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THE SUMMER I turned eleven or twelve, I was really looking forward to our usual holiday break. A few days before it began, as I sat at the dinner table discussing my wish list of activities with great animation, my mother gently put her hand on mine and informed me that she had other plans. She wanted me to join her and my dad for a medical camp they were going to run in a nearby rural village that didn’t get regular healthcare. It would mean starting our holiday a bit later, and needless to say, I was angry and upset.
Many tantrums and bouts of sulking ensued, but my mother was adamant. At 6 a.m. on a Saturday we set off, and when we arrived at our destination several hours later, I took my role of assistant pharmacist very seriously, helping the actual pharmacist distribute the medications and explain how to use them. We worked in a makeshift setup beneath a canopy strung from an ambulance borrowed from my mother’s hospital. The first couple of hours were a blur because I was still sulking, unaware of the societal pressures my parents were navigating in an effort to provide care to all who needed it. But as the day progressed, I grew more involved.
A lot of girls in the village who needed medical attention were not being treated. Mothers fussed over their sons but were afraid to discuss their daughters’ problems. My mother tried to persuade the women to allow their daughters to be examined; my father tried to persuade their husbands. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I couldn’t follow a lot of what was being said and what was happening.
During the ride home at the end of a very long day, I started to cry. Were the girls being punished? I asked my parents. What had they done wrong? Why couldn’t they get help for their problems like everyone else? My parents tried to explain as best they could that in many parts of the country, and in a lot of developing economies around the world, parents didn’t want their daughters to be seen by doctors because finding a medical issue would jeopardize their chances for marriage. But I was a daughter of the same country those girls lived in, and I was allowed to have medical care. I simply didn’t understand the disparity. I couldn’t grasp the distinction between girls who received medical care and girls who didn’t; girls who had opportunities and girls who didn’t; girls who were free to make their own choices and girls who had their choices made for them.
I don’t recall now whether or not I made the connection then between what I had observed firsthand that day—that some of the girls of this village were not receiving medical treatment—and what I had observed firsthand two or three years earlier—that a newborn daughter had been left under my mother’s car. In any case, that trip changed me. My parents’ humanitarian values, already planted in me, took firm root. What I witnessed and learned became an unshakable part of my foundation, informing a myriad of future choices and an unwavering dedication to being an advocate for children—especially girls—who weren’t afforded the choices and opportunities that I have been. Privilege and responsibility go hand in hand.
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it….If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
BRUCE LEE
MY KINDERGARTEN YEAR was spent at a Catholic school in Delhi, where my parents were stationed at the time. I adored my teacher, Mrs. Bhasker; my best friend, Denise; and everything about my little school. When Dad told me I had to bid farewell to my happy life at St. Paul’s because it was time to transfer again—with my parents in the military, we moved every two and a half to three years—I burst into tears.
In an attempt to calm me down and convince me of what he believed was an opportunity, Dad sat me on his lap and flipped the whole prospect of moving on its head. “You don’t want to leave because you think you have your whole life set here,” he said. “But in fact, you’re one of the lucky few who can leave your mistakes behind. If there’s a class you don’t like, or if you’re not doing so well in math, or if some teacher has a bad impression of you, the next school you go to will be like a clean slate. No one will ever know any of that. You can become whoever you want to be. That’s your superpower.” His clever approach swayed me. I began to get excited about the prospect of moving to a new place.
“Be like water,” he said. “Find the best situation wherever you are and make it work.”
Dad’s wisdom set me up to succeed and helped establish a sense of adventure and wanderlust in me early on. As a young girl and then a teenager, it was freeing to know that I wouldn’t be defined forever by who I’d been or what phase I was going through at any given moment. Bad hair? Made a social faux pas? Failed a class? As Aaliyah said, “Dust yourself off and try again.” Nothing lasts forever, and I could always start fresh somewhere else.
Even now, every time I move to a new place or go on location for work, I look forward to packing my bags. I get excited thinking about what the next adventure will bring. Reinvention, adjusting and acclimatizing to new environments, overcoming fear of new places by opening up to possibility—these are some of the principles by which I have lived my life.
Of course, I didn’t embody the “like water” principle all that consistently early on. In fact, after my brother, Siddharth, was born, I was less known for being fluid and more known for being a brat. I had been an only child for close to seven years, and the first girl-child on my father’s side of the family. Suddenly there was this crying, attention-stealing thing that had come along. Sid was a much-wanted and much-awaited baby who’d been born prematurely. He’d had to stay in an incubator in the hospital for a period of time, and when he came home he was still so tiny that we had to feed him with a dropper. As the months went by, I came to adore his perfect curls, his giant brown eyes, and his baby babble. But as cute a baby as Sid was, I couldn’t get past my jealousy over all the attention he was now getting. As a result, I acted out. A lot.
