Unbecoming

A Memoir of Disobedience

Anuradha Bhagwati

• Editorial: Atria Books
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501162565
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Biographies de sciences sociales

Brimming "with the ebullient Bhagwati's fierce humanism, seething humor, and change-maker righteousness, " ( Shelf Awareness ) a raw, unflinching memoir by a former US Marine Captain chronicling her journey from dutiful daughter of immigrants to radical activist fighting for historic policy reform. After a lifetime of buckling to the demands of her strict Indian parents, Anuradha Bhagwati abandons grad school in the Ivy League to join the Marines—the fiercest, most violent, most masculine branch of the military—determined to prove herself there in ways she couldn't before.Yet once training begins, Anuradha's GI Jane fantasy is punctured. As a bisexual woman of color in the military, she faces underestimation at every stage, confronting misogyny, racism, sexual violence, and astonishing injustice perpetrated by those in power. Pushing herself beyond her limits, she also wrestles with what drove her to pursue such punishment in the first place.Once her service concludes in 2004, Anuradha courageously vows to take to task the very leaders and traditions that cast such a dark cloud over her time in the Marines. Her efforts result in historic change, including the lifting of the ban on women from pursuing combat roles in the military."Bhagwati's fight is both incensing and inspiring" ( Booklist) in this tale of heroic resilience and grapples with the timely question of what, exactly, America stands for, showing how one woman learned to believe in herself in spite of everything.

PART I

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CHAPTER 1

Home Fires

Anyone watching closely would have understood. I joined the Marines because of them.

I had always been my parents’ little girl. Their only child, for some reason. I was shy in front of people, and terrified of being in groups. I listened to Mom and Dad completely. Because they had a lot to say, I did a lot of listening.

Mom met Dad in Boston when she was in graduate school at Harvard and he was teaching at MIT. They were both economists. This all meant nothing to me except that they were always going to the office or on their way to conferences. I remember flashes. Mom wore saris and a red powdered bindi on her forehead, and Dad made me a mug of hot chocolate with Hershey’s cocoa powder and milk for breakfast. Sometimes he and I sat together before sunrise in the quiet house while I sipped my cocoa through a plastic straw and he listened to the morning news on a tiny black-and-white television set.

I remember snow blanketing our neighborhood in Lexington, Massachusetts, for months, and Dad, in his black woolen overcoat, thick black-rimmed glasses, and Russian fur cap, trying to push our car up the hill to our house. Dad was dark brown with wild bushy eyebrows and a thick head of black hair that he matted down with gel and a wooden horsehair brush. His eyes danced when he spoke, and laughter always preceded his punch lines.

Mom was just a shade more olive than white, with thin arms like a cartoon princess. Her hair was black and wavy, and tied back into a bun with a long piece of black yarn and a dozen black bobby pins. She had a straight nose. Dad had a round nose. Everyone said Mom was beautiful. Everyone said I looked like Dad.

I was born in Boston in 1975 when the city was mostly white. Though Black families existed in small numbers, Asians were practically invisible. A few months earlier, a federal judge had ordered the integration of Boston’s public schools. White parents organized a boycott. There were riots and attacks on Black children. It could have been the Deep South.

For Mom and Dad, there was simply India, and there was here, where Mom was re-creating her life from scratch with a focus that allowed for no distractions. They were working to achieve the American dream. They were protected from the worst white animosity by the bubble of the ivory tower and the enclave of intellectuals who were moving to the suburbs outside Boston.

In the fifties, Dad was taken in by a cadre of Jewish mentors at MIT, men like Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, who would win Nobel Prizes and rewrite how economics was understood in the Western world. In 1968, Dad’s professors gave him early tenure, and he and Mom moved from a cramped apartment to their first house in Lexington.

I was about three when Dad was driving us one day along winding suburban roads. Being economists, Mom and Dad could tell you where everything in the world came from, like cars and refrigerators and crayons. If you were sensible, you drove only Japanese or German cars, because they were better made. This was why we had a Toyota.

I was in the back, strapped behind a seat belt, reading. Mom was in the passenger seat. Dad had stopped driving. Maybe it was a red light. Maybe he was lost. A car sped up from behind us and screeched to a stop alongside us. A man was making big movements with his arms. Dad rolled down his window.

The man’s face looked like boiling water. He was yelling at Dad. I didn’t understand what his words meant but they scared me. I was too young to know much, but I knew that this man felt like he was better than Dad, and this meant we were different. I looked away from the man’s face, which was red and white at the same time, because he reminded me of monsters in my picture books.

