“What were they fighting about?” I asked.
“Dad hated being a factory worker and wanted to come back. I think having an advanced degree but doing lower-caste work really hurt his pride. He thought his education and stature in India would translate here, but those things didn’t matter anymore. They ended up making less money than they would have in India and working harder to get it.”
“Factory worker? Dad was an engineer.” I couldn’t picture my father doing manual labor as a profession.
“That’s what he told people, but the company wouldn’t recognize his Indian degree. He was working on the floor of a steel mill hauling stuff to the loading docks. That’s why he has all of those back problems now. It took him years to get an American degree at the local community college that companies would recognize.”
My mind was reeling. How could I not have known that?
Neel continued, “Dad thought they’d be better off back in Ahmedabad. They’d have more respect and could afford a better life. Life would have been easier.”
“Why didn’t they move back?”
“Mom didn’t want to.”
That wasn’t the answer I was expecting. My mother, who was so steadfast in her devotion to Indian culture and who could not get on the plane fast enough whenever we went to Ahmedabad for a visit, hadn’t wanted to move back home? This was the same woman who’d forced me to wear panjabis to a public school in Chicago after she’d realized there were no school uniforms like we’d had at our private school in Ahmedabad. I had begged her to buy me a pair of jeans so I could dress like the other kids, but she’d said my tailored Indian clothes were better quality than the cheap, off-the-rack American clothes I wanted to wear. It had taken me over a year to convince her otherwise.
“Why?”
“Not sure.”
Neel’s version of our family’s life was so different from what I remembered. I began scanning my memories, looking for signs I had missed or been too young to notice. When my parents forced us to take leftover Indian food to school for our lunches and made us susceptible to curry-related jokes, was that really because they thought it was more nutritious, or was it because it was all they could afford? Was Mom insistent that I wear panjabis because we already had them, and she couldn’t pay for new Western clothes? Did she tell me I couldn’t have friends over for dinner because it was just another mouth to feed and every penny counted?
I had so many unanswered questions, but before I could probe Neel for more information, Bharat walked into his bedroom and asked if he could use the computer.
“Sure,” Neel said, standing and returning the chair to the desk. “Sorry we took over your room.”
I wasn’t sure when Neel and I would get another moment of privacy to resume our talk. But we had already come so far in just this single conversation, and I knew he was never going to be able to tell me why our mother had acted a certain way toward me, whether it was because she believed so strongly in our culture or whether she’d rather have me believe that instead of knowing how difficult things were after moving. Only she could give me those answers.
That night, I replayed my conversation with Neel and my childhood memories for things I might have missed or that might have been more nuanced than my young mind could have processed at the time. I felt a little betrayed that Neel hadn’t let me in on all those secrets earlier. While I’d thought we hadn’t kept any secrets from each other, it seemed that loyalty had only flowed one way. And even if the goal had been to protect me as a child, we’d both been adults for a long time now. Loneliness washed over me, and my heart yearned for Alex.
I thought about how introducing Alex back into my life would make it more difficult to learn the things I wanted from my mother. Hearing his name would likely be enough to put the cold war between us back into effect. I asked myself whether he was worth it. I tried to convince myself that he wasn’t, but my heart wouldn’t listen. And there was no guarantee that even if I didn’t go back to Alex, my mother and I could repair the relationship that had begun fraying since those early years in America and had never been mended. I was too Indian to fully cast aside my family, but also too American to not follow my heart. I’d do what I could to make both work, even if that meant being more like Dipti around my mother and biting my tongue to keep the peace.
When the only sounds were the dogs barking and crickets chirping outside, I reached for my phone and unlocked the screen to the favorites page, where Alex’s number remained in the number one spot. A smile crept across my face as I realized this time, I was calling him for what he had thought I was calling about from the airport a couple weeks earlier. Below his contact information was Neel’s, and then my parents’。 My lips tightened upon seeing my mother’s number, but I had made my decision, and there was no looking back now.