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  Dedication

  To Wesley, my rock and partner,

  without whom none of this would have happened

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Directory of Debs

  Foreword by Hasan Minhaj

  Prologue

  One: “I’d like to say a few words about race relations.”

  Two: “White people have the best lunches.”

  Three: “I almost did not recognize you.”

  Four: “My son is a star!”

  Five: “Sent from my iPad.”

  Six: “To them, he is a common man.”

  Seven: “Do you wish you were closer?”

  Eight: “I might not be around.”

  Nine: “Do you follow my points?”

  Ten: “That country was calling me.”

  Eleven: “My dearest son, I have no regret.”

  Twelve: “The lights of my life are not around me.”

  Thirteen: “You’ve brought me everything.”

  Fourteen: “For me, I didn’t have a choice.”

  Fifteen: “I am happy, yes and no.”

  Sixteen: “There were stories I heard.”

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

  Eighteen: “Children of immigrants . . .”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  When I first considered reaching out to my parents, I thought of chronicling the process as a documentary. But I felt that cameras would be too intrusive for comfort and instead opted to write it all down, each step of the way. I wanted to give the reader the same experience of unfolding discovery I had as I navigated through this tumultuous journey.

  This book is a collection of true stories, some remembered but mostly recorded over the course of roughly a year between 2018 and 2019. Extensive interviews, photos, video, audio, professional fact-checking, and ancient Gchat histories have been used to piece it all together in as precise a manner as possible. As you’ll see, dates and even a person’s age or number of siblings sometimes ultimately required an estimate. Most quotes you’ll read are verbatim from my own recordings. The others the result of copious note-taking in the moment or recall from my childhood. A small number of quotes and conversations were edited for clarity.

  I want to note that each member of the Deb family has their own version of this tale, which mirrors my memory in some cases and contradicts it in others. Some stories, particularly those based on recall and those that took place well before I was born, were impossible to verify. To the best of my ability, I gave my mother and father space to tell their stories in these pages, but the final product is my truth alone.

  Most important, this is not the story of all those of South Asian descent. This is only my experience. Nor is this a story only for those of South Asian descent. I hope everyone can take something from it, whether it’s a lesson about comedy, forgiveness, or how to properly send an email.

  Directory of Debs

  Given the endless supply of “S” names in my family, here’s a quick reference guide to keep you oriented.

  Foreword

  By Hasan Minhaj

  When Sopan asked me to write this foreword, I was honored. The man has an impressive résumé. He has worked as a journalist for the Boston Globe, NBC News, Al Jazeera, and CBS News, where he covered Trump’s presidential campaign. He then became a culture writer at the New York Times, and now he’s on the NBA beat there. I want that job. Watch basketball all day, analyze it, and get paid for it? That’s the dream gig. But he’s also a stand-up comedian. That’s the genius move he pulled off—getting an extremely reputable day job that his family understands and can be proud of, and then sneaking comedy into the bottom of his résumé. Brilliant.

  Sopan could write about anything, but for him to choose to write about his experiences growing up brown in America to two immigrant parents is special to me. I’ve always felt that the South Asian diaspora needs more of our stories being told. There are certain mythologies of growing up brown in America that we all share. I see so much of my family in Sopan’s story—his father’s pride, his mother’s stubbornness, his partner’s need to be endlessly patient and forgiving. There’s so much time spent sitting in living rooms doing nothing. So much time.

  His longing to bond with his father over sports, to learn about his parents’ siblings, and to make his mom happy by bringing her to a Broadway show are not just immigrant sentiments, but American ones. His yearning to connect to his family is relatable on so many levels.

  Sopan and I had similar upbringings. We’re both kids with melanin who grew up in super white towns—Howell, New Jersey, and Davis, California, respectively. We both came of age around the same time. Our parents both had arranged marriages, lived far from home and their families, and learned how to use email waaaaay after it was socially acceptable. I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess we both obsessed over the same Air Jordans when we were in high school.

  Nevertheless, our individual experiences are unique, nuanced, and worth sharing. But Sopan pushes his story well beyond the typical, “Hey my parents wanted me to get straight As” model minority narrative. He dives right into the darkest sides of South Asian culture, stuff that we only see in our living rooms, but never talk about. Depression, divorce, abuse, and betrayal are put front and center. And he does this in the gutsiest way possible: he asks his parents about it to their face.

  South Asian families don’t talk about their problems. We’re expected to tough it out, take a nap, sweep it under the rug, and go back to work. The most therapy most of us received came from illegally downloaded episodes of The Sopranos that we watched after everyone else was asleep.

