Missed Translations Read online

  But here’s the thing: He is notoriously impatient, another inheritance of mine. He had some sandpapering left to do on the car but didn’t want to wait for the paint to dry. So he decided to put it in the microwave. I’m going to say this again: My father—a brilliant, formally trained engineer—put a block of wood with wet paint on it into the microwave so it would dry faster.

  As the microwave did its electromagnetic magic, Shyamal and I went into the den to watch television. A few minutes later, one of us—and I don’t remember who—noticed that the microwave had been on for a suspiciously long time. By the time we ran into the kitchen to stop it, it was too late. The car was a smoking mess.

  Poor, panicked Shyamal went out of his way to convince me that it was fine and that I shouldn’t worry. I’m sure he was quietly smoldering as well. His big moment of bonding with his son was ruined.

  He was able to salvage the car and repaint it, and we would take it to the big pinewood derby race the next day. I had regained my composure and was ready for the car to do well. After all, I had my engineer dad behind me.

  The next step, after designing and burning—errr, painting the car—is attaching the axles and wheels. You are supposed to glue the wheels to the axles. Except Shyamal glued the wheels to the car, instead of the axles. This meant the wheels couldn’t turn. By the time we realized what he had done, it was time for the races.

  I had hope, though. I was a Scout, after all, and according to the Scout handbook, every Scout should be cheerful. We made it to the site of the big event: a local school cafeteria. I took my place at the bottom of a metallic-looking ramp where the cars would cross the finish line, with Shyamal standing nearby. Every few minutes, we’d watch as cars burst forth as if they were shot out of cannons. I saw classmates standing nearby with their fathers, all wearing familiar smiles. My Scout-mandated smile had faded. I was nervous.

  Finally, my car was up. I heard the pop. I squinted at my car. It wasn’t proceeding like a cannonball. It was barely proceeding at all. It would have lost against the tortoise and the hare. It finished in last place. Okay, not the best start. Luckily, there were other races. My car would have another shot to advance to the next round. When I took my place at the finish line, my cheerfulness was further dissipating. Another man took my car and placed it at the top of the ramp. Come on, Car. Let’s do this. Go.

  I don’t remember how many races my car was in that day. I do vividly remember that in some of them, my car didn’t even make it to the end. Either way, it came in last in every single contest. I remember being devastated at the time. But now? I look back on it fondly. It was one of the few warm childhood memories I have with Shyamal.

  The rare feelings of warmth gave way to resentment as I observed my friends with their fathers, especially as I became a teenager. For example, I always loved basketball and desperately wanted my dad to help coach me. He didn’t really know anything about it, which could explain why I’ve never been very good. Meanwhile, I would see a lot of my white classmates being taught by their fathers. I’d go over to their houses and hear about their plans to go to a Knicks game. I was jealous. That’s how bad it was: I was jealous of people going to see the Knicks play.

  In the days of the pinewood derby fiasco, my mother retained the classic helicopter parent gaze. Was there a cap on the number of parent-teacher conferences allowed? She was about to find out! A report card of mostly As? Why aren’t they all As? Remember Tiger Mom? My mother was Tiger Mom crossed with Tony the Tiger.

  She saw playtime as a distraction. When I turned on the television to watch Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, or Hey Arnold! after school, she’d cluck disapprovingly. One time she tried to keep me from watching by unplugging the television and saying she didn’t know why it wasn’t working. I figured the ruse out immediately and plugged it back in. If a disapproving cluck could kill, I might not be alive right now.

  For a little while in elementary school, to get me to focus solely on schoolwork, she sat me down to meditate each morning because she thought I was too distracted. It didn’t work. All I thought about when my eyes were closed was whether it was actually Pinky, not Brain, who was the smart one. To improve my penmanship, Bishakha would make me do lines. Not the fun kind of lines, mind you, but handwriting. I would spend hours outside of elementary school copying lines out of books I was reading. My penmanship got worse.

