Leaving India

by Minal Hajratwala

  Yet the dichotomy persists, is somehow useful to someone. Even today, young people in our community feel the pull of American temptations versus Indian values: as if adolescents in India harbor no desires, face no decisions; as if American parents operate without moral principles; as if the young everywhere are not capable of valuing, only of being tempted. If oppression works by dividing us from one another, then surely a primary split is this generation gap. The children of immigrants, the so-called second generation, grow up with an experience so different from that of our parents—and are encouraged somehow to blame both our parents and ourselves for the conflicts that such difference necessarily engenders. Since as a child I had no theories of race, racism, or cultural assimilation, I blamed my parents for the conflict I felt between the worlds; and, too, I castigated myself—the bad daughter, the selfish and ungrateful child.

  And yet, something in me insisted on plotting a path toward what I saw as, quite simply, freedom. Toward myself.

  I was seventeen years old when I traveled the nearly three thousand miles from my home in Michigan to Stanford University. It felt like a migration as momentous as any my ancestors might have experienced, from the crusty boundaries of the old world to the vast, romanticized horizons of the new.

  Stanford was red and gold, adobe and clay, a celebration of light. The dorms were co-ed and there were no curfews. "We trust you," my parents said as they dropped me off. I heard it as an implicit warning: Don't let us down. No other daughter in our community had been allowed to travel so far alone, they told me; they were progressive, they believed in education, for girls as much as for boys. To my parents the opportunities ahead of me were academic, career-boosting, intellectual. I knew that they were also sexual, and that I had better not get caught.

  The distance between my campus and my parents was deeply reassuring. Before leaving Michigan, two girlfriends and I had been talking about what we would do once we reached the faraway paradise of university. One wanted to get drunk; one wanted to do mushrooms; and I wanted to lose my virginity.

  Within the first week—before freshman orientation had ended—I invited a boy back to my room. We fumbled around awkwardly, and afterward, the smell of him still on my crisp new sheets, I called one of my high school friends to report, "I did it." I wept, but not with grief. My tears were one part relief, two parts jubilation. I felt as if I had shed a burden, as if I had tasted my first freedom. As a bonus, I hoped my forfeit would make me unmarriageable in Indian terms, whenever that time came.

  Within a month, my father was in the hospital for a triple bypass operation on his heart. Suddenly I felt guilty; had I somehow, with my wild behavior—my secret betrayal—managed to physically break his heart? My rational mind tried to assure me he could not have known what I was doing; but the emotional entanglement between my parents' expectations and my own desires would take me years of practicing freedom to undo.

  I slept around, and felt myself opening. I soon acquired a boyfriend, and when my parents visited for a weekend, my freshman dorm conspired to keep my secret. I discovered, in the arms of others, that I was not an ugly, shy loner of a girl. I could be beautiful, witty, brilliant, flirtatious, coy, sensual, myself. I discovered power, and the power of surrender. I drew new outlines of my moral life: respect, communication, honesty, but not chastity. And of my body: mine.

  My parents' values came to seem increasingly foreign, unreasonable, even oppressive. I took feminist studies courses that provided a theoretical landscape for my feelings and gave me one way to understand the great divide: it wasn't India, or even my parents, but patriarchy that was attempting to regulate, neutralize, and shame me out of following the true thread of my desire. Feminism offered, too, a righteous outlet for my anger, and a political justification for my yearning to break free of the community patriarchs who called me Daughter and demanded their tea. I rejected the idea of marriage as the only proper housing for female sexuality. From there it seemed a small and logical step to a women-only sex life; as a movement slogan put it, "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice."

  Of course, life is rarely as simple as it seems in theory to an eighteen-year-old. As soon as I declared myself a lesbian, I was beset by male suitors, one of whom became my next boyfriend. This sexuality business was, to say the least, confusing.

  I believed, in those years, that to be a good Indian girl meant to live entirely without sexual desire; that my longing itself, let alone any action to fulfill it, made me bad, wrong, and un-Indian. My entire understanding of my culture was that transmitted by my parents, who in turn passed on what they had been taught, at a level they considered appropriate for a child; I did not learn about my father's erotic art until years later. Their version, steeped in duty and obedience and propriety, was of course only a fragment of Hinduism and of India itself, not a totality. But it was a dominant and authoritative, self-authorizing version.

  My father quite literally wrote the book on being a good Hindu American child: a workbook for earning a Scouting merit badge in Hinduism, which he developed while my brother was a Cub Scout. It discussed sexuality— kama—as a canon, one of the four major elements of a Hindu life, if practiced strictly within marriage. Otherwise it described kama as an impediment to merit, a hindrance—not a sin exactly, not in the Judeo-Christian view of sin, but an obstacle to spiritual development, enlightenment, and being good.

  This hegemonic view was one of my sole windows into "Indian culture," yet my body told me another truth. I have proofread multiple updates of this workbook over the years, filling it with the copyediting marks I learned from my high school journalism teacher, the first woman on whom I ever had a crush. It was no wonder I experienced a split self.

