Rakshas

Trigger Warning: Abuse, Trauma

In Indian mythology, a demon creature known as a rakshas lives on a mountain slightly removed from a village. No one ventures there except once a year when the village leaders would head up the mountain to bring the monster a child sacrifice to appease its murderous appetite. After devouring the unfortunate young child, the rakshas would don the jewelry and bones of his victim around his fingers and neck, in a spooky, extravagant gesture of power.

When I was younger, I imagined my father was a rakshas. His physical appearance certainly evoked the association: tiny eyes buried under deep set arches protruding from his fleshy face, fat fingers spread out, studded with garish gold rings my mom bought him from India. He used these same stubby hands to grab toys from my hands when I was a child and to eat the last slice of cake at dessert or the first slice of cake at my sister’s and my birthday parties.

My fathers redeeming qualities included unintentional funny noises and mathematical brilliance. When sneezing at a restaurant, he’d scream “achooooooo!,” often seizing the attention of the entire venue, which always made my sister and me giggle. Moments later, he’d be working out multivariable calculus problems on napkins, oblivious to everyone’s eyes on him in the restaurant.

Other times, his not being tuned in could feel cold. I had no way to see into his mind, to connect. I’d lose myself in a fantasy of trying to see humanity in him, a bit of vulnerability maybe. But when he wasn’t being silly (he never intentionally was), he was usually enraged, demanding or critical. He was set off by what seemed to be the tiniest of matters — my finger “oils” seeping into walls when I touched them, beads of sweat accumulating on my upper lip, bangs obscuring my face. Other times he was inert, like pudding, lost in reverie, pacing around in the garden or staring dumbly at the television. He was in a world of his own. The things that moved and irked him were dictated by a logic inaccessible to my mother, sister and me. Most of the time we minced around words in deference to the emotional tyranny of his commands and makeshift rules.

Today, in my thirties, I think of my childhood and my eyes water. There is my dad sitting on a couch in the family room. He and I are both submerged in darkness. I can see only his silhouette intermittently flash in the blue glow of the television screen. At thirteen years old, when I had first started to be plagued with dark moods, I anxiously tossed and turned in my bed upstairs, mired in a relentless sea of shame over what I had perceived to be my major transgressions. I hadn’t said thank you sincerely enough to a family friend after dinner; I’d left my sweater in my locker at school; I’d slouch too much. Lying in bed, I’d replay everything. I’d perfect the tone of my voice when I said thank you; I’d remember my sweater; I’d stand up straight. Regrets spun in my mind so powerfully I could feel them physically. Nausea rippled through my stomach and my legs were restless. No position could assuage the dull ache gnawing at the ligaments in my knees.

I ran downstairs in a paroxysm of tearful self-loathing. “Daddy!” I called out.

He did not notice me. I curled up next to him, my legs throbbing with pain and my face hot with tears. I longed for comfort but did not know how to ask for it. He was indifferent. He cackled along with the laugh track when a corny joke on a sitcom amused him.

I needed his eyes to look at me, but they fixated on the screen. I gathered all the courage I had to talk to him. I longed for him to hear me, to see me.

“I had a bad dream,” I began. He was not interested, but I continued anyway. ”It was about you mocking my walk at CVS. ” His imitation of me flashed through my mind: back hunched, arms akimbo, face twisted into a scowl. His irate, high-pitched voice echoing in the public aisles, “Why you walk like this?” It felt as though the ugliness I feared inside of me was suddenly on the outside, reflected back at me, terrifyingly real.

The glow of the TV lit up the room like a lightening storm.

I tried to be as calm as possible, not whiny, “I thought you should know that sometimes you can make me feel so bad and at night I cry about having you as a dad.”

His eyes, glassy and impenetrable, did not budge. “The parents’ job is to correct you and fix you,” he said, unyielding. He did not look at me.

I resisted his statement. It felt wrong headed, rigid, a thick barrier choking me off from my truth, my source of expression. I feared I’d lose myself if I were to accept what he said. But I also wanted to be a good daughter — a good person– and listen to him. I did not know which path to take: say as I truly feel, or bite my tongue and yield? Could I be good? Good, which I thought meant quiet, pliable, but full of shame and seething? I feared I couldn’t be. Even as a child, I instinctively knew I was destined to be on the shamed, judged fringes of the world: expressive by nature and duly punished for it.

