Missed Translations

by Sopan Deb

  “Happy new year. And for the rest of the year.good night.”

  Bishakha and I had been texting more often, and about mundane things. The day before, she wrote, “Oh I am watching Obama in Oprah very nice.”

  Okay, she still needed some work.

  But it was another text Bishakha sent shortly after receiving the first that stood out to me more than anything. It was to Wesley. After exchanging similar pleasantries with her, my mother sent one that said: “I am going to have a good year. And a new life.”

  Wesley and I traded looks. Her bottom lip curled. It was the first time I could remember Bishakha ever expressing any sort of optimism for the future. I think about that text often now when I’m not with her. Love and care are obviously crucial parts of a healthy family dynamic. So are trust, safety, communication. Those are the traits that first come to mind in picturing a comfortable home.

  But optimism isn’t a trait we discuss much. We probably should in deciding what makes a family work. The ability for a group of people to look toward the future and say, “This is something for us to look forward to” is as crucial as having good things in the present. For the first time in such a long time, my mother was sitting at home, curled up in her bed, with cell phone in hand, and sharing New Year’s Eve with other people. We weren’t with her but we were with her. She had, by her own words, a “new life,” a light at the end of a dark tunnel, which happened to be coinciding with a new calendar. As the ball dropped in Times Square, my mother was turning a new page and aiming to write a new story for herself.

  There was, however, one potential wrinkle. I would have to ask my mother about her previous husband at some point, but I was nervous that it might rock the boat. I had compiled all the pieces to the puzzle but hadn’t yet completed it—and I felt like I needed to. Our relationship was the best it had been in our lifetimes. I ran the risk of upsetting my mother by forcing her to bring up memories that she didn’t want to confront.

  But, selfishly, I also knew that I knew about her previous marriage. I needed her to know that I knew, and I needed to tell her it was okay to talk about it. If she was ashamed about it, I needed to tell her she had no reason to be. Arrogantly, I felt entitled to know about it and how it affected the rest of her life. After all, it directly affected mine.

  One Sunday morning in early February, Shyamal video chatted with me and Wesley using his phone. This wasn’t the first time we had tried this, by the way, since returning from India, but previous attempts weren’t as successful. My father initially couldn’t figure how to get his phone to shoot his face. So Wesley and I had a lovely view of his kitchen table as we spoke. Bishakha wasn’t the only person who needed smartphone lessons.

  When Shyamal saw Wesley’s face, he chortled loudly. This time we could see his face.

  “HOW ARE YOU?!” Shyamal blared, followed by, “HA, HA, HA.”

  We spent some time catching up. I told him about some of the pieces I had written and that Wesley and I were planning on traveling soon. Shyamal said he had suffered a wrist injury from playing tennis.

  “Hey, Dad, did you know Mom was married before you?” I asked.

  I went for it. No warning. No lead-up. I did not pass Go. No “I have something I wanted to talk to you about, Dad.” I was intending on going that route, of course, but, impulsively, I skipped the preamble. What was the point? I wasn’t afraid of him getting angry at me for asking the question. Maybe it was the journalist in me. If I could press politicians with difficult questions on the fly, surely I could do the same with my father. I didn’t want to waste time. I needed answers. I had an internal A Few Good Men voice: I wanted the truth.

  There was a beat of silence. The question, obviously, had caught Shyamal off guard.

  “I had some idea,” he said slowly.

  “Did you know anything about how long it was or anything like that?” I asked.

  “No.”

  He wouldn’t say much else about it. But after a few seconds, he sagely said, “The world is not a very straightforward place.”

  No, it isn’t. A significant portion of the South Asian experience, at least from what I have seen among brown friends and my own family members, is about seeming a certain way to give off the impression of stability and status, at the expense of emotional needs. It’s why Bishakha, when I was little, loved telling people that I spoke fluent Bengali and sang Indian songs. I was a reflection of her effort. It was important for her to keep up the façade that we were a traditional Indian family achieving the American Dream.

  There is a formula to this for many Indians: Go to school. Get good grades so you can get into another school. Get a job, preferably in what your parents want you to study. Get a better job. Get married (in many cases, how and to whom your parents want you to). Have children. Have those children do the same thing. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Everything else is unimportant or a peripheral concern. This prescription is not universal by any means, and it is becoming more flexible by the decade. I have several brown friends who experienced varying degrees of this. Some went through all of it, and others, zero. But even those who avoided the traditional brown path know many who didn’t. Certainly, this dynamic was apparent with my mother and father. Empathy is a learned skill. Their mothers and fathers rarely asked, within the framework of the checklist: Is this what you want? Will this make you happy? Will this fulfill you? In turn, my parents never learned fully how to express empathy.

  Shyamal, from what I could tell, thought Bishakha seemed fine when they met. Because he was checking off the box: Getting married. No one thought to ask if she was fine, beyond the cosmetic. Not my grandmother. Not my father or my uncle. Even knowing what she had been through, none of the people closest to her recognized the impact it had on her as a wife and a mother. Our culture, with a general aversion to placing mental health at the same level of importance as academic and professional achievement, failed Bishakha.

