My Birthright - The New Yorker

“Why do you still write about India?” a friend was asking. It was 2015, and we were sitting on the shaded outdoor patio of a hipster Vietnamese restaurant in tropically hot Austin, Texas. Svelte white waitresses in generic Asian garb swirled around us. One had tiny slashes of black makeup at the edges of her eyes.

My friend, a white American from the Midwest, had asked a simple question. I had immigrated to the United States from India in 2001, for college, and had lived here, off and on, ever since. In many crucial ways—my vintage T-shirts, my fondness for indie rock, my social ease with Americans of all backgrounds—I could pass as assimilated. Why, then, she asked, did the novels that I wrote, set in the New Delhi of my childhood, bear no trace of my outer life?

She had asked the question innocently, and yet, on that humid day, I found myself filling with rage. I muddled through an answer—something about being drawn to unprocessed, formative memories—but what I wanted, more than anything, in that moment, was for America, and my American interlocutor with her America-centric concerns, to vanish.

It is only now, years later, that I can acknowledge that something else was going on that day: that I was feeling defensive about my own confused and tormented relationship to place, my powerlessness about my circumstances. Didn’t I, too, feel that there was something inauthentic about writing across a chasm of time and space?

Indeed, why, in my writing, did I have to pretend to be there, in India? And did people there want to hear about what I was writing about them from here?

Was I writing about there because I couldn’t accept my life here?

From the start, my immigration to the U.S. was infused with denial. I wasn’t even, properly speaking, an immigrant. When I arrived, after all, I was already a citizen.

This was a quirk of personal history. My father had emigrated from India to the U.S. in 1968—soon after the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Immigration Act—for a master’s degree. In 1973, my mother joined him, and for thirteen years they lived together in Chicago, Illinois; Nashua, New Hampshire; and Stamford, Connecticut. In 1986, when I was two and my younger brother was just six months old, they repatriated to India, with us in tow. My brother and I were, in a sense, “anchor babies,” though, in another way, we were the reverse: our arrival in my parents’ marriage quickened their realization that they didn’t want their kids to grow up in the States. We tore our parents’ anchors from America even as we gained birthright citizenship.

From then on, my brother and I grew up in upper-middle-class Delhi, surrounded by relatives. We attended a local school—not an American or British educational outpost—and our parents never seriously considered returning to the U.S., even though, at the time, material conditions in India were, in many ways, a generation behind the place they’d left. From a world of abundant brands and wondrous gadgets, we had come to a city with days striped by power outages. There were two national channels on TV and only a handful of brands of sluggish cars. Bureaucratic delays were rampant. Yet my mother, especially, felt she had made the right decision, choosing her culture over America’s capitalist escalator to nowhere. (My father, aggravated by the inefficient business culture of nineteen-eighties India, was more ambivalent.)

All the same, my brother and I remained connected to America. There was our American citizenship—India, thanks to a post-colonial suspicion of divided loyalties, does not allow dual citizenship—but also the matter of our parents. Their years in the U.S. had changed them. Unlike many of their peers, they were dead set against a culture of casual graft. Courting terminal uncoolness, they routinely scolded fellow-Indians for their habit of throwing trash and wrappers in the street. Religious rituals were rarely observed in our home. My parents spoke English confidently and had an easy traffic with the West and Westerners. My father, an engineer, still consulted for companies that he had worked with previously in the U.S. and Europe. During my childhood, he often travelled abroad, bringing back toys and springing open his hard-shell American Tourister suitcase the minute he arrived.

But, if the West was just another aspect of our lives rather than a glittering Valhalla of possibility, this changed when I entered my final years of high school. My mother, realizing that my American citizenship was an advantage, suggested that I take the SAT and apply to American colleges. I had always pictured myself attending an Indian engineering school—the dream of most academically inclined students in India. But my citizenship, synonymous with quality and power, sat there like a taunt and a temptation. And, frankly, it was much easier to gain admission to a prestigious American university than to India’s hypercompetitive technological institutes, which required years of after-school preparation for their entrance exams. When I was admitted to Stanford, in 2001, with financial aid, there was no question of turning it down.

