The Devouring Mother
“In a fit of rage, he gave me a concussion. I told my mother-in-law about what he had done, hoping for gender solidarity. Instead, she put a matrimonial advert on shaadi.com to secure him a new bride while we were married. After our divorce, the new mail-order wife-to-be emailed me on the eve of her wedding to see if there was something I wanted to tell her about Deepak’s mother — I did not respond.”
I met Deepak in San Francisco when he was 23 and I was 26. We were both Indians but from different India’s. He was born in the US to Indian parents and is referred to within the Indian community as ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) or a confused Indian. I was an FOB (Fresh off the Boat) immigrant lower on the totem pole looking to make it to the US but firmly grounded with my roots in the homeland. Both of Deepak’s parents were conservative Baniyas whose marriage was a product of an arrangement. The mother, who had never completed high school, lived vicariously through her children. Her primary aspiration was that her child must, at some point, attend Harvard.
In some respects, Deepak was every Indian mother’s dream — he had graduated from Stanford in symbolic systems, and in the diaspora world, he was a solid catch. He was my dream — he had taken a year off post-Stanford to write poetry in Berkeley, living in a squatter home off University Avenue. A goatee-sporting, weed-smoking cute desi guy, living a double life that he hid from his parents. Shacking up in abysmal housing on Shotwell Street in the Mission District, rapping and trying to convince a chocolate store owner in the mission to build her website — he was so cool! I was a struggling immigrant studying at first a community college and then a state school. I lived on Cesar Chavez in the mission district (pre-tech boom) with a housemate, a witch named Shaila, who ran her colonic irrigation business out of our beautiful old Victorian home. At this moment, our co-mingling made sense.
The early Deepak was simply a mirage. You never really know a man until you see him angry. One day, in a fit of rage, he broke my wrist. I was stunned and called his mother, she asked me not to share this incident with anyone and said she would speak to him. She never did. The co-conspirator and canniver for the violent Deepak was his mother, who took an instant loathing to me from the first moment she met me and saw me as unworthy of her beloved son. We were both Indian women from India — I saw her for who she was. I came from modern Mumbai, and Deepak’s mother, Neera came from a village in Old Delhi. What could never have worked in India did not work in the parody of her old Delhi ways in the Indian tech sector hub of Fremont, California—currently the global capital for the practice of transnational abandonment of Indian women.
I was three years older than her son, I had no Ivy credentials (when we first met). I was damaged goods in her eyes. When I fixed this later by getting credentialled at an Ivy League school, I was still not good enough for her son. The irony was not lost on me — a woman who had not completed high school was judging my academic achievements.
The only thing I had going for me — and how my in-laws introduced me to people in their milieu — was that I was of a higher caste than them, a Brahmin. In their casteist, commodity-filled world, this was the only cache I had. When they accepted that I was not going away, my mother-in-law resorted to desperate measures, paying an Indian sorceress to cast a spell on me and slipping the potions she conjured in my drinks to kill me off (revealed by Deepak in a moment of solidarity, no doubt). She was nothing if not determined; we were at war, and it never let up until she got her way, and Deepak and I divorced before his family would have killed me, literally.
My only firm stand was for our wedding in Big Sur. A bohemian affair that was the antithesis of Fremont culture. As retaliation, the parents refused to pay and we sold our car and did it ourselves. Soon after the wedding, I convinced Deepak to move to another state and then to another country to escape the clutches of his mad mother.
We both applied to graduate school, hoping the move away would allow us to reset our violent marriage. In a moment of solidarity, we got married in a civil ceremony and never told his parents. I got accepted into my first choice, and Deepak was rejected from Harvard Law, although he still got accepted to many high caliber schools, NYU, Colombia, and UC Berkeley. Oh, the irony that “the woman raised by a single mother in the homeland….and not good enough for her son” was accepted to two Ivy League universities for my graduate degrees, while Deepak was rejected from his. Wow. His mother went into solitary confinement and refused to eat or drink, she turned the lights off. She professed in full self-pity, “I wonder what wrong I have done that god is punishing me like this”.
Despite my achievements, she continued to devalue me. I picked up the pieces of his broken self-esteem and pushed him towards an internship with a Harvard Law Professor, Larry Lessig. She scoffed at the internship. I persuaded him to stand his ground and not be bullied by his mother into getting consumed with getting admission into Harvard to fulfill her dream. I urged him to find his calling in law, combining the internet and coding with law and philosophy. He put in the right application with some expereince and the next year, he got in.
Upon graduating from Harvard Law, we felt the pull of his mother’s devouring gaze to move back to Fremont and for him to take up a corporate law job. Panicking, I looked up a fellowship, the Sheldon fellowship, for Deepak to spend a year at the South African constitutional court and convinced him that this was the right career move for him. I was hoping to give our marriage. last ditch effort and remove us from his noxious family’s clutches. I stayed up all night helping Deepak draft his fellowship and together, we pushed it through. I repurposed my doctoral research to put in a new proposal to be able to move even further away to South Africa. She punished him for this, simply guilt tripping him for leaving his family and “going off”.
When we returned from our sourjorn in South Africa, his mother went to work. I was summoned to the family home in Fremont and instructed to drop out of my PhD and immediately have a child. I refused to cave in. My resistance to this was the source of renewed violence. I fought back.
One day, in a fit of rage, Deepak gave me a concussion. I told my mother-in-law about what he had done, hoping to put an end to the violence. Instead, she put a matrimonial advert on shaadi.com to secure him a new bride while we were married and orchestrated to try and have my marriage annulled. Through violence, they coerced a divorce whereby I lost even my possessions, leaving me penniless. When I left, I felt liberated from this violent family and felt blessed to be alive.
Neera took all my voluminous pieces of ancestral wedding jewelry draped over me as a face-saving moment for tech sector billionaires attending our wedding — she said she would put them in her safe – for safekeeping! When we divorced, the jewelry vanished along with my clothes, furniture, and everything I ever owned. Everything. These tech sector stalwarts, founding members of the Indus Entrepreneur (TIE), Neera and Satish Gupta, flashy and loud with their big house in Fremont and gold Lexus, were corner shop thieves, wife-beaters, and dowry takers. That double Ivy League-educated boy of theirs was nothing more than a wife-beater to fix his fragile ego that could never fulfill his mother’s insatiable appetite for his success. All that expensive education could not cure the patriarchy and violence shipped from India and re-packaged into a gold standard Fremont life.”
After our divorce, the wife-to-be emailed me on the eve of her wedding to see if there was something I wanted to tell her about Deepak’s family life — I did not respond.