64 THE WEEK • JULY 14, 2019
@LEISURE
BOOKSA
nuradha Bhagwati was three and
strapped to the seat of a Toyota
when she realised that she was
diff erent. A driver sped up next to
the car which her father was driv-
ing and started yelling. “I was too
young to know much, but I knew
that this man felt he was better
than Dad. And this meant we were diff erent. I
looked away from the man’s face, which was red
and white at the same time, because he remind-
ed me of the monsters in my picture books,” she
writes in her book, Unbecoming: A Memoir of
Disobedience.
Her parents Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai
are brilliant economists. Yet, in the America of the
1970s, they were just brown. Bhagwati, born in
1975, grew up in a predominantly white America.
Her parents, the kind of academics who could
win a Nobel, were trying to assimilate in a country
where their intellect did not protect them from
racism. In Unbecoming, Bhagwati writes bravely
about being the only child of brilliant parents,
defying them and joining the Marine Corps. Of
being bisexual. Of battling sexism, racism and
sexual harassment. And of fi nally fi nding the
courage to become an activist to “change the
landscape of America to make it safer for women
and children”.
One of the most powerful accounts of growing
up Indian in America, it is compelling, heart-
breaking, poignant and brutally honest. At the
heart of the book is her relationship with her par-
ents. In her deeply conservative household, when
she discovered that she was bisexual, her mother
threatened to kill herself if she did not end it
then. At her home, grades mattered more than
anything. Bhagwati ended up going to Yale, where
she was not allowed to choose her subjects. Her
parents discussed the CV of the teachers taking
the classes before she opted for them. An outsid-
er, Bhagwati tried every trick in the book—includ-
ing dating a black boy—to try and get back at her
parents. Till she found the perfect solution: the
Marines.
Bhagwati’s voice in the immigrant Indian expe-
rience is essential reading. It is courageous—both
in the way she writes about her own failings and
shame as well as in the way she writes about her
parents. It is about love without hero worship.
And for this, she must be given credit. Being harsh
on yourself is somewhat easier than shattering
your parents’ halo. Her mother was a pioneer in
her fi eld. Her father quit his job at MIT to supportMy father read the book in one night.
Cover to cover. I asked him what he
thought. He said, ‘I am so proud of you.’
He said it was hard. He cried while
reading many portions.Anuradha Bhagwati