Dad didn’t say anything. Something uncomfortable was moving in my belly, like a stomachache when I was sick. The man suddenly drove away. Dad and Mom were still quiet. Then they began whispering in Gujarati. I felt something new rising up inside me. I felt shame. I wanted to be as powerful as the light-skinned monster man. And I did not want to be like Dad.

• • •

My father was constantly being told he was brilliant, and he believed it. When we walked through airports on trips to India, random men would stop before him and bow. Dad loved these moments. Mom hated them. But for all of Dad’s fame, he never seemed settled.

It is a testament to my family’s strange narcissism that I knew what a Nobel Prize was when I was a toddler. My parents referred to it as “The Nobel,” and the consensus was that Dad had been robbed. Every September I witnessed my parents’ tortured theater as they tossed the names of potential winners around the dinner table.

Each year when Dad was passed over for one of his colleagues, I would ask him gingerly how he was. He delivered the only line that ever made him feel better.

“Oh, I’m fine. Even Gandhi-ji didn’t win a Nobel.”

• • •

I was five years old when Mom was offered tenure at Columbia University. Dad quit his job at MIT to support Mom’s career, and we moved to New York City. The girls and boys in my new school were mostly white and Jewish. I’d been to many synagogues in the city but couldn’t recall ever visiting a Hindu temple.

“Daddy, are we Jewish?” I asked when I was six. We were not. I would never have a bat mitzvah. It was a terrible disappointment.

Lunchtime at school was torture. In the early morning hours, my father made sandwiches for me with great care, wrapped them up in paper bags like my friends’ parents did with theirs, and dropped me off at school. His sandwiches became one more reason I kept my guard up in the company of white kids. Their lunches held power over mine, even though their tuna fish was bland and mealy and their bread was white and crustless. My brown paper bag was flooded with Indian ingredients conquerors had traveled the oceans to get their hands on: finely cut vegetables flavored with cumin, coriander, and turmeric; shrimp salad sandwiches on whole wheat bread; and chicken sautéed in spicy tomatoes, mustard seeds, and onions. My lunch smelled different. It smelled, period. It made me want to hide.

At the dinner table, under the watchful gaze of Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, we ate dal, subzi, raita, and rice that my mother had made from scratch after a full day at the office. Mom and Dad ate with their hands, while I clutched my fork and fumed, trying to reconcile their savage eating methods with the lessons I was being taught at school about the proper use of utensils and keeping elbows off the table. I didn’t know that most Brown people around the world ate food with their hands. It wouldn’t have mattered. None of those people had any leverage over my childhood.

One afternoon I was playing at the sandbox in our classroom. Joel Stein approached me. He was shorter than most of the other boys, and chubby, with wispy blond hair. He started talking to me about Gandhi.

Joel faked an Indian accent, in the confident way white folks fake Indian accents, not knowing they are widely missing the mark. He started prancing around the table as though he were wearing Gandhi’s white dhoti and tripping over himself. Shy and introspective, I watched his performance. I had no witty comeback. I was too young to summon outrage, though even then I wanted to tell Joel that we called him Gandhi-ji as a sign of respect. I stayed quiet. It was not in my nature to confront someone who was picking on me. I remember the sting of humiliation. If India’s national hero was the object of ridicule, what chance did the rest of us have?

• • •

My parents made it clear to me that my grades mattered more than anything else in the world. And so I studied, all the time. The grown-ups in my life weren’t just adults, they were elders. In Indian culture, elders were practically demigods. Kids didn’t just bow to their grandparents, they touched their feet in respect. One didn’t say no to parents, aunties, or uncles. And every adult was called Uncle or Auntie, regardless of their actual connection to you.

Mom and Dad had no rulebook for raising an Indian kid in the States. Sex ed and the subversive nature of pop culture were not things Indian parents had to contend with in the motherland. When I came home at age nine singing Madonna’s latest album and asking, Daddy, what’s a virgin? my father was stunned. Couples didn’t even kiss in Bollywood movies. (Dad rapidly deflected, telling me it meant a person hadn’t yet been married. I lost interest.)

As I approached preteen years, I was aware of the shifts happening in the bodies around me. Training bras and boys’ wandering eyes appeared suddenly, causing a disruption in the group order. This budding sexuality was something I tried to ignore, but the buzz generated by my light-skinned classmates let me know I could not just hide in my homework. These kids outnumbered me and shaped my every move.

I went along with the charades my classmates played, but in my gut I felt a separation that made me feel like a fraud. My classmates’ sexual and social preoccupations didn’t correlate with the attention and approval I would get back home. I lived in two worlds.

My Indian cultural indoctrination would be no match for the influence of the prepubescent white girls in my life. At age eleven, these girls were deep into gendered rituals that defined their changing relationship to boys, before I was aware that gender was even a thing. For them, shaving legs and removing facial hair were vital to their survival. As I listened to them obsess about their transformations, self-preservation took root. The thought that I might be teased, or worse, forgotten by the other kids, became fuel for altering my skinny Brown body.