One evening, my parents and I were watching television together in their bedroom. I was lying on my tummy and snacking on some chips, and Dad asked me to pass them. “No,” I responded, without taking my eyes off the screen. Dad asked again, and I said, “No,” this time more firmly. And then, as if “no” wasn’t bad enough, I added:
“Can’t you see that I’m busy!” Which was a variation of what Mom used to say:
Give me time. Can’t you see that I’m busy? I’ll get back to you.
Mom looked at my father, then at me, and then at my father again. “Mimi needs to learn discipline,” she said, using the nickname I was affectionately known by within the family. Then she announced that perhaps I would benefit from going to boarding school.
I can only imagine that when Mom heard me talk back to my father that evening, echoing her very own words, she panicked, wondering where this disrespectful, spoiled child had come from. Dad wasn’t concerned, but for Mom it must have been the last straw after many months of enduring my tantrums and attention-seeking behavior. An idea that had perhaps already been percolating in her mind began to take clearer shape: In the northern part of the country where we lived, there were several boarding schools known for providing a fine academic education combined with a comportment component—sort of like Ivy League boarding schools with a touch of posh finishing school thrown in for good measure. I’d known some kids who’d gone to these schools; army families sometimes sent their children to boarding school and in my own school in Bareilly it was considered a cool thing to go off to attend one.
My parents argued back and forth that evening about my schooling, a huge disagreement that lasted all night. It was the only perhaps-exception to the rule of “no arguing in front of the children” that I can remember, though they did try to keep it in the realm of discussion rather than fight. Dad tried every line of reasoning he could with Mom, but she wouldn’t budge. Mom wanted t
o do what she thought was best for me, and what she thought was best for me was La Martiniere Girls’ College (which started with the elementary grades and went through high school), a four-hour train ride south in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
La Martiniere, well over a century and a half old, was British in its architecture and palatial in size. The Girls’ College—there was an older and larger Boys’ College, too, though the two were kept entirely separate—offered top-notch academics. The school also taught its pupils how to be ladies: how to dress, how to speak, and how to develop good, healthy habits. We were expected to obey a strict lights-out rule, keep our closets neat, and be well groomed at all times.
After their “discussion” that night, my parents started having conversations with me about attending a new and bigger school, but in none of these conversations was it mentioned that I was going to live in this new school. Without my family. I remember taking and passing an admissions test, and not long after, my mother dressed me up one morning and she and my father and I traveled to the school for a tour. I figured this would be a getting-to-know-you tour, to be followed, if we all liked the place, by a start date weeks or months away. The tour wore on and eventually we came to a dormitory, where I was shown a bed and a closet where I could put my things.
What things?
I turned to my mother and asked, “Am I going to sleep in this bed?”
“This is where the students come to rest when they’re tired” is what she remembers telling me. While she had been adamant about sending me to boarding school, when it came right down to leaving me there at the age of seven, she faltered. She didn’t tell me that I was staying that day. She didn’t have the heart to.
I’m not sure exactly what happened next or how much time passed, but at some point I looked up and my parents were gone. The matron had told them, and all the other parents of new students, that the hour of departure had arrived. There was to be no lingering, no looking back. It was time for their children to adjust and they would do so under the school’s care. Someone must have told me that my mother and father had left and that I was now going to live at the school, yet I have no memory of that moment. What I do remember vividly is the feeling of being abandoned, a feeling that lasted for a long, long time. I remember sitting on the little merry-go-round in the school’s playground gripping the cold rusty bars and staring at the gate for hours that first week, and in subsequent weeks, too, as I waited for my mother to swoop in and take me back home where I belonged.
The first time Mom was allowed to visit was the following weekend. Because I was in my playground waiting spot staring at the gate, I saw her immediately as she entered the grounds. It was a bit of an unreal moment: the one person I had been longing for suddenly appeared, just like I’d dreamed she would. I jumped off the merry-go-round, ran to her, and fell to the ground. “Why, Mama? Why did you leave me here?” I cried as I grabbed her knees. “I’m sorry if I made a mistake! Please take me back! I won’t do it again!”
She tried to explain to me that boarding school was for my own good, that La Martiniere was a wonderful place and I’d make new friends and learn all sorts of exciting and useful things. In an attempt, I think, to distract me, she asked to see my dormitory, even though she’d seen it the weekend before. I responded, “Promise me you won’t leave me here. If you promise me, then I’ll take you.” She wouldn’t promise, but I showed her where I slept anyway, guiding her through the large doors into a huge room with high French windows and a sea of iron single beds.
For the first month or two, Mom came every weekend, taking the train four hours each way. She’d bring me goodies to replenish my tuck box, the multicompartment box of food and trinkets that students in India and Great Britain take with them if they go to boarding school. My tuck box was everything to me—familiarity, family, home—and Mom kept it filled with my favorite treats: Uncle Chipps, the brand of potato chips I liked best; aampapad, a tangy mango fruit leather; churan, sweet tamarind balls mixed with spices; and an instant ramen-like snack called Maggi noodles. She put in plenty of other goodies, too, and once I started to feel a little more social I figured out that to make friends, I could share what I considered nonpriority items. The priority items, the stuff that I loved and that comforted me, I hid.
