What Sexual Assault Taught Me about Being Indian
2021 Note: I wrote this series before I understood or made sense of my caste and class privilege as an oppressor caste/savarna, upper-middle class Indian-American. While my trauma is very valid, my story is missing critical perspectives that inform most Indian femme experiences. I leave this story up for accountability and to assist anyone who identifies in ways adjacent to me. If you choose to read any part of my story, please also read this piece as a short introduction to caste-based gender violence in India.
Part of Three of Three: My Parents and My Struggle with Mental Health
This took me months to write, because every time I tried, I ended up crying. It’s the longest one, but I’m not going to apologize.
And I’ll start by putting this out there: Indian culture glorifies family drama. Our Hindu epics drip with the blood and tears of spurned wives, warring cousins, and misguided parents. Bollywood blockbusters so often use it as the only conflict in otherwise fantastical tales: Devdas and Ram Leela drape Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s signature lush aesthetic over the stories of star-crossed lovers, weaving class and family conflicts into our beautiful escapisms. Even the cheesier 3KG, Mohabbatein, Hum Saath Saath Hai-peppered with slapstick humor and glossed over with the blended veneer of cosmopolitan sanskaar -remind us through slow, sappy songs and tearful scenes that every family, no matter how perfect, will be driven by social expectations to find its worst moments in itself.
My Parents
Off the screen and across the ocean, my family is my sister and my parents. My Telugu father and my Punjabi mother met in business school and went on, most logically, to Texas. For my entire memory, they have worked full time in their respective industries and are, in my opinion, successful. Their personalities are somewhat different: my father is a romantic, a man who once swept my eight-year old self into a waltz after a trip abroad and who still tells his childhood stories with the kind of embellishments that would impress any Judy Blume-styled prankster-hero. My mother bubbles over with self-sacrificing love for her family but is surprisingly measured with enjoyment, a champion at extending the life of any dessert through tiny nibbles and licks, and hides her backstories as a champion debater, world traveller, and aspiring translator behind an undeserved and underserving modesty.
Other than that, our familial unit on its own is not particularly interesting: we have cuddle puddles on the couch in front of Law and Order. Mom shouted the most loudly only when she called home to India because my grandmother was hard of hearing. And when I decided to pursue regional studies, Mom and Dad tried to understand why I cared so much about seemingly weird little corners of the world, but still insisted (even after I drunk-dialed them sobbing on Mongolian New Year, as one does) that they, of course, were proud of me.
So, sweet reader, I wish I could tell you that my parents were the Indian stereotype and that this essay will tell you how to deal with the caricature of our parents that we have been fed and feed each other when we want to complain about how overbearing and stereotypical they are. Because that is the kind of family we imagine Indian-Americans having to struggle with.
But that is categorically not the family I (and possibly most of you) grew up in.
No, my parents were too full of a love far too all-encompassing, far too self-sacrificing, and far too quotidian for the spotlight. My sister and I were only trained to give our best so that life would give it back. And when life sent me rejection letters from Yale and Georgetown, Mom and Dad convinced even my agnostic ass to accept that God or the universe intended it for whatever higher purpose. All this they gave to us, despite being spread thin across two continents separated from their home, their family, their languages. And when I look around to see my Desi-American friends and Aziz Ansari celebrate their parents for many of these same reasons, I am assured that the biggest struggle we now face as diaspora children is how to return the love we were given.
For a seemingly wayward child-adult, this means trying my hardest to not be a burden.
My Mental Health
When I was raped, my parents, already stricken with worry that I would somehow be killed abroad, were beginning to cope with my paternal grandmother’s initial stages of Alzheimer’s. It was almost perfunctory the way I hid my distress: I called home almost everyday and reported only how tasty the fruit was, cute the students, beautiful the landscapes, mundane my struggles. My emotional reflex was to hide it all, to not cause my parents worry. And I had hidden so much my whole life: bad grades, boyfriends, shenanigans. This was just one more secret.
A little less than a year after, in May of 2014, they finally found out. I don’t remember how I broke. It was in the wee hours of the morning: Mom was asleep on the couch, Dad had been giving me one of the lectures that a kid needs to hear but never wants to, I don’t remember about what. I remember him saying he suspected it because of my Facebook posts. I remember telling him how it happened when he asked, and how when my Mom stirred, he told her while her eyes were still shut and she mumbled something in response. I don’t remember the next few days. But I think I stopped posting about feminism and rape culture so much on Facebook. We had to skip an episode of Law and Order that dealt with rape (and have never been big fans of SVU anyways, but that was off the table). And when I told them I was taking a break for the summer (the one in which my mother’s mother would pass away) they said they understood. I remember times when they told me how strong I was. Those got me through a lot.
Much to my chagrin, despite their support and the summer break, my mental health deteriorated. I became more reclusive, more jumpy. The brain which was once able to reference academic books, authors, articles at the drop of a hat now felt like a sieve: my short-term memory felt (and still feels) irreparably damaged by PTSD. I tasted failure like soup through a straw — constant and briny — as I dropped classes and gained weight, developed stress rashes and social anxiety, forgot who I used to be and missed “the old me” all the same. My memory fails me even now when trying to remember the painful blur of that year.
But I do remember this — that like dominoes, as I began to fall apart, I noticed they were falling too. It’s almost always this way, isn’t it? That when a child suffers, parents suffer at least ten times as much. I saw them confused, sad, angry at my depression, and I responded like any former-angsty teen would: defensively. Weighed down with fatigue, it seemed I could hardly find the energy to get out of bed let alone scale the metaphorical wall of getting over trauma and their inability to understand it. With simultaneous admiration and jealousy, I watched Mom and Dad juggle the health of their parents and families back home (with trips back and forth to India), their own health and careers, and their children’s health and careers.