Desperate, I began to sob, “I know I am insignificant. I am unworthy and a big loser. Please don’t rub it in.”

He kept rubbing it in, his high pitched voice grating into my ears. I do not see how my worth could have been seen or salvaged that night.

******

Whether or not the legend is true, my father frequently boasted that he had some of the highest math scores in all of India. He bragged that he was recruited by the government to work in an atomic research lab, a feat that was remarkable considering he went to a village school built out of mud and straw. He recounted stories to us of studying poetry and Russian under the streetlight because his family home did not have electricity for him to read at night. Since his family did not have enough money to buy erasers, he ripped tiny pieces of paper off his notebooks and rubbed them against dried white paint on the adobe wall; he then used the paint on the paper bits to smooth over errors, carefully erasing them from the page. He had only one shirt, one pair of pants, and one set of shoes with holes in them, which he wore to school every day. He spoke of these difficulties, privately only, in angry tones, as a way to get my sister and me to feel more grateful for what we had in America.

What drove him to this country was the desire for a good life. In his thirties, he obtained a student visa to study computer science at the University of Wisconsin. He arrived in New York City with his life savings of ninety dollars in his pocket, in the dead of winter, with only a thin long-sleeved shirt hanging over his body, malnourished down to bones, and no coat. After sleeping in a homeless shelter for a week or two in the city, he headed to Wisconsin for his degree.

Today, when I examine my memories of him sharing his youth, his eyes betray pain and shame in the retelling, the vulnerability I had longed to see in him before. As a child, I had been oblivious to the difficulties he must have experienced in the midst of childhood poverty in a rampantly classist India. Through my young eyes, he remained unscathed, in the position of the inflictor, not the inflicted.

In reality, no one escapes the past. It always comes through, in some form or another.

After moving to California upon completing his degree, my father became withdrawn, dysfunctional, and jobless, a state he maintained for decades. My mother, sister and I left him alone at home for a summer when we went to visit India. When we came back, the kitchen was covered in cobwebs, crumbs all over the floor and countertops. Sunflower seed husks were littered all over the bathroom floor, and peach-colored fungus sprawled over the tiles like carpet. Empty bottles of alcohol were clustered together on a kitchen counter. Ends of wires and electronic gadgets were spread over common areas, loosely strewn about and tangled together. My mother had been appalled by the mess, and even more appalled when she found more wine bottles stashed away in a towel closet in the bathroom.

Today, I look at the filth in my apartment: dirty dishes and trash everywhere, clothes, unwashed for weeks, stretched over the couch, scraps sprinkled all over the floor. Disorganized stacks of papers and half open books spread in a messy array. I wonder if someone would see how I live and feel the same shock I felt when I came home that day from India.

It’s not surprising that I take after him. I am, after all, my father’s daughter. And I have inherited his demons.

Through My Own Eyes

My memories of my childhood in California beam with happiness. I think now I may not have known any better. My recollections are fragmented into tiny slices of moments, mute photographs of people with smiles. In their failure to evoke emotional resonance, or any narrative, the scenes seem to be from another life.

I remember most my small accomplishments. I got straight As in school, won several contests including the science fair in sixth grade, and was the fastest runner in my grade. These small tokens of worth built my fragile self-esteem. And they form the bulk of what I remember from that time.

My parents, in turn, would brag about me. My accomplishments would seem to fill them with joy, at least in the moment. The mental equation was clear: first place in the mile plus the highest grade on a test plus winning the science fair equals acceptability, and acceptability equals love. But as I got older, the truth of these equations began to falter. I grew tired of being lauded in public and yelled at at home. I began to feel used, like a puppet my mom and dad paraded but did not care for.

My mother was, and remains to this day, very concerned about our family’s image and social presence. To cultivate this presence, we hosted massive parties and invited all the Indian families we knew. In eager anticipation, my little sister and I helped my mother tidy our home in preparation for guests. After cleaning, the carpet was light, soft and plushy, with fresh vacuum streaks and countertops radiating with immaculate perfection.

