatever else. After dinner, Wesley and I quickly found ourselves in the living room so we could digest, along with my aunt and uncle. Sattik and Erica worked in the kitchen while Tessa and Braden sat near us on the floor, playing with L.O.L. dolls and Legos, desperately hoping a wayward adult would wander by to play with them. Everything had come full circle. Just as Sattik, Sagnik, and I had played on the living room floor at the feet of Atish and Sima when we were children, there were Tessa and Braden doing the same decades later. We had passed the living room torch from one generation to the next.

  Atish and Sima were characteristically warm toward me, even though it had been a while since we had spoken at length. I told Atish, as we settled onto the couch, how difficult some of the recent conversations had been with Shyamal and Bishakha.

  “They’re different now,” I said. “They’re older and I think regretful.”

  Atish, now in his midsixties, seemed mournful in thinking about his own relationship, or lack thereof, with Bishakha.

  “I hope so. You know that’s how it should be. At some point in life, as long as you realize that, you know, we are all human beings, Shambo,” Atish said. “I could get mad. I could get sad. We get mad. We get happy or whatever. That’s how we are as human beings. And when we are mad, we say things and we do things which we regret later—but that’s the key. We should not do this thing, but we should regret it and say sorry for it.”

  He seemed to be convincing himself of this as much as he was telling me.

  “Shambo, the thing is that if you do not have peace at home, you can work hard or whatever, but you’ve got to have someone to come back to,” Atish said. “You remember I used to watch my favorite television show, Cheers? And there was that song called—”

  “You want to go where everybody knows your name, yeah,” I interrupted.

  “So this is the thing. Where you are comfortable, where you feel good: That’s the thing that you guys didn’t have. Like if I’m away, as soon as I get out of home, let’s say fifteen minutes, I get a phone call. ‘Where are you?’” Atish said, looking at Sima, his wife of more than thirty years. “Sometimes I get mad. She always worries about me. But that’s the thing: I know inside that I’m wanted. That someone is missing me. Someone wants me home. So that’s the thing: You have to have love in your life.”

  Atish had learned how to love properly, despite growing up in the same environment as Bishakha. Atish loved Sima, and vice versa. They both cared deeply about Sagnik. And Sattik and me. It was in their nature.

  But as warmly as I felt toward Atish, I had some growing resentment about the situation into which Bishakha was forced during her teenage years: that she had been, essent
ially, exiled to Canada after the death of her father to build her own life by herself at a young age. No wonder she had such a difficult time as a mother, having been shoved out the door by her family. I pictured Atish and Bishakha as children. He said she was always “very jolly,” which I wish I could’ve seen. I wondered if the two of them ever played together. Bishakha loved books: Maybe, as the two of them grew older, Bishakha read to him out loud at night. Maybe they fought and teased each other, as siblings do, happily playing again within minutes. Maybe she helped him with homework.

  “Why was Mom in Canada? Who made the decision to send her?” I asked.

  “That was our parents,” Atish said plainly.

  “So why did they send her? How did she end up going there?” I asked.

  “She came here because she was married to another person at the time,” he said nonchalantly.

  The answer sped by me, the way a car might on a highway, and gave me whiplash. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What?

  “No, no. She was in Toronto—” I protested.

  “Yeah, because they came here.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “That person married her, and they came here,” Atish said.

  “Wait, you’re saying she was married to someone previously before my father?” I said, startled.

  “Yeah.”

  It turned out that my mother had purposely skipped over a portion of her story in our discussion. She hadn’t come to Canada on her own. While in India, Amiya, my grandmother, had arranged Bishakha off to another man at a very young age, around seventeen years old. Atish said he had met the man once and that Amiya had handled most of the arranging, just as she would later do with Bishakha and Shyamal. He didn’t remember much else because he was so young. Atish estimated that Bishakha was married to the first husband for about three or four years. She lived with him in the United Kingdom before moving to Canada with him, where she spent her twenties. The divorce happened in Toronto soon after their arrival in Canada, from his telling.

  “He was a bad, bad person,” Atish said, adding, “There were stories I heard. He was abusive to her.”

  If you consider how terrible my parents’ marriage was—and that they took decades to divorce—how bad must it have been for Bishakha’s first marriage to end in a matter of years? Without realizing it, Atish had turned over a stone I hadn’t even been looking for. For the first time, I saw my mother as something more than a stranger or a source of strife. She was a survivor of abuse.

  I thought about what she must have gone through—not only being in an abusive relationship, but an abusive relationship that carried her over two continents where she didn’t speak the language or have any family or friends. It doesn’t take a professional psychologist to realize that spending several years in a distressing marriage in a strange foreign country may make you hesitant to remarry.

  It would also explain why she had a difficult time connecting with my father—and her children. It would shed light on why she had trouble connecting with me.

  Conclusions began to form in my mind. My experience was not just about being a brown kid in a white town. I didn’t just fall out of touch with my parents because they were immigrants and couldn’t relate to me. Something happened: a massive, unexposed trauma that unwittingly permeated my entire childhood.

  And the trauma went unaddressed. For one thing, we didn’t talk about emotions. We didn’t have frank discussions—or any discussions—about mental health. Where many of my white friends saw therapists growing up, it wasn’t the kind of treatment my family was ever open to considering—because they didn’t know to consider it. In the same way that Indian parents, or at least my Indian parents, had their children solely focused on academics as opposed to social development, they didn’t know how to turn the gaze inward, or even that they are supposed to. Depression, abuse, and trauma can fly into a family like meteors, leaving massive craters in their wake. But those craters come secondary to putting food on the table and making sure your children succeed on paper. I had avoided closeness with Atish out of guilt about the lack thereof with my mother, but in a sad and twisted irony, reaching out to him sooner would have bridged many of the gaps that had kept my mother and me apart.