No wonder they were confused, sad, and angry at my depression, I would think between naps in my room, my childhood trophies on the wall taunting me with memories of when my parents’ hard work was paying off. They’ve gotten over so much. And all I had to do was admit that the things I had gone through were terrible and hard, and I could shirk my duties, retire to my room, and sleep whole days away.
My ability to heal became the most confusing of privileges. In some ways, it never stopped being reiterated to me that it was a privilege, a fact that stunted my healing by causing me to analyze myself further and “determine” that my responses to my trauma were born out of weakness. Watching them do everything they do (despite losing their own parents and having their kid suffer like this) from the vantage point of my personal pit of darkness made me wonder if my reaction to my rape was appropriate or even deserved. The cultural chasm between our definitions of “traumatic experience” seemed to push me away from them out of guilt more than anything else.
I often think that if I had been the way I am, depressed and unproductive, in India, I never would have made it to America as they had.
There are reasons our Hindu myths and Bollywood films and gossip mills have thrived for millennia on family drama: it is where the witches’ brew of intergenerational misunderstandings poisons the otherwise almost-perfect relationships of people who love each other the most. It is where a woman, no matter how independent and headstrong, is primed exclusively for marriage to a man and motherhood to hopefully sons so as to not incur the burdens of having a daughter as she once was. It is where siblings, parents, and extended family painstakingly hand-stitch those social demands and assumptions of a virgin bride into her wedding dress, of a successful career woman into her slim-fit work pantsuit, of a dutiful mother and wife into her modest and daal-stained salwar-kameez or sari. And it is where resolution can take a variety of different forms depending on an infinite number of variables, but normally involves the silence of the girl and the saving face of the family.
For the survivor, involving and engaging your family is one of the most difficult parts of healing, precisely because not knowing exactly how your family will react is terrifying. We have heard of everything from slut-shaming to honor killings. My own family was not exempted from doing the former. When children have been trained to keep so many secrets from their families, sometimes it just seems easier to not tell them. We have so much to take care of with our bodies, so much face to save in front of our communities.
I’ll admit, I thought that I never would tell my parents what happened. I truly thought they would be too devastated and angry to ever talk to me again.
But much like I felt privileged to acknowledge and heal my trauma, I feel privileged to note that our episode — as a part of my episode — was not resolved that way. It was a privilege for me that my parents went to see a therapist on my behest and acknowledged that my assault would have longstanding effects on my mental health, even if they would never fully know what they were. One of the biggest privileges of all was undoubtedly that my parents even made it seem like my mental health was always a far larger issue than my virginity (as it should be!). We’ve never really talked about that to be fair, but given the shaming of rape victims in India and America, that it’s never really come up between us is a big fucking deal.
This kaleidoscopic privilege is mine alone standing shyly on the hyphens in “Indian-American” and “third-wave feminism”, but it is a privilege along with so many others that I know my parents have fought and continue to fight for me to have. Try as I might to not feel like a burden, I have had to accept in my healing the [sometimes painful] gift that is their boundless, tireless love and wrap my heart in all the emotions and experiences that it produces, including the most frustrating and unsolvable misunderstandings. In fact, even before publishing this article, Mom asked me if I hadn’t written enough about my rape and reminded me to stop being a victim. As infuriating as that is to hear, I know now where her worry comes from and can insist that the ways I acknowledge my vulnerability prove what we both know: that my victimhood is not weakness or sadness and that me giving the almost unrecognizable version of me from a few years ago the voice she wanted but never could muster builds my strength and gives me peace.
And if I address any part of this article to them it will be this: I remember, Dad, what you said when I was on the tail end of that horrible blurry year, that all you and Mom wanted is for me “to be happy again.” It might seem counter-intuitive that I write about what seems like the lowest point in my life, but reminding myself and others about the salve of parental love and its ability to surmount the myriad (SO MANY) trials posed by my rape is what gives me the strength and motivation to pursue the personal happiness that will give us all peace. Your understanding my mental health surmounted the biggest hurdle to my healing, and I cannot tell you what a difference that made for me learning to love myself as your daughter.
And I want you, Mom and Dad, to know that even if we never agree on what “healing”, “victimhood”, “empowerment”, and “justice” mean, those battles are so paltry when compared to the happiness I feel like I can finally give back to you by being happy myself. I know you’ve always wanted it, and — like I have with everything you both have given me — please accept the many forms it takes. They all come from a place of love.
The last time I was home, Mom, Dad, and I cuddled up to watch Law and Order together. They had cut me a plate of summer-ripened mangoes from the Indian store, and I happily slurped away while Dad insisted that he knew how the case would end and Mom dozed off during the “Law” part despite her best attempts to follow through with the “Order”. It was an episode in Season 9 in which a woman murders a man who had forced her into a sexual relationship. It ended with ADA Abbie Carmichael telling DA Jack McCoy about a time she herself had been raped in a relationship before the silent fade-out into black and Dick Wolf’s credits.
My heart almost joined the mangoes on the plate, but Dad didn’t hit the pause button. It felt like we had all witnessed the storm and rebuilt our home together for that beautiful moment. Normalcy became a precious gift that we all needed and worked for. And as presumptuous/conceited as it sounds, if there’s one good thing I felt like I gave them in that moment, it was my health; even if they didn’t need to be, the scales felt just a little bit more balanced. Things felt right.
And we cuddled through one more episode just as we always have.
