Missed Translations - Sopan Deb Page 0,10

of our brown culture. It’s a stereotype of Asian parents, but it was an accurate one in our household. Their relentless focus on report cards seemed designed to torture me. I never thought much about what their childhoods had been like, what lessons their lives had taught them, or how those lessons shaped them as parents. My reaction was classically juvenile. Instead of heeding their advice, I became a wannabe class clown. In eighth grade, the same year as my first kiss, I submitted an entire short story with such character names as Seymour Butts, Ben Dover, and Mike Rotch, which got me kicked out of the end-of-the-year celebration. I was acting out, period. I skipped homework assignments, and when teachers sent “homework slips” home to inform Shyamal and Bishakha that I wasn’t keeping up, I intercepted them and forged my mother’s signature. I was committing fraud as a child.

Toward the end of middle school, the anger I felt became the only constant in my life. I completely rejected the brown side of myself. Calling it a side seems unfair. Your culture isn’t a side. Boxes have sides. But culture and heritage? It’s who you are. Still, I refused to believe I was Indian. I’m different, I told myself, I have to be different than this. The situation at home became more unbearable as I navigated my teenage years. My parents were fighting more, and my mother’s disposition swung rapidly and unpredictably from calm to choppy waters. I distinctly remember money being a sticking point, although I never figured out specifically why. Bishakha took a job as a cashier at Drug Fair, a local pharmacy, where she made about sixteen thousand dollars a year. I suspected at the time that she took the job to get herself out of the house and because she wanted to have some financial independence from my father. I blamed arranged marriage, Hinduism, and India for the ills of the household, even though I didn’t know enough about any of those things. I just knew I wanted distance from whatever culture had forced my parents together and produced this misery. I stopped playing the harmonium and performing at Indian festivals. When my parents hosted Bengali family gatherings, I started avoiding the party because I was embarrassed by the number of saris and dhotis being worn around my home. I became a self-loathing Bengali child.

I grew to idealize whiteness, which I conflated with safety and easy communication. This desire to be white didn’t come from feeling socially or politically marginalized because of my skin color. It was about white suburban moms who made after-school snacks and asked my friends about the girls they liked and the teachers they hated. The sex talk with Indian parents is the same talk as the one about what college you should go to: Get good grades and you don’t have to worry about either.

At the end of middle school, my parents’ scant tolerance of each other shifted to intolerance. They separated sometime around 2001. When I was in high school, they officially, mercifully, divorced.

I was relieved. Divorce isn’t uncommon in the United States. But it is uncommon among arranged marriages, especially in India. By design, arranged marriages are transactional in nature. The love, in theory, comes later. Perhaps this is why, in the United States, the divorce rate among Indian-Americans is estimated among experts to be between 1 and 15 percent, according to the Washington Post. It’s hard to pinpoint a precise number for this, and the United States government doesn’t track Indian-American divorces. But the national average is closer to 50 percent (although this number varies among age groups).

After the divorce, my relationship with each parent improved, though it was a low bar to clear. Shyamal moved to a small apartment about thirty minutes away from Howell, and it was decided that I would stay with my mother. I didn’t object, more due to a sense of inertia than a desire to pick one parent over the other. Every time my father called and I saw his name on the caller ID, I cringed. The scars were still there. We had become acquaintances by that time, nothing more. The conversations with my father would last no more than a few minutes and consist of small talk. How’s the weather? What did you eat today? Click. We’d occasionally meet up for dinner and hear only the sound of our chewing.

I also changed in high school after my parents separated, physically