  To understand myself better, I started going to a support group for "lesbian, bisexual, and questioning" women, led by the student health clinic's first openly lesbian therapist, whom I had carefully scoped out by writing a profile of her for the Stanford Daily. The group included a fellow Daily staff member; a woman who was so infatuated with one of the Indigo Girls that she traveled from city to city to cheer at their concerts; and a pretty, dark-haired medical student who asked me to dinner.

  She had a car, so she picked me up at my dorm. "Oh, you dressed up," she commented as we embraced in the foyer. "You even wore pantyhose." I was embarrassed, and tugged at my short skirt. I had thought it was a date. But over dinner she told me about her tortured relationship with an on-again-off-again, currently-trying-to-work-it-out girlfriend.

  Nevertheless, she came back to my dorm room afterward and, in the spirit of mutual support, asked if I would help her by mirroring the affirmations her therapist had prescribed. We sat cross-legged facing each other on my not-too-lumpy futon mattress, which lay on the floor and was covered with a colorful Mexican striped blanket I had purchased from one of the many vendors who filled the campus's main plaza on weekends.

  "You are beautiful," she said, looking into my eyes.

  "You are beautiful," I repeated dutifully. We were to maintain eye contact, as this would help her see her own reflection.

  "You deserve love," she said.

  "You deserve love," I repeated, shifting slightly on my seat.

  "I love you," she said.

  "I love you," I whispered. It was becoming very intense. I had never even kissed a girl, as I'd confessed to her earlier in the evening, yet here I was saying "I love you"—although the I and the you were both her, not me. Weren't they?

  "Thank you," she said.

  "Thank you," I said, which was funny, but neither of us laughed.

  There was a pause. "You've never been kissed?" she asked.

  No, I confirmed.

  "Well—would you like a kiss?"

  I nodded. It was a generous offer.

  She leaned forward, still cross-legged on the floor, and pressed her lips to mine. They were pink, soft; pleasant. Then they were gone. I opened my eyes, not knowing when I had closed them.

  "Thank you," I sa
id again, feeling truly grateful; feeling one step closer to being who I wanted, or was meant, to become.

  By late sophomore year I was describing myself as bisexual or lesbian to myself, to my friends, and to most of campus. I didn't mind my boyfriend, but I felt I was merely marking time with him until I figured out how to be with a woman. I had seen a therapist at the student health center, who reassured me I was normal; taken almost enough feminist studies classes for a minor; and helped found a feminist literary journal and our university's tame version of the radical organization Queer Nation.

  All of this took place, not in secret exactly—I was wildly, recklessly, open about it on campus—but separate from my family, outside their domain. The two worlds, and who I was in each, became mutually exclusive. On visits home I was the good daughter, successful student, on track for my parents' version of the ideal life. On campus I was the radical bisexual lesbian feminist, writer, activist. I was so visible that I still run into strangers who know my name from those years; I counted the miles again, nearly three thousand, surely more than enough to protect me from my parents' gaze.

  The construction of these two selves felt exhausting, necessary, and oddly familiar. In a way this secrecy, this silence, was merely an extension of my earlier splitting: home/school, Indian/American. Straight/queer: it seemed the only way to keep each aspect of myself safe—an illusion that, though it served me at the time, was bound to collapse. I don't know why I did not see the inevitable collision coming; perhaps I did, but thought or hoped I could control its timing. Or maybe the split self was the only trick I had; I believed it would work because it had been at work all my life.

  For all my parents knew, I was spending my semesters earning A's and working as a student journalist at the Stanford Daily. This was also true, and earned me a summer internship at Time magazine in New York between my junior and senior years.

  Nineteen years old, alone in Manhattan, I went to my first grown-up Queer Nation meeting and marched in my first gay pride parade, shouting slogans ("We're here, we're queer, get used to it!") alongside more than a hundred strangers in the radical Lesbian Avengers contingent. The atmosphere on the streets and in the city's gay neighborhood was electric, in a way that for previous generations it could not have been. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, which had claimed gay men as its first victims, a fierce movement based on defining oneself by one's sexual identity had arisen in the United States in the 1980s. SILENCE = DEATH: I can still see the white-on-black lettering printed on T-shirts that seemed ubiquitous by the summer of 1991, when a miniature version of it adorned a button attached to my backpack. The words referred to both AIDS activism and our sexuality itself; and if silence meant death, then being and speaking out was the only way to live. OUT, LOUD, AND PROUD went another slogan: more T-shirts, more buttons, and huge roaring chants that we shouted in angry, exhilarating street demonstrations. Pride was to be the remedy for a history of shame. Because of AIDS, gay Americans like me, as our most ardent activists argued, could no longer afford the luxury of hiding, of assimilating. Coming out became an urgent political act, a statement of integrity, a life-and-death matter with real money at stake for AIDS treatment and research at a time when the federal government seemed content to let us die.

