Clearly, Nick and I were slow starters.
Only after my mother and father were married did Dad admit to Mom that he’d never had a stomachache in the first place. And only after they were married did Mom admit that when she examined him, she couldn’t help but notice his killer abs.
* * *
DURING A STRETCH of time in her teenage years, my mom, the oldest of five, was the only child kept at home while the rest of her siblings were sent away to live with aunts and uncles. This was during the 1970s, a volatile period of political unrest in Bihar, so it just seemed safer to my grandparents—both of whom were involved in state politics—to send the younger children away. It’s quite normal in our family and in India in general to do this; children often live with extended family for periods of time because of work, educational opportunities, or for other reasons. Many of my cousins have lived with me and my parents for long durations, just as I did when I stayed with my grandparents when I was small, and then again with my aunts and uncles so that I could go to high school in the United States. I know this may seem strange to some, but it’s simply a cultural thing. In India, taking care of one another’s children as if they are our own is just part of who we are. It’s seen as a duty and a responsibility, not an imposition. India is not alone in this practice and mindset, by the way; dedication to the family network can be seen in many other countries around the world, too.
During that period when her siblings were gone and her house was quiet, my mother was free to focus on her studies. Her parents treated her like a young adult instead of like a child—something she would follow in her own parenting style—and she was able to develop into the fiercely independent person she was meant to be. She drove to school in an open Jeep, a seventies flower child with her favorite music playing.
My mother has always been my role model and my inspiration: I think of how she came from a small town but left the expected path of practicing medicine there to forge her own way elsewhere, eventually earning multiple medical degrees, becoming a certified pilot, and speaking nine languages. She’s the one who taught me that I could be anything and everything I want to be; she’s the one who made overachieving seem cool. She is the woman I’ve always aspired to be.
* * *
WHEN MY PARENTS married, my mother joined the army, so now there were two army doctors in the family. By the time my mother was pregnant with me, they had been posted to Bareilly, although I was born in Jamshedpur, in Jharkhand. That’s where my grandparents lived and my mother had traveled there to be with them at the time of my birth. Portions of my early childhood were spent living with my maternal grandparents while my parents were doing their postgraduate work in Pune and establishing themselves in their medical careers; my mother’s younger sister Kiran also helped care for me. Back in Jharkhand, my grandparents showed me pictures of my parents every morning and then I would sit with my grandfather in his rocking chair while he drank his tea and I practiced my ABCs. Each day, he would point to the tree in the yard, an ashoka tree with a beehive in it, and because my father’s name was Ashok and my mother’s name means honey, my grandfather would tell me that my dad was carrying my mom in his arms right outside, and that they were always there with me. I saw my parents almost every weekend and during school and summer vacations. I was always surrounded by family, always loved.
Like most little girls, I was totally in love with my dad. My earliest memories of him are of how he always entered the room with a burst of energy and laughter—and also of how long his legs were (he was six foot one). I wanted to be like him so badly that I would trail behind him in our house, pretending that whatever he was doing, I was doing, too. I would try on his uniform with his pants puddled at my ankles and my feet inside his giant shoes. I would spend hours watching him iron his uniform and polish the brass on the shoulders. (Once I started school, where I wore a uniform, too, this would become our own private ritual; we ironed our uniforms together nightly and shined our shoes until they were glossy.) Studying him as he shaved before work mesmerized me. He’d dip the shaving brush into a plastic mug full of water, then put it on his dark, angular face, and the white shaving cream against his dark skin always struck me as a beautiful color block. I loved the smell of his Old Spice, which he wore for years. One time, after he left the bathroom to get dressed, I decided to try the whole shaving ritual myself. It didn’t end well. I had to get eight stitches on my chin and I still have the scar to prove it.
There were other scars and other trips to the hospital after that: like when I got bit on the butt by my dog; when I swallowed beads; contracted typhoid; suffered bronchial asthma attacks. I was actually something of a sickly child and required an inhaler to help with my breathing problems, which could be triggered by pollen, dust, allergies, and sometimes just physical exertion. Still use one. There was also the time my father had to be rushed to the hospital and ultimately undergo surgery because I’d put a beetle in his ear while he was sleeping. I’m embarrassed and horrified to admit that I did this because I wanted him to wake up and pay attention to me. (Note to self: There are limits to what you should do to get someone’s attention.)
Other childhood ploys for attention had less dire consequences. When I was quite young, before I went to sleep each night I would ask my father, So ke uth ke, kahaan jaayenge? which translates as “After sleeping and waking up, where will we go?” I wanted him to make a plan with me of exactly what we would do together when he came home from work the next day. And he did; there was an actual rule involving a promise that I would be paid attention to when he returned. When I knew it was getting time for his arrival, I’d plant myself at the window, gazing through the iron bars that were attached on the outside, and wait for the sound of his motorbike—that loud, tinny pop pop pop pop pop of the Jawa engine. As soon as I heard it I’d race outside, and when he arrived, I’d sit on the front of the bike and he’d take me for a ride around the neighborhood. Bliss! Once I had my time with him—even now the thought of being with him, my twin in so many ways, makes me smile—he’d head inside to see Mom so they could catch up on the events of the day.