  Weeks later, with much trepidation, I called my mother. I had to put my cards on the table. The conversation had filled me with dread for weeks, going all the way back to Christmas when I first learned about the marriage. All I wanted for Bishakha was for her to be happy. This talk would not make her happy.

  I was going to buck traditional brownness. We were going to communicate about feelings and needs.

  When Bishakha picked up the phone, she told me she had spent the weekend celebrating Saraswati Puja, an annual event honoring the Hindu goddess of knowledge.

  “Mom, when you first left India, were you married once before my father?” I asked her in Bengali, to make her feel comfortable. I made sure my tone was measured and warm, in contrast to the conversation with Shyamal. I had the same fervent desire for answers but not the same appetite for directness.

  Once again, there was a beat of silence, just like when I asked Shyamal.

  “Yes, I did marry,” Bishakha said in a low voice, barely above a murmur.

  “I didn’t know that. You never told me that,” I said.

  “It never came up. That’s why. It was a long, long time ago. He left me.”

  It never came up. She was right about this, at least semantically. Bishakha told me that Canada was always supposed to be their final destination. But first, after the wedding (which would’ve been sometime in the mid-1960s), Bishakha and her husband stopped off in Manchester, England, where the husband had lived for a while. My mother fell seriously ill after somehow contracting typhoid fever and was hospitalized for at least a week. And somewhat amazingly, during most of that year in Manchester, Bishakha said she barely saw her husband. She didn’t know where he was. He’d come and go from their home. They barely spoke. He didn’t come visit her at the hospital.

  She eventually recovered from the illness, and they moved to Canada together. My mother was around eighteen. Soon after that, he was gone. It might have been days. It might have been weeks. It was at most another two years. Her husband, whom she barely knew, packed his bags and left. She was a recent immigr
ant. She didn’t know the language. She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t understand how things worked. She was alone and abandoned.

  “This must have had quite an impact on you,” I said.

  “Yes, very much. Let me tell you, Shambo. My life is very complicated. I’ve always struggled. I’m so used to it.”

  “Did this factor into why you didn’t want to marry Dad?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  There it was. The final puzzle piece was in its place. It was the confirmation of something I had only begun piecing together around Christmas. I began to see the fully formed picture. I understood something neither of my parents could: My mother being abandoned created an obstacle neither of them seemed to understand. And neither ever did.

  “I spent most of my life with your father,” Bishakha said. She seemed ashamed about having been married twice.

  “There’s no shame. There’s no embarrassment. This is a common thing. This is not a problem. Do you understand?” I said.

  “No, I understand that. I don’t know how to say it. I was so young. I had to struggle a lot.”

  “Mom, listen: If I was sixteen, and I had to go to a new country with a man I didn’t know and I didn’t know the language, that would affect me for my whole life.”

  “Of course it affected me, Babu. Very much.”

  I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. It was those around her, especially those entrusted to protect her—like my grandmother—who should’ve known. They’d let her down. I asked her what she thought happened when her husband left.

  “Sopan, I couldn’t even think. I was so lost. I thought, ‘What am I going to do? How will I survive?’”

  Bishakha said she remembered that a Punjabi family in the area took pity on her and helped her learn to use public transportation and speak English. They also gave her money to help her get on her feet. And then she began the life she had described to me before.

  I could hear her sobbing into the mouthpiece.

  “I had to take care of Atish. I had to take care of Ma. I didn’t have anyone to take care of me,” Bishakha said.

  “It’s okay, Mom. This is all important. This is very important that we talk about this stuff. You’ve overcome quite a bit. I had no idea. I wish I did. It would’ve made all the difference,” I said. By now we had shifted to conversing in English.

  “I am very emotional right now. I don’t want to cry,” she said.

  I told her we didn’t have to talk about it, but that it was good we had. It felt cathartic. Though there were still unanswered questions I had about the specifics of their arrival in Canada, at that moment getting those answers felt peripheral.

  “It’s just such a remarkable story,” I told my mother. “I don’t think you have a proper appreciation of how much you’ve overcome. I hope that you do at some point. I understand it now. I didn’t before, but I do now. And I certainly believe that you deserve better than you got.”

  “Thank you. Maybe, I don’t know. One thing for sure: I tried my best to build a family.”

  Before we got off the phone, my mother had one last question for me.

  “Are you going to write about the turkey thing?” Bishakha said, laughing. The turkey thing? This was what she wanted to know?

  When I was about eight years old, and we were still living in Randolph, my family had a house right by this huge stretch of woods. As one might expect, various wildlife would swing by and visit our lawn. Lots of deer. Squirrels. One time, though, for whatever reason, there was a flock of turkeys. We looked out our window and saw a bunch of them hanging out on our front lawn. They stayed there for at least a couple of days.

  One cloudy afternoon, I was walking down the street to play with a friend, while my mother watched me from our front step. It started drizzling, so I began jogging. And soon enough this jog turned into a terrorized in-fear-for-my-life sprint because some of the turkeys started chasing after me, apparently thinking I was a threat. Or they were trying to mimic me. Either way, these turkeys weren’t playing, man. Considering some of the turkeys were at least my size, it is still a wonder how they never caught me.