  My mother and I did spend some quality time together, though, on the days when things were good between us. In elementary school, we’d watch whichever movie came on as part of the Wonderful World of Disney feature on ABC. Then came middle school, where we watched—I swear to all the Hindu gods—7th Heaven on television. I loved that show. I’d like to think that my mother and I both watched it thinking about the idealized family life we wished we were living. There were the loving and religious parents, Eric and Annie Camden, who instilled strong morals into their perfect children, Matt, Simon, Mary, Ruthie, Lucy, and some cute twins thrown in for good measure. And I must admit that Jessica Biel was one of my first celebrity crushes. The show even had a dog who was named Happy. That’s how unsubtle this show was. Many scenes featured the children coming to their mother, Annie, to discuss complicated issues, a concept so strange to me that Ghostbusters seemed more realistic.

  When I was twelve, we left Randolph and moved to a much larger, four-bedroom home in Howell, New Jersey, which is in the southern part of the state. For reference, it’s near Seaside Heights, the beach town where MTV’s Jersey Shore was filmed. Howell is about 80 percent white, and I was one of the only South Asians in my graduating class of more than four hundred at Howell High School.

  At least we had our own bedrooms this time—my mother taking the roomy master and my father claiming a smaller one. Even in middle school, I didn’t realize how unusual it was that they slept apart. It was my white friends, especially in high school, who made me aware of it.

  One of the times I noticed how different my life was as a brown kid was when my white friend Shaun invited me over for dinner in sixth grade. It was my first year in Howell, and he lived a short walk away. We played Wiffle ball outside with some other neighborhood kids, and then Wendy (Shaun’s mom) made us tacos. We sat around the dinner table, along with Dylan (Shaun’s brother) and Patrick (Shaun’s father). They each took turns telling everybody about their day after dinner was served. Sitting together for dinner wasn’t an obligation for this family. It was enjoyable.

  All I could think was, What the fuck is this?

  In retrospect, I see this dichotomy for what it was: happy versus unhappy. Back then, it was brown and white.

  Bishakha made food for us, morning and evening. She would leave cereal out for me in the morning and, occasionally, a banana. But I refused to eat the bananas, so she eventually gave up. (She won in the end, though, because I now have a banana for breakfast every day.)

  In the evenings, we ate Bengali food—she was an excellent chef, and Sundays were her days to cook. Her specialty was a fish mustard curry. The odor of masala would waft through the air like a wayward hot air balloon. I miss that smell, actually.

  Some of her culinary efforts were a bit off. In kindergarten, my mother sent me to school every day with a piece of cheese. Not gummy bears or animal crackers or the other cool snacks my classmates had. I had a giant lunchbox with a piece of cheese and a juicebox. Every single day, I’d open up my lunchbox hoping for something different. It was cheese. Every fucking day. White people have the best lunches.

  There were times the three of us would eat together (or the four of us, before Sattik left for college), but it was rare. And those dinners were quick and silent. I didn’t think much about why we ate separately. I processed it very simply as, I would rather eat while watching television than sit here in silence with my family. It didn’t strike me as strange until I became friends with kids like Shaun.

  When I went over to Shaun’s house, I bonded with Wendy. Shaun’s mother was always kind and approachable. She always in
sisted on being called Wendy, which I found strange. No Indian mashi or kaku would ever accept that. I knew that Shaun talked about girls with his mother because he told me. In one of our early visits, Wendy pulled me aside and said she was worried that Shaun wasn’t making friends in school. She punctuated this thought by saying, “I want Shaun to GO OUT and then MAKE OUT!” I was so jealous of Shaun. What a mom. I wanted to both make out and have a mother who wanted me to make out.

