Twenty-Five

I slept the first time with the balcony door open. Second floor, Malvern, that first summer. The sliding door pushed all the way back and the screen letting in the breeze, the sound of crickets and little else. In India I slept light. The tiniest sound, the lightest touch was enough for my body to jump up and run. The world I left behind was the one that watches you, weighs you, finds you wanting. Too dark. Too fat. Too educated. Too much, always.

That second summer I slept like the dead.

In Madras, I lay on my terrace manifesting myself on a plane to Pennsylvania. Out of the heat, out of the eyes, out of the marriage-market that had my folder since I turned twenty. I grew up on a diet of books that showed me women could be what they wanted, date whom they wanted and be just themselves outside of being a daughter and a wife. June twenty-fifth, two thousand and one. I landed in the US and the feeling I remember was relief. Not wonder. Relief.

The first years were the sleeping years. The water was clean. The skies pristine. The apartment I called home then was nestled in the midst of corn fields, next door to a university with a sprawling campus. I went on walks, alone, at night. Amma and Appa were a phone call and an ocean away, my sister at the University a train ride away and my brother lived two miles down the road, working at the same company as Saathi, so there was an anchor, a thread back to the life I had left without grief. I did not miss India. I missed the vibrant energy of the cities but not the country itself.

I was oblivious to how I was being seen. That is the closest word I have for it. Oblivious. I had bought into the narrative I craved. I willed it into being.

Then the fog began to thin.

The first time I took a train into Philly. The first stop at the gas station to fill gas. The first time I noticed a customer wait to be served by the teller at the next window. The many times I corrected my name only to be called Lack-shmi again. Every foray into a populous city, every trip on the train, I realized the only thing that had changed was that my circle had narrowed, I drove rather than walked, I kept to other immigrants, brown like me.

Then, I became a mom, a brown mom to non-brown children. It was the catalyst to a harder awakening. One that made me see that this country had never been the paradise of freedom I had imagined it to be. George Floyd and later, the incensed school board meeting where a man screamed that his kids shouldn’t have to feel ashamed of his ancestors. I finally learned to recognize the racism behind the politeness, the veneer so smooth I mistook it for absence. Reading Black history and feeling the floor of this country drop open under me, understanding for the first time where I actually stood in the place I had adopted, who it protected and who it merely tolerated.

The first decade had been about everything this country gave me. The second was the reckoning. This was learning that the system I fled and the system I ran toward were first cousins, just shades different. Patriarchy is the same world over, as is misogyny.

Somewhere around the time we bought our single family home, the American dream, two kids, a house with a picket fence, India stopped being back home. It was when I stopped saying back home, stopped marking Independence day with flags and kesari, stopped following the elections and the sports, stopped recognizing celebrities. It was here now. Imperfect, flawed, complicit, here that was home.

This third stretch, the half-decade I am standing in now, has been the settling. Eyes open. No more narrative I have to will into being. And the proof of that is in how I close the garage and leave the kitchen door unlocked. I notice the security system isn’t armed and I think, as an afterthought, leave it. The body that slept light in Madras took twenty-five years to stop bracing.

I was on a work call when the phone rang. The kids, breathless, saying they were being followed.

I did not panic. I got in the car. I drove over. Less than half a mile, a town where a cry for help gets answered, where the police will come and stand on the side of my children. I went and got them.

And in the car, going to them, the thought in my head? Two white teenagers and a brown girl, the youngest. The cry would be answered partly because of who was standing in the frame. The privilege of the older two would reach over and envelop the youngest, this time, in this parking lot, in this town. I, who had spent a whole decade learning to see the complexity of race in America was now co-opting the same machinery, on behalf of the three people I love most, and noticing that it does not protect them evenly. There is nothing in her control, really. The country and the people are all the same as they ever were. It is she who changed.

The body stopped bracing for itself. It will never stop bracing for them.

And under all that, the bigger question, the one I have never been able to reconcile. The women who stayed. I think about what it is like to navigate it every day, to negotiate your agency afresh, every day. I look to my friend who disavowed it all very early. In doing so she built a wall that is also a moat. I put an ocean between me and all of it, and the ocean is what let me finally see the pattern from a distance. But you cannot slam a door you walked out of years ago. I inspect the dead weight, piece by piece, picking and choosing what to keep and for how long.

I will go back this fall. India, the lit fests, the family. I will walk into the humidity of Chennai, in a linen pant and a full sleeved tee. I will stand in it and know I belong there, in some sense. And I will come back home and know I belong here too, in some sense. The two halves that do not add up to a whole.

I slept the first time with the door open because I thought I had found home. Now I do because there is no whole home. Only the places where we stop bracing, and the people for whom we never will.

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