Having Mom visit was heaven, but her departures were agony for both of us. I’d be in tears, traumatized all over again by the separation, and as much as Mom must have tried to control her own tears as she was leaving, she would end up crying, too. For days afterward, I wouldn’t be able to sleep or do my homework. It was obvious that I wasn’t adjusting. Which was why Principal Keller (we called her “Mrs. Killer,” God rest her soul) instructed my mother to reduce her visits to no more than once a month. When even that reduced visitation schedule didn’t help matters, Principal Keller took the difficult step of instructing her to stop visiting completely for the next six months.
“If you are serious about your daughter continuing her education here,” she told my mother, “you should not make it more difficult for her. You must give her the opportunity to become more independent. Please don’t make the gateman’s job any harder by arriving and asking to be let in.”
I felt like whatever tenuous safety net had been supporting me had just been ripped away.
I still didn’t understand why I had been sent away, why my mom had thought this was the right move for me, why the school would be “good for me.” I didn’t understand why she couldn’t visit me anymore when it was the only thing that made me feel better. Some days I blamed the arrival of my brother; other days I blamed my own bad behavior. My confusion remained because Mom didn’t explain her reasons to me—maybe she didn’t fully understand them herself. All I understood was that I was alone, and that everything was different now.
First there was getting used to sleeping in the huge dormitory—getting used to how the coils under the mattresses creaked whenever we moved; getting used to the sound of the other girls’ breathing as they slept; how they hung their washed socks and underwear on the head rails to dry during the day; how the temperature dropped the instant you walked into the room because it was so cavernous. Mealtimes were no longer family time with interesting dinner table conversations about my parents’ medical cases and my school. Now I ate in a big dining room with long tables and benches, surrounded by people I hardly knew. At home, I adamantly refused to eat any vegetables, but in boarding school, you had to finish what was on your plate or receive detention. It was a very stereotypical English boarding school, with huge arches and vaulted ceilings, just like Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. Only at the time there was no Harry Potter, so I didn’t even have the comfort of feeling that maybe this experience, like Harry’s, would eventually give me magical powers. I suppose the only slightly magical thing that happened is that I learned to enjoy the food I used to hate, like baingan, for instance. Even now, eggplant is one of my favorite foods. Out of torture came a new love.
One night soon after I arrived, I threw up in my bed after the lights were turned out. I’m not sure if I’d eaten something bad or if my sickness was due to the anxiety and fear that sometimes gripped my stomach. Not wanting to get in trouble for making a fuss, I went to sleep with a puddle of vomit in my bed and didn’t tell a soul. In the middle of the night, I got up, washed my sheets, hung them up, and then returned to my bed to sleep on a bare mattress. Early the next morning, I rose before everyone else and remade my bed with the still-damp sheets—the solution of a third grader terrified of what would happen if she made another mistake, considering that the last mistake she’d made had been bad enough to get her banished from her family. None of my dorm mates ever noticed—or if they did, they didn’t acknowledge it—and the only person who ever knew about it was another new girl whom I’d become a little friendly with; I told her two days later.
Sometime after this episode I did a complete turnabout regarding sickness. Inst
ead of pretending that I wasn’t sick, I’d pretend that I was. I didn’t want to be in class; at that point I didn’t like most people and most people didn’t like me. But in the infirmary, there was a lovely nurse who used to make all the kids in her care laugh. It was the only bit of attention I could find, so I did whatever I could do to get it. There was a rumor going around that if you put cut onions under your armpits you’d get fever, so I used to steal onions from the food hall and put them under my armpits, desperately hoping it would send my temperature soaring so I’d be sent to the infirmary, where the nice nurse would take care of me. But the only thing that happened was that I smelled like onions.
Eventually I stopped questioning why I’d been sent away and slowly began to settle in. It had finally sunk in that I didn’t have a choice. One teacher, Miss Rose, took me under her wing, occasionally inviting me in the evenings to her quarters on the property. Those nights, we’d eat something together and then she’d help me with my homework. The one-on-one time was a balm, and I started to feel a little less alone.
And I think the orderliness of all the rules at the school started to comfort me in some way, too. From the very first day, we were taught how important it was to make a good impression. We had to iron our navy cotton uniforms every night because our pleats were checked every morning by monitors, as were the height of our socks and the shine of our shoes. It mattered how pressed and ironed your pleats were, how clean your hair was. I bought into this fully, making sure I always looked neat and clean and well put together. Even now my clothes have to be ironed, my shoes need to be scuff-free, and my closet needs to be orderly.
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