  Bishakha, sensing the threat, jetted out in her car in an attempt to disperse them—at least that’s how I remember it. The turkeys stopped running on their own, but it was a brave mom moment nonetheless. That doesn’t mean I’ve gotten over my fear of animals. Since then, I’ve been uncomfortable around all types, whether domesticated or in the wild. All of them. Ask the New York City pigeons that coo atop store awnings or the stray dogs lounging around Kolkata. Ask those menacing squirrels in Central Park.

  To this day, the turkey thing remains one of my mother’s favorite stories to tell about me. I don’t blame her, I guess. I have the corniest phobia known to man. I’d make fun of it too.

  “It was so funny,” Bishakha said. “You were the talk of the town. Every time I see someone: ‘Remember, Shambo was running with the turkeys!’ It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny back then.”

  Honestly, it was funny then. It’s still funny now. And I was relieved that we got off the phone with something funny. But my mother probably remembers the turkey story for a different reason. Not just because of its humor or the absurd visual. So many of our stories come from a place of darkness. This was one where Bishakha got to be the unequivocal protective force she meant to be as a mother. When her young boy was in danger, she sprang into action. This one was pure.

  Eighteen

  “Children of immigrants . . .”

  When I took the stage at the Comic Strip Live in April 2019 for the second Big Brown Comedy Hour of the year, everything looked the same. The brick backdrop was still there, as was the green broom closet where comedians hang out before it’s time to go on. Out in the darkness of the crowd, Wesley was taking pictures and chuckling.

  During these shows, I always hang out in the back to watch some of the other comedians onstage. I got to see my hilarious friend Atheer Yacoub, a master of the deadpan, telling stories about being Muslim and growing up in Alabama. There was Ramy Youssef, who was test-driving material before taping a comedy special. He brought the house down like he always does. Dave Merheje, a comic whose manic demeanor onstage earned him a Netflix special, matched Ramy note for note.

  Every time I’ve done these gigs in the past, I’ve been amazed at how much funnier those folks are than me.

  But now they felt different, man. I was on their level. My skin didn’t feel like a costume, despite the similar surroundings, and my sets didn’t feel like a front. At the Big Brown show, I felt big and brown. And more than anything, my parents were no longer just a pretext for punchlines.

  I told the story of my mother’s reaction to my first crush, tapping into a well of affection that had grown for her over the last year.

  “We’re looked at as different, man. Immigrants. Children of immigrants,” I said during the routine. I might as well have been talking about the way I viewed myself too. I saw myself for the first time as a child of immigrants, rather than one who mistakenly ended up with the wrong genetic sample. My take on brownness had shifted from sarcastic and ironic to an earnest embrace.

  I told a true story about being part of the team that launched Al Jazeera America and how we were constantly told to change the name of the network, because a lot of people in the United States thought we were a terrorist group.

  “No! Why should we change who we are? Why should we bend to the ignorance of other people? We are always the ones being asked to change!” I declared onstage. There wasn’t a punchline for that one.

  One day, I told the crowd, I was outside of St. Malachy’s Church, in New York’s theater district, shooting exteriors as part of a feature we were doing on the chapel. An older white guy came up to us and asked what we were doing. I told him about the story we were working on and that it was for Al Jazeera America.

  “Oh, Al Jazeera. Nice to see you guys doing something peaceful for once.”

  The audience got a g
ood laugh out of that.

  I added, “Not with that attitude!” while scrunching into the microphone.

  When I walked off the stage, I felt funny. Actually funny. As in the way a comedian is supposed to feel when they finish a set.

  Following the first Big Brown show of the year, which was early in the winter, I got some unexpected external validation on my way out the door. An older brown woman, who looked to be in her fifties, came up to me in the lobby after the show.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said sternly. “You’ve gotten much better.” Then she strolled away without another word. A true brown moment, where even a compliment feels like a criticism.

  This time it was Wesley who was standing by the front door, ready to offer me my validation. When I finally snaked my way around the throngs of people headed for the exit, I saw that Ron, Susmita and Somnath’s son, was standing next to her. He was just finishing college after managing a successful state representative campaign. This was the latest of several instances in which Ron had come down from Connecticut to visit. Sometimes he needed a place to stay if he was interviewing for a job or had an event to attend. I’ve even had the opportunity to offer him advice. “From an older Deb to a younger Deb,” I once said to him before catching myself. “I’ve never had the chance to say that before!”

  Ron was the first family member to come see me perform in person other than my brother, Sattik. I was relieved that the Comic Strip show went so well because the first set of mine he saw could not have been worse. We dragged him to Brooklyn on a freezing night for a show called Bushwick Bears well before the Comic Strip show. Every single joke bombed. Even a newsy joke I had written for that night was met with such silence that I had to follow up with, “So nobody heard about this?” In the immediate aftermath of walking off the stage, I vowed never to do comedy ever again, which sometimes happens. Ever the politico, Ron gamely said he enjoyed himself.