  The year I met Shaun was also the year I first told my mother about a crush. A classmate of mine at Howell Township Middle School South—we’ll call her Phoebe—had a friend tell me that she “like likes” me. It was the first time in my life this had happened. Phoebe had big curly hair and a sweet personality. That she had a friend tell me directly about her feelings was very mature, given that my generation was partial to romantic feelings expressed anonymously through AOL Instant Messenger profiles. I was enamored by Phoebe’s affection, but I had no idea what to do.

  So, naturally, emboldened by Wendy’s pep talk about going out and making out, I went home and asked my mother what she thought about Phoebe “like liking” me. Bishakha put her book down, stared, and said nothing for a moment. And then she just laughed and laughed, as if I were Chris Rock at the Apollo. Then she walked out of the room. We didn’t approach the topic of girls for at least another decade.

  When I had my disastrous first kiss in eighth grade (involving braces and a big clink!), I never told her. I wanted to, but I didn’t know if my mother had ever gone on a date. That excitement and anticipation you feel about someone new was probably as foreign to her as being arranged was to me. The topic felt like it was off-limits in a way it wasn’t for any of my white friends whose parents had all been through the adolescent misery that eventually culminates in “love marriages,” as my father would call them. Many of my white classmates had parents who understood heartbreak stemming from bad dating experiences, or the high that comes from a crush giving you the faintest bit of attention. The generation that had grown up in America before us had gone out and then made out.

  More important, I couldn’t talk to Bishakha about the alienation I felt at school as one of the only children of color, or how I was having trouble making friends. She wanted me to be focused on academics and that was nonnegotiable. When she felt my grades weren’t high enough, she would snatch the activities that meant the most to me, like flag duty or an elementary school basketball team, without offering an opportunity for protest. She may have thought she was motivating me, but my response to the resulting social alienation was an attempt to suppress my brownness in the hope of finding friends.

  I wanted to fit in, and I viewed my parents’ insistence on academic perfection as a by-product of our brown culture. It’s a stereotype of Asian parents, but it was an accurate one in our household. Their relentless focus on report cards seemed designed to torture me. I never thought much about what their childhoods had been like, what lessons their lives had taught them, or how those lessons shaped them as parents. My reaction was classically juvenile. Instead of heeding their advice, I became a wannabe class clown. In eighth grade, the same year as my first kiss, I submitted an entire short story with such character names as Seymour Butts, Ben Dover, and Mike Rotch, which got me kicked out of the end-of-the-year celebration. I was acting out, period. I skipped homework assignments, and when teachers sent “homework slips” home to inform Shyamal and Bishakha that I wasn’t keeping up, I intercepted them and forged my mother’s signature. I was committing fraud as a child.

  Toward the end of middle school, the anger I felt became the only constant in my life. I completely rejected the brown side of myself. Calling it a side seems unfair. Your culture isn’t a side. Boxes have sides. But culture and heritage? It’s who you are. Still, I refused to believe I was Indian. I’m different, I told myself, I have to be different than this. The situation at home became more unbearable as I navigated my teenage years. My parents were fighting more, and my mother’s disposition swung rapidly and unpredictably from calm to choppy waters. I distinctly remember money being a sticking point, although I never figured out specifically why. Bishakha took a job as a cashier at Drug Fair, a local pharmacy, where she made about sixteen thousand dollars a year. I suspected at the time that she took the job to get herself out of the house and because she wanted to have some financial independence from my father. I blamed arranged marriage, Hinduism, and India for the ills of the household, even though I didn’t know enough about any of those things. I just knew I wanted distance from whatever culture had forced my parents together and produced this misery. I stopped playing the harmonium and performing at Indian festivals. When my parents hosted Bengali family gatherings, I started avoiding the party because I was embarrassed by the number of saris and dhotis being worn around my home. I became a self-loathing Bengali child.

  I grew to idealize whiteness, which I conflated with safety and easy communication. This desire to be white didn’t come from feeling socially or politically marginalized because of my skin color. It was about white suburban moms who made after-school snacks and asked my friends about the girls they liked and the teachers they hated. The sex talk with Indian parents is the same talk as the one about what college you should go to: Get good grades and you don’t have to worry about either.

