Chapter 9 The Boy Wonder
In the summer of 2015, I turned 40 and decided to fly myself to Bali. Justifying a highly extravagant trip with the fact that you only turn 40 once, I booked myself a business class flight and stayed at the most beautiful hotels… only to find out that I had managed to go on my own honeymoon without a husband. Because the only people who fly to Bali business class and splurge on the nicest hotels are honeymooners. Ignoring the awkwardness of accidentally encroaching on romantic couples every 10 minutes or so, who couldn't keep their amorous activities to their rooms, I bonded quickly with the hotel staff.
On the surface, books like 'Eat Pray Love' had glamorized Bali. But internally, Bali was not dissimilar from India. Underneath the crisp white uniforms the hotel staff wore, there were human beings with stories of grit, determination and hard work. It would've been easy to ignore any poverty in Bali as a tourist. You could sit inside the hotel grounds or on the beach and never know that there are hungry children there. And truthfully, tourism had brought in an influx of cash that had not previously existed there. But the rural areas of Bali looked quite similar to parts of India. I had been driven through some of these more rural areas on my way to Mount Batur, the mountain I had foolishly decided I would climb to commemorate lasting on this planet for 4 decades.
I succeed at climbing the mountain- sort of. Towards the end, the guides just kind of dragged me up the mountain because my legs had stopped working. But somehow I was delivered to the summit. Finally, after an arduous climb to the top and back down, I was returned back to my luxury hotel, where I could soak in my private hot tub and eat the passionfruit that had been artfully laid out for me in my room. As I laid my head back on the marble ledge of my hot tub, my mind started to wander. I thought about the realities of growing up in rural Southeast Asia and I felt a surge of empathy and admiration for my father. Though he was aggressive and emotionally erratic, his ability to escape the shackles of poverty in a third world country was astonishing. "I would have given up," I thought to myself.
My father's mother, as the 'inferior' Indian gender, was never given the chance to escape, though she too was a remarkable human being. Despite being married off as a child and yanked out of school, she taught herself to read and write and would regularly write short stories. She was also very talented at making kolams, a form of South Indian decorative art where people draw floral patterns on their doorstep and in prayer areas using rice flour. But none of those things were useful for bringing in an income in rural India. There was only one way out-someone would have to go to America. That was the reality in the 1960s. The family rested all of their hopes on my father.
My father had always been a high performer in school and he would need to continue to succeed, or the family would remain in poverty forever. My father once explained his family's strategy to me. Sternly, he said"the reality for people in my town was that a child who ranked first at school had a chance to move forward. Those ranked second or third may possibly have moved forward. And those ranked fourth would be stuck in that village forever. I decided I would rank first." So my father studied, studied some more and then studied some more. But all the intelligence and hard work in the world could be useless with all the odds against him.
He had challenges very few Americans could relate to. He didn't have enough food and he didn't own shoes until he was 18, at which point he was told he must have shoes to enter a chemistry lab. Shoes could not be mandatory in a rural Indian school as a whole, since many children didn't own shoes. The electricity in my father's home existed sporadically, and when it was actually working, my mother’s family, the owners of the home, would scold him for wasting electricity. Once darkness engulfed the night, the only way to read books was outside by the streetlight when there was electricity in the neighborhood, and when that didn’t exist, he would study with a kerosene lamp. Years later, comfortably settled into America, he couldn't look at anything that resembled a kerosene lamp without tears in his eyes- meaning we had to stay out of Pier one Imports.
But the poverty wasn’t the worst of it. He also had to contend with his older brother, who had a violent temper, and his mother, who could match his brother’s physical blows with razor sharp verbal assaults. My father would repeatedly tell us a story with tears in his eyes.
"Once I was called into the school headmaster’s office after school. They called me in to tell me I had won an award. When I arrived home a few minutes late, my brother promptly beat me until I was bloody for being late."
And then my father would stop talking as he choked back his grief. I could never understand how my father survived, much less thrived. In reality, like me, my father probably didn’t want to survive. Most likely, we now suspect, my father and many of his family members were either severely bipolar or severely depressed. But in rural India, there was no knowledge of mental health, or access to medications or health professionals. My father was starving, abused, depressed and had no guarantee of ever escaping his erratic and violent home. And yet, in his opinion, he remained lucky as he had a roof over his head, and he wasn’t sent to an orphanage.
The poverty in India was shared by many, but my family's genetics- that was not shared. Thankfully. My father owed his genetics to a father I would never meet and a mother I had barely gotten to know as a child. Then he passed his genes on to my sibling and myself- both the good and bad. My father's gene pool resulted in reasonably good looks and sophisticated brains. But it turned out these were nothing but a sinister cover for our severely damaged mental health genes. For my father, his brother, his mother and several cousins, the sordid reality of being bipolar drenched any possibility of happiness with a caustic, acidic, blanket of destruction. I had been clinically depressed since childhood- but at least depression came with consistency. I consistently did not want to be alive- there was nothing confusing about it.
But bipolar disorder, I would learn, was confusing. One moment, life was full of hope. Elated, my father could propel himself through hours of academic learning, thriving as he rode a wave of energy to the top of mountain- and then came the crash. He would feel the same way I felt at the top of Mount Batur. Tired. Maybe even dead. Defeated. And that is when the demons would start whispering in his ear. "You would be better off dead," they would sing gleefully. "Your family didn't respect you. You were nothing then. You are nothing now. Your daughter doesn't respect you. Look at her, flaunting herself all over the place like an American girl" they would taunt. Then the simmering pot would boil over. His temper would spill out in every direction, burning anything it touched. Burning me, his soft spoken young daughter who was the first to be born in America.
My father worked tirelessly to provide us with opportunities. He let me run the race that females in India were not allowed to run in at the time. But then, just when I would begin my steady jog, he shot bullets into my legs so that I couldn't really run the race. All of the good fortunate I had been lucky to benefit from did not stop my father from passing his abuse to me. And an even greater curse would be the genes he would pass down to me. That meant from the beginning, there could be no other choice for me. Depression- the truly hereditary kind- just doesn’t care about a person’s personal story. I was lucky. Very, very lucky, compared to my dad. But I still had no desire to live.
Now, sitting in the lap of luxury in Bali, many miles from home, my mind was swimming with conspiracy theories as to how my father's genes would set out to destroy me. I reminded myself I needed to get out of the hot tub. My skin had become wrinkled, and I could see out of the bathroom window that night was approaching. Though the resort was paradise, they could hardly control nature, and soon bats would start swooping about the property, narrowly missing my head. I wanted to get to the restaurant and eat before they could plan their attacks against my long hair. I yawned, glad that my one and only day as a mountain climber had concluded.
As I walked out of my hotel room, I found myself swelling with pride as I thought about my father. My father who would not live to see me turn 40. He walked out of poverty, the first in his family to become educated, and came to America to secure a better future. He garnished his sword and tried his best to defend himself against his many demons- abuse, poverty, bipolar disorder and later, a slew of medical conditions. For anyone to simply call him an abusive and terrible parent would have been disingenuous. There was clearly so much more to the story than that.