As a child, I viewed my parents’ relationship as fairy-tale perfect. They had their problems, of course, like every couple does, but they had one rule: they never fought or had a disagreement in front of the kids. I actually never saw them argue, much less yell at each other, not once, though clearly they had occasional disagreements behind closed doors. Tension would come in the form of things being quieter than usual, like the time my mom came out of her room, headed silently for the kitchen, and dropped a pan on the floor. (Mom almost never cooked, so the fact that she was in the kitchen and picking up a pan at all was already a dead giveaway that something wasn’t quite right.) Or there would be no flirting, which otherwise happened all the time. Often at home and especially at parties, Dad would put on the charm—he would sing to Mom, recite poetry for her, completely and utterly embarrass her. He was creative and romantic and thoughtful, and I dreamed of having a relationship just like theirs, one of true partnership, and of romance, poetry, and music. Who could have known that all that childhood imprinting would actually manifest in reality, just like those self-help books say it will?
One of the most astounding things about my parents’ marriage is that it was equal in all regards—from the way they made their home as newlyweds, picking everything out together, to the way they had mutual respect for each other’s careers, to the way they worked together to do what they determined was best for our family, to the goals they shared in providing medical care and supplies to those who couldn’t afford them. Both of them were also ambitious and they respected that in each other, which taught me that it was fine to have large goals and to work hard to achieve them, and that marriage or even parenthood doesn’t mean you have to stop dreaming big for yourself.
I looked up to my parents as if they were superheroes, not only because they were my parents and I loved them
but because I always felt that being a doctor was sacred work. Imagine a human hand delving into the miracle of the brain with a scalpel, or holding a fragile new life. That responsibility takes my breath away. I have tremendous respect for the medical profession but I don’t personally have the lion’s heart required for it.
During my dad’s posting in Leh, in the northernmost state of Ladakh in a dangerous combat zone, a soldier was once brought in for emergency treatment with a bullet in his head. He was just barely alive. As he was prepped for surgery—in a tent, with temporary stretchers in a makeshift operating room—he was conscious enough to understand there was only a slim chance that he would survive the procedure, much less ever make it home. He said to my father, “Just tell my family that I was martyred for my country. That I did my job.” My dad said, “You’ll tell them yourself.” And he did. Two decades later, after my father died, the soldier came to his chautha—the ceremony marking the fourth day after a funeral—to pay his respects. He had kept the bullet that Dad had removed all those years earlier.
My mom did extraordinary things in her practice, too. She would see patients at the clinic, come home to have dinner with us, then go back at night for rounds—all the while stylishly dressed. She’d sometimes work thirty consecutive hours between her night rounds and the unexpected labor and deliveries that were part and parcel of her medical life. I’ll never forget the night that she went to the hospital in a driving rainstorm to deliver a baby. It was normal for her and Dad to get called away at night, but this time, when she came home sometime after midnight, there was an unusual amount of activity and excitement. My grandmother, who had come to live with us when Sid was born, was up and speaking in a low voice to my mother, who seemed to be racing around the house.
Groggy with sleep, I got up to see what was going on and found Mom in the kitchen cradling a newborn in her arms. She told me that after the delivery, when she’d returned to her car parked on the road outside the hospital, she’d heard the sound of a baby crying. To her complete shock, while the rain was coming down in torrents someone had abandoned a newborn girl under the vehicle.
That night, I desperately wanted for us to keep the baby, this impossibly tiny thing swaddled in my brother’s clothes. Gently, my mother explained that we couldn’t. Instead, she said, she knew of a couple, patients of hers who wanted a baby very badly but were unable to get pregnant. She allowed me to accompany her as she delivered the newborn to them—a different kind of delivery for her, but just as dramatic. There was plenty of legal paperwork that would have to be completed, but I was unaware of that at the time, focused as I was on holding the baby snug in my arms as we drove through the stormy night to the home of that waiting couple. I will never forget the looks on their faces, how the woman fell to her knees in gratitude, how they both cried at the miracle of a baby showing up out of the blue, in the driving rain, during the festival of Janmashtami, the birth of Lord Krishna, who was also born on a windy and stormy night and who was also carried through a flooding rain to reach safety.
That night, I couldn’t grasp why anyone would ever abandon a newborn baby under a car. In the days that followed, it was explained to me that girls were not as highly valued by some people in our country as boys were, thus making them “easier” to abandon. This was, naturally, deeply strange and upsetting to me. I knew I was treasured, and I could see that my mother and father were equal partners in their marriage. How could it be that someone would abandon a baby under a car just because she was a girl?
My paternal grandmother, or Mataji, as we called her, used to tell me that when I was born and people were telephoning to congratulate her, the group of friends who were sitting with her would say, after listening to the callers’ good wishes, “But it’s just a girl. Maybe next time.” And while that story perfectly and sadly illustrates how the cultural message of devaluing females is so deeply rooted in some people’s minds, thankfully, that was not how I was raised. And now that the destructive message that girls are not equal in value to boys is being called out with greater urgency and condemned around the world, maybe things will change.