  This us, like every we or us I have ever encountered, disturbed me even at the time, partial as it was. My friendly "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning" community at Stanford had seemed racially mixed, with women of color as strong and visible leaders. But the mainstream queer world to which I had access through its institutions in Manhattan—a community center, free support groups and activist meetings, the big, organized Pride events—looked very white and often very male. Still, at a Pride party, I met a woman of color. Her skin was smooth and light brown, her accent bridged Puerto Rico and Yonkers, and she asked me to dance. When we were hot and sweating, we went out to the patio and kissed in the June night breeze. We made a date to see Paris Is Burning, the hot queer documentary that was earning rave reviews that summer.

  Exiting the movie theater into the brightness of mid-evening, I felt aglow with anticipation. We stopped at my first gay bar; underage, I ordered a soft drink. Then we walked to the NYU apartment I was sharing with a dental student from Jamaica. My roommate was out. We went into my room, sat down on the twin bed. We were high above East Twenty-sixth Street, and from the window we could see the lights of Brooklyn.

  "Do you know what two women do in bed?" my date asked me. She was older, and I had told her I was a "lesbian virgin."

  I nodded, exuding what I hoped was confidence. I had no idea.

  By the time she left, I did.

  And I knew how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

  I don't know where desire begins; whether it is with us from birth, latent as genes and destiny, or comes as gift and curse somewhere along the way. Whatever its roots, surely its particular expression in each lifetime is shaped by what touches us: culture, experience, relationships, history.

  Had I come of age in a different time and place, perhaps I could not have named my desire. I might have suppressed it all my life; or married a man but engaged in furtive affairs with women; or chosen other routes of emigration from heterosexuality. Suicide, religious chastity, a lifetime of silence, or a subterranean and hidden sex life are some of the alternatives to Out, Loud, and Proud.

  As I was coming out to myself, it was comforting to construct a narrative of childhood Otherness. The fact that I had never felt normal made radical queer politics all the more appealing. The norm was deeply flawed, not only about sexuality but at its core; we were right, and righteous, in raging against it with all our will. Queer theory, activism, and rage seemed to offer absolution for my childhood: I hadn't fit in because that safe suburban world was not worth fitting into; its values were corrupt and its hypocrisy ran deep. Liberation meant that I did not have to strive any longer to be one of that gang.

  And yet, to migrate away from a community of migrants is to experience a particular kind of disorientation, a dual displacement. To free oneself from a family already in free-float means taking in a heady rush of air, the illusion of being an individual. One forgets the original nature of the longing, deep-rooted, almost atavistic, for clan, tribe, home.

  A few weeks after my first lesbian affair, I was back home, sitting on the beige sectional sofa watching television with my parents. I was keeping the worlds separate as planets, trying not to let material from one atmosphere seep into the other, so my parents knew nothing of my summer adventures. Senior year was only a few days away; my mind was already in California.

  My father stood up and turned off the TV. This was alarming because we had a remote control; in fact, it was in his hand. He set it down, then turned to look at me.

  My mother said, "There's something we want to talk to you about."

  "OK," I said, looking from one to the other with what I hoped was an innocent, or at least neutral, expression.

  "This will be your last year in school," my father said, sitting down. "You've always known we would arrange your marriage. So it's time to start thinking about it."

  "There's a boy in Toronto you've met," my mother began. "And that one in Florida..."

  I started to cry.

  "It's OK," said my mother. "When my parents brought it up, I cried too. We're just talking about it now. It won't happen until after you graduate."

  She put her arms around me. I cried harder, my chest exploding in giant, noisy sobs that, combined with the inward pressure of her body, left me barely any room to breathe. I was trying to make myself stop, but sheer terror had set in.

  One of them brought me a glass of water, a box of tissues. They exchanged glances, kept quiet, and waited until I had regained my composure, at least a little.

  "Is there anything you want to tell us?" my father said.

  ***

  I did not want to tell them, not then. And even if I had, where could I begin?

  Would I start by remin
ding them of the day I was fourteen years old, when I had first said the No, and they had not wanted to hear it?

  Could I describe how that No had melted over the last three years into a Yes, the Yes of my deepest self, a Yes to an alternate world so wide and sunny it left me, often, afloat with joy and possibility?

  Would I mention the aha's from the feminist and lesbian books I'd been reading? The crushes and fantasies I'd suppressed and never acted on in high school, not wanting to risk my long-range plan? The secret money I'd been squirreling away against the day when I might be disowned?

  I thought of my parents saying, We trust you; I thought of my last year of university, which would cost twenty thousand dollars, a sum I could not possibly afford on my own; I thought of the stories I'd heard of girls being forced into marriage, or sent abruptly to India, or kicked out of the house; and I kept mum.

  I shook my head furiously. I sipped some water. I looked down into the glass. I sipped some more.

  My parents exchanged looks.

  "Well," my father said. "We were hoping you would be honest with us, but..."

  In June, from Stanford, I had mailed a box of papers to my summer address in New York. Inside were books, a teddy bear, a binder of my writing. One issue of the campus feminist newspaper contained an essay I had written about my newfound bisexual/lesbian identity, explicit with details of my sex life. My journals noted sadly that my relationship with my parents was now "mainly financial."

  Through a series of UPS mishaps, the box ended up at my parents' home in Michigan. It was tattered and torn; my parents had repacked it and forwarded it to me, without comment, over the summer. Now my father referred to it.