  We’re not equipped to handle this stuff. But Sopan goes at it head-on, like only a true journalist (and comedian) could. I genuinely hope that this book starts a conversation between family members. We need it. No more lying about our pasts. Who we’re dating. Why our parents are unhappy. Why we won’t talk about mental health or therapy. He’s forced my hand at dealing with these issues. And if all of this is too heavy, at the very least I hope it forces some Indian uncles to tell the truth about how much money they had in their pockets when they first came to America.

  Prologue

  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.”

  One

  “I’d like to say a few words about race relations.”

  I grabbed the mic and locked in. It was January 2018, on the cusp of my thirtieth birthday, and I was prowling back and forth onstage at the Comic Strip Live, a comedy club on New York City’s Upper East Side. I was absolutely killing it, man. A rare feeling.

  Stand-up comedy crowds can be warm. I’m prepared for them to be icy. Used to it, really. But this one was on fire. Bodies were squeezed into
every seat just looking for an excuse to laugh. I felt larger than life, like Mario after eating a mushroom or LeBron dunking on a fast break.

  The Comic Strip is an institution. Seinfeld. Chappelle. Sandler. Murphy. Rock. Every comic who has made it had, at some point, gone through this place. The venue is deep and cavernous, with seats crammed at long tables strewn throughout the room. Behind the stage is a familiar brick wall. Somewhere between the main stage and the front entrance, out of sight of the crowd, is a green room for performers, which is more like a green broom closet. In some parts of the venue, it’s hard to see the performer. When you’re the one telling jokes, you can’t see shit.

  My set was part of the Big Brown Comedy Hour, a recurring show that Dean Obeidallah and Maysoon Zayid, New York City–based comics, started in 2009 as a way of putting a spotlight on up-and-coming comics of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. These shows are always packed to the brim with, well, brown people who rarely get to see shows like this. When brown crowds are in, they come to laugh.

  After seven years of doing comedy, getting the room to laugh because of something I constructed still gives me a high. When a punchline really lands—I mean, really—it is the kind of moment I want to freeze, store in a jar, and put on a shelf forever. Or pour into one of those Pensieves from Harry Potter.

  But laughter is fleeting, and you have to keep things fresh. That night, I decided to test out some new material—a seasonally appropriate bit about the holidays:

  My favorite Christmas tradition growing up was asking my mom what the meaning of Christmas was. Every year, we’d be like, “Hey Mom! What’s the meaning of Christmas?” She’d go, “Oh, it’s when Jesus died on the cross.” We’d say, “Oh. Why did Jesus die on the cross?” She’d answer, “It’s because Jesus became a carpenter instead of a DOCTOR!”

  The bit played on a tired South Asian trope that Indian kids are supposed to become doctors. It didn’t quite slay, but I heard the laughter ripple across the room. What I didn’t hear was my own bullshit.

  For one thing, I grew up Hindu. My family didn’t exactly have Christmas traditions, which explains why I confused Christmas and Easter. The only traditions of any kind we had were family squabbles and seething resentment that split our family into warring factions. What I knew about healthy families at Christmas was what I saw in pop culture. Think “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” or Miracle on 34th Street or Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause. Yes, even the last one.

  The best stand-up comics deliver searing honesty to the audience. They’re supposed to expose and clarify truths about the world as they see it. They heighten hypocrisies and spotlight inequalities, and they do it all for the crowd’s amusement. Someone once framed it for me this way: The greats tell the audience what is funny rather than try to make them laugh.

  But I was handing this crowd someone else’s honesty with that joke, telling them what I pictured a stereotypical Christmas with Indian parents to be like. That I didn’t know the first thing about a happy Christmas made me all the more eager to talk about it. It was a paradox: I had spent much of my life running away from my skin color and culture, and yet the thing I felt most comfortable discussing onstage was my South Asian ethnicity. Talking about any version of the brown experience felt cathartic, whether it was the mangled one of my childhood or the way I imagined a happy brown kid growing up.

  I had just ten minutes to give the crowd at the Comic Strip a little taste of my truth, and I had more to say. I launched into some jokes I had written about my Indian family. This was the real stuff. First, there was the bitter divorce between my mother, Bishakha, and my father, Shyamal, after a long and ill-fated arranged marriage. Then there was a healthy dose of cultural alienation, a smattering of outlandish (but totally true) stories about my parents, and the father who disappeared to India eleven years prior without telling anyone. No, really. He did.

  I had the punchlines down pat.

  I love family reunions. Anybody here been to a good family reunion?

  When I do this bit, nobody ever raises their hands. It gives me a beat to take stock of the audience before inquiring:

  Is this a room of fucking orphans?

  That gets a chuckle, but it’s just the amuse-bouche. A warm-up for the appetizer.

  I, for one, really love family reunions. Mine are typically in court.