* * *
MY PARENTS’ CAREERS as army doctors meant that our family moved all over India. We were stationed in Pune, Lucknow (twice), Delhi, Leh (my father only), and Bareilly, though I missed some of those postings because I was living with relatives or away at school. We also traveled a ton, because my parents believed in travel as the ultimate education—a way to literally broaden your horizons in order to have an understanding of the world beyond your own front door. Travel wasn’t just Mom’s thing or Dad’s thing. It was our thing. And when we traveled together, just as in our home together, they were completely inclusive of me. They never treated me as merely a child—they treated me always as a person.
My parents usually got two months of annual leave, and from the time I was very small we’d use the leave to spend a couple of weeks with each set of grandparents every summer and then head up to the hill stations of the Himalayas. Hill stations are towns in the hills or low mountains that were often established by the British in colonized India as places to escape the blistering summer heat of lower altitudes. There are hill stations all over the country, although most are in the north, and with their beautiful scenery they make fantastic vacation destinations.
When it was time for us to head out on holiday, my parents would pack our red Maruti minivan, license plate number DBB 743—the first car I ever remember us having after Dad’s motorbike—and we’d take off. We’d go to Ranikhet, Shimla, and Manali; to Nainital in the Kumaon foothills of the outer Himalayas; to Pahalgam, Gulmarg, and Srinagar in Kashmir. Dad would tie thin, rolled mattresses to the roof of the Maruti, pack the back with suitcases, bags of clothes, and coolers loaded with sandwiches, parathas, and my favorite spicy aachars, and off we’d go.
Every trip was an adventure. The minivan would always be full of family and friends, with at least eight of us jammed into it. We traveled in packs. Still do. My favorite place to sit was in the very back. Dad had convinced me that a cramped, crowded storage space with cushions and blankets thrown over our suitcases and bags was a special place, created just for me. That it was “my room.” I fell for it, as I always fell for Dad’s charm. My cousins knew better—“You’re in the boot!” they’d cry—but one of my cousins, Kunal, the son of my dad’s sister Saroj Bhogal, used to join me there. We were similar in age and that became our territory. The best part of being back there was that when we were on smaller roads with little traffic, we’d keep the boot open and dangle our feet out the back. (Clearly this was a different time, when safety laws there were still somewhat lax.) We’d nibble at our snacks and wave at the occasional car going by as we made our way through the terrain.
Most of the games we played during these long car trips were music-related. One game was antakshari, where the last letter of the song one person has sung is the letter the next person has to start their song with. When we weren’t playing a group game, we’d all be singing, usually to one of the mixtapes that Dad had recorded and brought along. We’d stop to buy guavas, cucumbers, and mangoes, Dad’s favorite, from the vendors on the side of the road, then take a break for lunch near whatever stream we’d seen from the car. The fruit and the adults’ beer were cooled in the ice-cold clear Himalayan springwater that flowed down from the mountains. A few more hours of driving, and we’d stop at a restaurant. Later, when I was a teenager living with my mother’s family in the U.S., I took summer road trips with cousins, other relatives, and friends that reminded me of these carefree early childhood ones. We drove through the states of Idaho, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming, one happy extended family.
The summer I was nine, we spent two months in Leh when my father was posted there. On a trip through the higher reaches of the Himalayas on the way to Pangong Lake, which extends from India to Tibet, I saw my first yak, sampled yak jerky, and tried Ladakhi tea, made of yak milk and salt
. Not a fan. During those months in Leh, I made two or three friends who were my age and who were also in Leh visiting their parents in the military. We’d run around the barracks, which were warmed in the daylight hours by coal-burning bukhari heaters, and search the hills for little dome-shaped Buddhist stupas. I was always out exploring, looking for adventure, trying to uncover something new. My urge was to do something that hadn’t been done before, to discover something that no one had found yet. I always wanted to be first.
Maybe I remember that particular summer so well because that’s when India’s former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was assassinated by a suicide bomber. On May 21, 1991, I was playing cards with some kids in the mess of the army barracks while a group of adults were watching television. Suddenly, several of them rose to their feet. It was eerily quiet, and then one of the adults started crying. The former prime minister’s assassination and its aftermath marked one of the first times I understood that what happens somewhere far away—he had been in Tamil Nadu, more than two thousand miles away in the southernmost part of our country—can affect everyone, that the impact of certain events can’t be contained. I remember the silence, the sobbing, and the crackling of coal as the small heaters tried to warm the large mess hall, which would never feel as completely safe and cozy to me as it had just moments before.
Years later, when I returned to Leh to film the movie Waqt in 2004, I discovered that the hills that had felt so massive at the time now seemed small, and that the barracks we had stayed in during my ninth summer had burned down. Nothing remained of them but ash. Another set of barracks had been built next to where the old ones had been, but they weren’t the same, of course. The new barracks were neither the home of my memories nor of my childhood footprints. But they were the future. They looked sturdier, more comfortable, and they probably all had electric heaters.
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