  At the end of middle school, my parents’ scant tolerance of each other shifted to intolerance. They separated sometime around 2001. When I was in high school, they officially, mercifully, divorced.

  I was relieved. Divorce isn’t uncommon in the United States. But it is uncommon among arranged marriages, especially in India. By design, arranged marriages are transactional in nature. The love, in theory, comes later. Perhaps this is why, in the United States, the divorce rate among Indian-Americans is estimated among experts to be between 1 and 15 percent, according to the Washington Post. It’s hard to pinpoint a precise number for this, and the United States government doesn’t track Indian-American divorces. But the national average is closer to 50 percent (although this number varies among age groups).

  After the divorce, my relationship with each parent improved, though it was a low bar to clear. Shyamal moved to a small apartment about thirty minutes away from Howell, and it was decided that I would stay with my mother. I didn’t object, more due to a sense of inertia than a desire to pick one parent over the other. Every time my father called and I saw his name on the caller ID, I cringed. The scars were still there. We had become acquaintances by that time, nothing more. The conversations with my father would last no more than a few minutes and consist of small talk. How’s the weather? What did you eat today? Click. We’d occasionally meet up for dinner and hear only the sound of our chewing.

  I also changed in high school after my parents separated, physically and mentally. I became as independent as one can get as a fifteen-year-old. As a symbol of my newfound self-rule, I grew an afro and started wearing tie-dye to class. This was, I think, when I shifted my parents to peripheral characters in my life. I didn’t need Bishakha’s instruction as to what extracurricular clubs I should join, and she didn’t give it. By then she realized I wanted to be left alone. And she obliged. I got a job as a cashier at a grocery store and saved up money to buy my own car. Plus she was working her Drug Fair job full-time and wasn’t getting home until the evenings anyway, so I came and went as I pleased.

  I applied to colleges on my own: New York University, Rutgers University, Boston University, Boston College, and Berklee College of Music. I had played classical piano my whole life and briefly entertained making my living in music. Although I was living with my mother, Bishakha didn’t know what colleges I applied to until acceptance letters started coming in. Thankfully, BU gave me a big scholarship, so I made the decision to go there.

  I didn’t cringe when my mother called me during college, which was the best our relationship ever was. When I came home on winter breaks, we occasionally watched television together. You couldn’t quite call us close, bu
t the relationship was comfortable. She never visited me at BU, but I visited her at home. At least then we were in touch.

  But something shifted after college. I got my first job working at the Boston Globe, before moving to New York to work at NBC. I started to notice that calls with Bishakha were becoming less frequent, and I knew that her contact with my brother, Sattik, was rare or nonexistent. When we did talk, she sounded sadder than usual. I didn’t know why and didn’t summon the emotional wherewithal to find out.

  Days without us talking became weeks. Weeks became months. Months became years. And as I turned thirty, I realized that my mother and I had ceased all substantive contact for at least three years, if not more.

  After receiving the wedding invitation from Manvi in 2018, I made the decision to go to India and see Shyamal. But I didn’t feel it would be right to fly around the world to reconnect with him and not put in some of the same effort with Bishakha. At the very least, I knew I needed to see where she was. I was more nervous about this connection than the one with my father and bracing myself for how she might react to the outreach. I felt guiltier about having let this relationship deteriorate in the way that it had, knowing that my mother was just across the Hudson River. There were several days when I wanted to pick up the phone and call her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  As we approached Mother’s Day that year, months after that Big Brown set, I decided I was ready.

  For most people, Mother’s Day is a time to pay tribute to the women who suffered through pregnancy to birth and then raise them. The woman who cleaned up after them, supported them financially, cooked for them, talked them through the bullies in middle school, excitedly sent them to prom, and, tearfully, sent them to college. But for me during any other year, this would be just another Sunday.