I sighed, beginning to understand that I’d never achieve the goal I’d set as a seven-year-old immigrant, but also not ready to believe there was something this significant in my life that hard work could not overcome. But I knew deep down that Neel was right. Acceptance and belonging were moving targets.
“I’m not sure I know who I am if I stop chasing after that,” I said softly. “If I admit defeat now, then what did I spend my life doing?”
Neel’s eyes met mine, and I could see him wondering if he’d made the right decision for us all those years ago. “What about devoting your life to something you love? Like photography? Even just watching you take photos here of the days leading up to the wedding. You seemed more comfortable than I’ve seen you in a long time. It has always been obvious how much you love it, and I never knew why you quit in the first place.”
“Mom was right. It wasn’t practical,” I said, even though I’d asked myself a million times over the past eight years whether I had given up too easily. I’d been a kid back then. A year of trying and failing and living with my mother’s “I told you this wouldn’t work” face felt like a lifetime. I wondered if it would be different if I tried now. If, even if I didn’t have the same financial security that corporate America provided, I would have enough emotional security to outweigh that loss.
“What’s the point of being practical if you aren’t happy?” Neel asked, his voice thick with his recent pain.
His words caught me off guard because he and I had focused on what was practical since we’d arrived in America. Through the wall, we heard Indira Mami close the heavy wooden closet door in her bedroom, the skeleton keys she kept on a large ring clipped onto her sari clinking against each other as she locked the wardrobe.
Lowering his voice, Neel said, “If you need money or anything, Dipti and I can help you, until you decide what is next.”
I held up my hands in protest. “No, no. I’ll be fine. I have some savings until I figure out what I want to do. You know when you feel like you’ve hit a wall? You’re not sure how or why you got there, but you just know that you’ve got to make some changes.”
He nodded, closing his eyes as if the feeling was all too familiar right now.
I debated telling him about Alex and New York but held back because the family strain had affected him as much as it had me, and I didn’t want to add to his burden now. Besides, my heart knew the right thing was to call Alex and tell him first. If I was choosing him, then I had to commit to that fully. Neel had suggested I devote my life to something I loved, but maybe the right answer was to devote it to someone I loved.
“What are you going to tell Mom and Dad?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, but I figured there was no point in telling them until I really have to.” Shifting my gaze back to the blanket and feeling emboldened by the conversation we’d just had, I asked, “How do you manage to do it?”
“What?”
“Be so perfect.”
“I’m not perfect.”
“I know you’re not. But how do you get Mom and Dad to think you are?”
“I’m more patient with them.” He clasped his hands together, pausing for a moment. “I was older when we moved to Chicago. I remembered more about India and life here. Mom and Dad would put on this act that everything was fine after we moved, but it wasn’t. They fought all the time when they thought we couldn’t hear them. Money was tight. They weren’t good at mixing with Americans.”
“It’s not like I was that much younger than you. I saw all of that stuff too.” I tried not to sound defensive, but he often acted like being five years older gave him a lifetime of experience over me.
He shook his head. “You know some of it, but they worked really hard to keep the bad stuff from you when you were a kid. So did I. We wanted you to think moving to America was the great adventure we hoped it would be.”
I searched my memories, trying to understand what Neel meant. It had been hard for him and me as we struggled to fit in at the public school, where most of the kids were white or black, but I thought it had been good for our parents when we’d first arrived. One of Dad’s friends had helped him get an engineering job at a steel factory. Mom had her social circle with Monali Auntie and her other friends who had also come over from Ahmedabad. It was like they had their perfect Indian enclave in America: modern amenities with old-world culture. They weren’t teased and picked on the way we were because they didn’t have to go to school and mix with so many non-Indians. No one had ever called them “curry lovers” during lunchtime—a phrase that I did not understand because there were no Indian dishes I knew of called curry. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized curry was what white people decided to call Indian food rather than use the names Indians used for our food. My parents never learned to identify themselves as “other” the way Neel and I had to navigate America’s color-based caste system. As a child, I’d longed to be something other than “other.” After September 11, I got my wish. After that, we all became “brown,” and that was far worse than “other.” India had no “brown” people, so I’d never referred to myself as such when living there. The first time I had to utter it as an identifier of who I was, it felt so odd. But my parents escaped that. Keeping to their own meant they got to avoid the pressures of blending in and adopting odd labels to make them palatable to the white community around us. For years, when things were so hard for Neel and me, I’d been resentful that they’d made this move thinking only of themselves and not about how it would affect us.