  It’s a good, not great, joke. I like it, though. If jokes are comedians’ children, that one would be Cindy Brady: Fine, it gets the job done, but who really cares? The audience at the Comic Strip agreed. A solid Cindy.

  But what the crowd never knew, and what I couldn’t bring myself to tell them, was the crippling anxiety and sadness I felt about each of the truths I had morphed into a laugh line. I was comfortable talking about this stuff from behind a microphone, but only to an extent. Sometimes it felt like I was playing the part of a brown guy onstage, but when I dropped the façade and delved into my actual life, the words deflected the guilt and vulnerability I wasn’t yet ready to face. Much of my material—especially the stuff about my parents—resulted from unfamiliarity, both with myself and with them.

  Look, stand-up comedy is a mostly masochistic endeavor. That’s why I have a day job as a writer for the New York Times. The Times gig is a fantastic outlet for curiosity and for exploring the humanity of others. I can interview other people and probe them with questions I might not be able to ask of myself. As for comedy, I’m only willing to flagellate myself for free and after hours.

  At the time of this set in January 2018, I hadn’t seen my mother or father in years. My relationship with each of them had its own contours but essentially landed in the same place: I considered them distant footnotes from my past. At that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure where either parent was living.

  When I started writing this book, right after the Big Brown set, much of what I could tell you about Bishakha and Shyamal could fit into a small paragraph. This one: At some point in the latter half of the twentieth century, they were arranged to be married. I could also say, though without complete assurance, that they were both from India, but I didn’t know where in India they were from. I wasn’t sure how old they were. I didn’t know how many brothers and sisters they had. I was pretty sure their parents—my grandparents—were all dead. I had no idea what they were like as children or what they hoped their lives would be. I never asked; they never told me.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Oliver Twist. I grew up with my parents as well as my brother, Sattik, who is nine years older than me. Or, rather, I grew up in the same general time and space continuum as the two people who were responsible for my birth and a sibling who moved out of the house when I was nine. My relationship with my brother has always been warm, in part because the age difference meant he was separated from our family dynamic during my coming of age. But there was a deep void in the relationship with my parents, a pervasive sense of unhappiness that reigned over the home.

  My father, an engineer by trade, was mild-mannered and rigid about planning and finances, while also being quite hapless (something I’ve inherited) and conspicuously distant from my brother and me. My mother, meanwhile, was impulsive (something else I’ve inherited) and stern. She was the disciplinarian. The personality contrasts were stark: My mother was a social creature who loved gabbing on the phone and taking in pop culture. My father was a nerd who once tried to memorize the periodic table.

  But more important than mere personality contrasts was the irreparable schism between them that existed long before I did. It was as if there was an invisible hand that had guided the two least compatible people in the world toward each other. And since the marriage was arranged, my parents couldn’t swerve to avoid it. By the time I came along, their distaste for each other was ingrained into the fabric of the household.

  The only thing that united them was a genuine pride in being Bengali. It was important to them, but, ironically, it was what I resented most. It was being Bengali that forced these two mismatched soul
s together, and I looked to escape them at every second. We all tried, in our own way, to make it work, but we were oil, vinegar, and gasoline.

  Over time, I learned how to turn my personal trauma into light quips and punchlines. The real stuff, though? That was a little too dark for the Comic Strip.

  When I first started exploring comedy seriously, I was working as an assistant producer on an NBC newsmagazine called Rock Center with Brian Williams, soon after graduating from Boston University. If you never watched it, don’t worry, nobody else did either. It was canceled in less than two years. I was bored there, a young journalist who wasn’t given much to do. I also wasn’t particularly liked by my higher-ups. If I was to guess, the bosses thought my gregarious personality meant I didn’t take my job seriously. Read another way: They found me annoying. I don’t blame them. I’ve spent all day with me, and I don’t recommend it.

  To make matters worse, I was lonely. My college girlfriend, Michelle, had recently dumped me. She was someone I thought I might marry one day, a woman who was smart and enterprising but, more than anything, showed a degree of selflessness of which many humans aren’t capable. I should’ve realized that she felt differently when she broke up with me over Gchat. If not then, I definitely should’ve taken the hint after the two subsequent breakups, including a final one through an email as she was volunteering at an orphanage in Uganda. It was a brilliant move on her part: She broke up with me in a terrible way and still held the moral high ground.

  What do sad people do? Some folks see a therapist. Mine was named Jerome, and he was well into his eighties. He had a deep and solemn baritone voice that sounded like James Earl Jones telling a bedtime story. “Soopppaaann. Many people are uncomfortable being alone because theyyyyy were always alone as chilllldren.”

  Jerome meant well. But during one particularly emotional session when I was pouring out the innards of my soul, admitting that I felt isolated and nervous about not being able to find love, I looked up.