  I wasn’t sure where to place the blame. My grandmother was arguably the catalyst for what happened to my mother. But she also arranged Atish’s marriage to Sima in the mid-1980s, in a manner similar to Bishakha’s. And that decision worked out fine. Better than fine, in fact. It couldn’t have been by accident. Amiya had found in Sima a loving, desirable partner for Atish, the complete opposite result of what happened in each of Bishakha’s two marriages. Atish drew the right straw while Bishakha twice got the wrong one.

  The Atish and Sima connection went something like this: Amiya put an ad in the newspaper and Sima’s parents, with Sima still living in India, responded on her behalf, just as Amiya had with Bishakha and Shyamal.

  “It’s the same thing you guys have. Whatever dating site you use,” Atish said.

  “Ancestry.com,” Sima offered.

  She meant Tinder. Or Hinge. Or Bumble. But that’s not the point.

  Sima met with three potential suitors, Atish being one of them. She picked my uncle. Although, from Sima’s telling, this marriage was destiny. When she was young, her parents had consulted a palm reader who had written several predictions about Sima’s future: One of them was that she would marry someone who lived outside of India. Atish was living in Canada. Sima didn’t want to go back to Canada with him, but it was her fate.

  “Maybe because I liked him?” Sima said, followed by a hearty cackle. That seemed to be the case. This arranged marriage has lasted more than three decades, and from my vantage point, their love for each other seems to have only increased.

  “I must say one thing,” Atish declared from the couch. “I don’t know which one is right, which one is wrong, because both sides have some flaws, arranged marriage or dating marriage, whatever they do here.”

  Atish wagged his finger.

  “I have seen dating marriages. They are dating for two years, and then they make a big announcement. They go to Hawaii, Honolulu, or Mexico, they get married. They’re really in love, and then after six months, they’ve separated because they need some space.”

  Everyone in the room burst out laughing, including Sagnik, my cousin, who sat silently nearby. He’s a quiet type, unlike his parents. But Atish and Sima didn’t want to arrange a marriage for Sagnik, even as I teased that they should.

  Atish continued: “See, this is something you have to understand, we are in a different country now. His buildup is different than ours. It’s always important to have a second opinion. Sometimes when you are in love, you don’t see the fault, which an experienced person can see. Maybe that way I could suggest to him. No, but I would not tell him to not marry this girl and marry that girl. No. Never.”

  I glanced at Sagnik, who, in contrast to my uncle, possesses a wiry frame and an unassuming demeanor. I considered that he was living the life my parents meant for Sattik and me to have, just as Ron and Trisha, the children of Shyamal’s nephew Somnath, were living in Connecticut. It’s the life we should’ve had. Sagnik was impressive: smart and a self-starter who has built a stable career for himself as an accountant. He is close to his parents, even taking care of them as they get older. He had grown up understanding and appreciating Indian culture, and he is exceedingly polite and respectful of elders. Atish, Sima, and Sagnik were the opposite of Shyamal, Bishakha, Sattik, and me. I didn’t have that stability growing up, but I knew I wanted to build that life for myself with my own children. Maybe I would with Wesley.

  It was getting late. Tessa and Braden were put to bed after leaving out milk and cookies for Santa. Not wanting to incur Santa’s wrath or his coal on Christmas Eve, they didn’t put up a fight about going to sleep early. Sagnik, Sima, and Atish turned in for the night soon after. Wesley and I cozied up on a surprisingly comfortable sofabed.
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  But we lay awake, processing all the night’s revelations. I had the strangest feeling, as I held Wesley close that night. It was an unfamiliar one, a slight tingle. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. My body had to do some translating. As much as my mind was whirling from the revelations about Bishakha, as I closed my eyes, I couldn’t help but notice that for possibly the first time since I was a child, I wasn’t merely tolerating this time of year. With Atish, Sima, Sagnik, and Wesley nearby, as well as my brother’s family, I felt a sense of warmth and I was looking forward to Christmas morning. I didn’t feel adopted. I felt like I was nine again in Toronto. I felt at home.

  Seventeen

  “I couldn’t even think. I was so lost.”

  On New Year’s Eve, Wesley and I went to the studio apartment of my friend Matt on the Upper East Side for a quiet evening. Matt and I grew up together in Howell and had celebrated every New Year’s together going back to college. Some of them were big bashes at our respective schools. One was a trip to Puerto Rico. But now, both being thirty, we wanted something more relaxing. Although on this particular evening, we were so boring that we swung the pendulum too far. A coma would have been less relaxing.

  Matt has long been one of my closest friends. Ever since we met in high school, we’ve spent multiple nights on the phone every week, just shooting the shit about anything. Movies. Television. Sports. Sometimes our phone conversations are just silent, punctuated only by grunts as we watch a basketball game. True friendship. He’s always been steadfast and reliable. Yet, strangely enough, I’ve never spoken much to him about my family life. The lack of talk has always been my source of comfort.

  Sitting on Matt’s couch as we watched television, my phone buzzed right before midnight. It was a text from my mother. She had really mastered this.