Coming back to America fifteen years after I had left it was more of a beginning than a return. I possessed no memories of my earlier time here, and, like many new immigrants, I struggled to take care of myself after a life cosseted by family. All the same, I had a familiarity with American culture that my parents had handed down to me. I also held strong to my Indian roots. My parents, for example, had never developed American accents. Nor did I.

I had started writing poetry as a high-school student in Delhi, and now, in creative-writing classes, I attempted stories set in my home town. Writing about India from the command center of Silicon Valley was, at least initially, an expression of cultural confidence. I knew who I was and where I was from. Unlike some of my Asian American peers, who had been raised within a white superstructure, I did not write about white people by default. At the same time, as I mentally summoned India in my dorm room, with the golden hues of California outside my window, I was filled with doubt. How much did I really know about the place where I had grown up? My childhood had been cloistered, and I’d glimpsed just a sliver of the Indian experience; around me lay a great area of darkness to be explored. If I wanted to be a real Indian writer—like Arundhati Roy or R.K. Narayan—I would have to immerse myself in the Indian reality, become one with my nation.

And so, by a strange act of mental jujitsu—declaring myself an “Indian writer” in the West—I forced upon myself a second, figurative passport: a passport to India, where I planned now to return after completing my studies in economics and English, dedicating myself to painting an accurate picture of the country that India was becoming, my writing unshadowed by the corrupting eyes of the West.

But there was already an irony within this declaration, because it was America—through its permissive creative-writing classes, which my engineer friends slogging away in India would have considered a joke—that had allowed me to declare myself a writer, away also from the judgment of my bourgeois Punjabi milieu, in which literary life was looked down upon as an effete, unremunerative curiosity. And, examining myself through Indian eyes, I judged myself. I was ashamed of what I wanted to do. It didn’t seem serious. It didn’t seem right for an academically gifted Indian boy whom everyone expected to study computer science and to work at Microsoft or Goldman Sachs.

I told myself that I would return to India when I published my first novel—when I had something to show for my ambitions. Growing up in a viciously competitive culture of exam-taking and scorekeeping, I had internalized the need for outward validation. After graduating, I accepted a low-pay, low-stress publishing job, in San Francisco, and worked on my first novel in the evenings and on weekends. The novel was a comedy about an urban-planning minister in Delhi who is only attracted to his wife when she’s pregnant and so keeps fathering child after child. Like so many works in which a writer discovers his voice, its energy came from conflicting influences: the gentle domestic dramas of R.K. Narayan on one hand, and the transgressive, bawdy approach of Philip Roth on the other, as well as the hyper-sexed world of American colleges, where sex was discussed in such a puerile fashion that the quasi-official chant of my freshman dorm had been “Who are we? Branner! What do we want? Sex!” The book, which I titled “Family Planning,” emerged quickly, a product of excitement and desperation.

It was published when I was twenty-four. Before it was released in India, I sent a copy to a famous older writer in Delhi with whom I was slightly acquainted. This writer was known for penning mischievous columns in newspapers, but he had also been encouraging of my early efforts at poetry. When he published a review of the novel, though, he did something that, in my view, no reviewer should do: he baselessly insinuated that the minister character with the pregnancy fetish who made casual anti-Muslim statements was modelled on a prominent, and deceased, family member of mine (one who had, incidentally, lived in a completely different era from that dramatized in the novel).

This deceased family member was not mentioned often in the press, and it angered my extended family that he was resurrected in such a negative way, and that my book was the occasion for it. I remember sitting in an office in New York—I was now working for the city government as an economic planner—and receiving a cascade of incensed e-mails. In Delhi, an older family member accused my parents of having written the book, suggesting that I was too young to have done so myself. (My parents had been utterly in the dark about what I was writing, but, in one respect, my relatives were perhaps right: my parents’ years abroad had given me the perspective of an outsider to India; and it was this estranging perspective that the family members, in their grief and anger, were reacting to.)

I was full of guilt and pain and shame. Writing from the privileged West, I had caused a terrible explosion in the life of my family and parents. And, as if to kill myself and not face the family, I decided that I would not repeat the mistake of writing anything that could be perceived as autobiographical. I also resolved, tacitly, to remain in hiding in America until I wrote my next book—one that I hoped would redeem me and enable me to return.