My hair was a problem. I used tweezers to yank out the soft black wisps on my upper lip and the tufts in front of my ears. The hair on my head was thick, curly, frizzy, and endless. Indian mothers were inexperienced and uninterested in the self-love birthed by the Black Power movement. Mom’s solution for managing my lustrous hair was not to let my fro be free but instead to cut it all off.

No one in my world celebrated my mother’s pragmatism, least of all me. An older Black girl—one of so few Black kids in our school that we might have banded together if we’d known any better—whom I looked up to approached me in the hall one day and declared, “You look like a boy.”

I took this to mean that boy was the worst thing a girl could be called. I did everything I could not to cry.

I made my mother let me grow my hair out. But there was so damn much of it. I didn’t understand why my hair didn’t stay put like it did on the white girls at school. There wasn’t a knot or tangle anywhere on their heads. Even the Black girls knew how to braid and barrette their hair. I was an outlier among all the kids, an ugly duckling who belonged nowhere and didn’t understand why.

Still, I tried my damnedest. These white-girl rituals were expensive and time-consuming. I had to gather the right equipment: pink plastic razors, women’s shaving cream, and cherry-flavored lip gloss. The careful, calculated entrapment of adolescent males was no easy task. It was pure orchestration, planning and counterplanning, like considering the best way to ambush one’s enemy.

To tame my hair I tried bobby pins, elastic bands, plastic combs, and wooden brushes. Side parts and middle parts. I went through enough brands of shampoo and conditioner to make me a Procter & Gamble poster girl. But nothing would help me look like them.

In any case, my obsessive, unsupervised primping didn’t seem to make a difference. I never got the attention the other girls got. White boys noticed white girls. This was the unspoken rule of things, but I figured it was my fault. My body would never be that kind of body, the one that got talked about by boys in hushed tones in the hallway, the one that provoked lust-filled glances from men on the street.

I learned about sex and love at the homes of my white girlfriends, where we watched movies like Dirty Dancing and played games like spin the bottle and truth or dare. Slumber parties were where I discovered important childhood rites of passage, where we assembled our sleeping bags in front of the television, bingeing on ice cream and watching late-night pornography on cable, where naked adult bodies engaged in acts of contortion and pounding that made no sense to me. I was in no place to ask questions. I kept my head down and ate my ice cream.

I was just the smart girl. But smartness had no currency in this world; it was only back home with Mom and Dad that it was both everything and never enough.

• • •

Every Indian family seemed to have a story about a handsy Indian uncle or neighbor. Stories about sexual violence were told in whispers, if they were told at all. Without any talks about birds and bees, I had no way of knowing the difference between sex, love, and violence. I had to find out on my own.

At thirteen, Bianca was one year older than me, and very thin, with budding curves around the hips. She wore shoes that adult women wore, with tapered toes and heels. Her jeans fit closely to her legs. I could spot Bianca in a crowd of kids by her bright-red lipstick. It drew out the green in her eyes and the dark brown in her hair. Bianca was some kind of Italian goddess, and I would never look like her.

Bianca was crying this morning, and our teachers had surrounded her. Mascara was dripping down both of her cheeks. She had a complexion that was beyond white. It was the kind of porcelain I saw in museums, where security guards warned us not to touch anything. A face like Bianca’s inspired great art, and grave concern.

The news reached us like the telephone game, from one child’s seat to the next. On her way to school, a strange man attacked Bianca, touched her in some harmful way. Bianca was still crying audibly, surrounded by a ring of adults.

I wondered who this man was. I imagined him as handsome. Even then, I recognized what jealousy felt like: a narrowing of my chest and heat behind the eyes.

• • •

Mom got a PhD in economics in the 1950s from Harvard, on full scholarship. The saris Mom wore to work in Cambridge were delicate and elegant, like her. She carried them in a single leather suitcase on a ship from India to the States. My favorites had flowers and plants, tiny elephants, and peacocks. They reminded me of the stone sculptures in our home, where the gods were animals.

In New York City, at her new job as a professor at Columbia, she was going through a wardrobe change. I accompanied her to department stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, where she tried on all the latest pantsuits by designers from Italy, because they were the best. Mom’s red bindi powder remained unused now on her bedroom shelf. The elephants and peacocks came out of the closet only on special occasions.

There was that day when, early on in her tenure, Mom stopped by a colleague’s office. He was a senior faculty member in the political science department, a large white man with a big reputation. He stood up to greet her. Then he unzipped his pants. She flew out of there ...