Each book, in this way, became a passport home in my mind, a means of hoping that I would be accepted by India and by my family. The U.S. was incidental; it was purgatory, a place I lived in as I reached desperately for home.

But the second book proved extraordinarily difficult to write. Stymied by the knowledge of what my first novel had wrought, I spent years avoiding the material closest to me. After New York, I moved temporarily to Bangalore for another job, and then to Austin, to get an M.F.A., in 2012. The breakthrough only occurred when, six years into writing my second novel, on the verge of abandoning it, I set aside my fears. At that moment, the external worlds I had been assiduously researching fused with repressed material from my childhood, and the book exploded out of me in a few months. I was exhilarated.

But, if I felt I had fought my way out of terrible depression and pain—the pain of exile, of having hurt my parents, of being cast out, of being disowned—another unavoidable counterforce had developed: my American life.

Which is to say that by the time the book was published, in 2016, I had been in the U.S. off and on for fifteen years—the same length of time I had lived in India and two years longer than my parents had lived here together. A whole structure of meaning had locked into place for me: I was in a serious relationship with an American woman, a fellow-writer who was deeply supportive of my vocation; I had many friends; I was aided by American arts institutions. And, though I once again considered returning to India, there were now too many complications. It was difficult to imagine dragging an American partner full time to Delhi—which had climbed the ranks of noxiousness to become the most polluted capital city in the world—and when I reached out to the few universities that hired instructors for creative writing, I was met with polite disinterest. In India, it turned out, I was seen as more of an American writer, exactly the irony that I had sought to avoid by writing about India.

I eventually accepted a teaching job at a university in the States, achieving true financial security for the first time in my adult life and cementing another aspect of my American identity: that of an economic migrant. This, of course, was a position I would have had to come to terms with long before had I not possessed the privilege of U.S. citizenship—a privilege that had also become a liability, because it had allowed me to ping-pong, physically and mentally, between places, never feeling at home. I consoled myself with the fact that the rhythms of academic life, with five months off a year, would allow me to formalize my half-and-half life, with long sojourns in India every year.

Then the pandemic hit. Then I had a child. The dream of a half-and-half life faded. When I finished my third novel, a few years ago, I asked myself: Why was I so obsessed with India anyway? Why didn’t I write about America, where I lived, as people kept asking me? Didn’t I now know this nation well—better, in many ways, than the imagined India of my past? Wasn’t I an American by birth?

But, when I sat down to write, my mind remained incapable of engaging with my American surroundings. For reasons that I do not fully understand, the landscape of the United States—with its strip malls and spaghettied overpasses and flat, sprawling cities with their dingy bars and Germanic breweries—remains as inert and impenetrable as it did when I first arrived, twenty-five years ago. In my darker moments, I feel that this is a homogenous country giving itself airs by overhyping its political polarization; that, in fact, it is a place where cultures come to die, breaking and vanishing like tired waves against the dreary suburban architecture that characterizes most of the nation, a place that is unable to absorb outside influences in any meaningful non-monetizable way—unlike, say, India, where cultural churn is visible on every surface, in every face. All these years later, America, for me, is the great anywhere.

On another level, I recognize that anger at the U.S.—just like the anger I felt at my friend at the Vietnamese restaurant in Austin—is anger at myself. Perhaps another writer from South Asia, formed in a different way, would have a different creative bond with America. But I, forever looking backward—having inherited this homing instinct from my parents—seem to have warped my own brain, so that I cannot accept, at least in my writing, where I am. My soul, like my parents’, is unusually sticky.

And yet, is it possible that what I am experiencing is familiar to all immigrants? When you immigrate, certain bands of cultural experience, certain selves—the self that speaks a native language, for example, or that is attuned to a Third World city’s hectic rhythms—go dark, with nothing to replace them. In your new country, you feel a mounting discomfort and grief, without quite knowing why. In my writing, am I simply doing what so many immigrants find that they need to do: to go back, again and again, to refresh the parts of themselves that lie dormant, so that they can survive in a place that means nothing to them besides opportunity?

Or is it simpler: Will I only write about America if I move back to India? I don’t know. I wish I were not so divided; I wish I could live mentally where I am physically. But that, evidently, is not my fate. I am forever reliving the journey that my parents made.♦

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