When the party began, people flooded into our home and brought in delicious balmy, cool night air. The chandelier above our mahogany dining table splattered light all over the room, illuminating gaudy glitter and beads sewn on our vibrant Indian dresses. The smooth, musty smoke of incense and talcum powder blended in the air with the spicy scent of curry. Grumbling male voices dissected politics with thick, rolling Hindi accents that chimed jovially with the jingling of bells, bangles, and anklets.

“The Silicon Valley is like India,” an uncle joked. “Pretty soon there will be more Indians here than Americans.” A few like-minded uncles rippled in chuckles.

It was here, amongst the infectious mirth and people who looked like me, where I last felt like I was part of the world. I seamlessly blended in with my environment, laughter in a chorus of laughter, brown in a sea of brown.

My parents had curated this world with the priority and expectation of my and my sister’s future academic and monetary success. Our success would be ultimate proof they had made it in America. As my mother used to say, “children are a map of their parents.” So, if we were “the best” at everything, everyone would look up to them. That was their master plan of assimilation. It was all they would accept. And the conditions here were ideal: I went to a small private school on scholarship with kids who looked like me. I had many neighborhood friends and a community united by a common culture.

Like most kids, I absorbed my parent’s ways of interacting. Through my mother’s eyes, I’d analyze social exchanges, weigh the tone of voices, and judge their sincerity. Whether or not a comment was “off-putting,” according to her standards. I’d judge the color of dresses against the tone of skin. Through my father’s eyes, I’d participate in politics and say the weirdest things I possibly could.

“You eat like a monkey!” My mom chided him.

My dad replied, “Yea, I escaped a zoo!”

The life of the party ricocheted between those extremes– the judiciously social and the boorishly flippant. People laughed at the staged, comical jabs they took at each other, light hearted, only at the surface.

My father imitated Indian comedians on TV and kids would laugh at him and say “Oh Bond uncle!” They’d tell me, “Your father’s so cute!”

I hated when people said this because they did not know the truth. Or they did not see it.

When I ask myself today, as an adult, what I saw through my own eyes at that time, it would be the fights afterwards, among the detritus of the party, when the house was empty and no one else was there. The terror of fights that no number of prizes or distinctions could assuage. The terror that made me feel utterly alone on earth. It was then, behind closed doors, that the truth came out, and the fragile tension between appearance and reality broke.

“Abuse”

“My stupid fucking dad always manages to put me in this position. Sitting here in the closet, crying. My face is still burning from his fingernails clawing my cheekbones. My sister and I were just playing and kicking around this balloon, and my stupid fucking dad stomped his heavy feet into the room and grabbed onto my face and smashed it against the blinds and told us to shut up. He held my face so hard that I think he deformed it because I can barely even open my mouth to scream. But I’m getting better at handling the pain my dad gives me. Today, I’m not sobbing at my own fate. I’m instead tearing at his fate, because he is such a stupid fucking bastard.

…..

My face still burns and I hope the pain goes away. I looked in the mirror and it was all red and my cheeks are still killing me. I have a cut on my nose and eyebrow.

I hope they don’t scar.

I close my old diary, dated 2003, careful to not rip out the pages that are falling out.

It holds the truth: my father physically and emotionally abused me. It feels strange to use the word “abuse.” I feel ashamed, like I’m betraying him when I express it. I feel pressured to preserve my family’s image, whatever they imagined that may be. It was wasn’t the image I saw.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I’d google abuse on the Internet, read the definitions, think they couldn’t apply to me, even though deep down inside I knew they did. I’d compare the examples listed with my experiences. Hitting. Check. Leaving a mark. Check. Destroying my self-esteem. Check.

To say it out loud was to make it real. And it was a reality I did not want to acknowledge. When my guidance counselor at school insisted on calling DYFS, the Division of Youth and Family Services, I told them that I lied about my father biting me. I feared that my family would be split apart, and I would be blamed for making a big deal about something I should be able to handle myself.

In college I kept the word abuse as a secret from myself yet felt its weighty burden everywhere. It was smothering silence taking my voice out of me so I couldn’t speak. It was not being able to hear or believe my own thoughts. It was my reality spinning around my head, going back and forth between pinning the blame on my father and pinning the blame on myself.

I settled on calling his treatment of me abuse when I learned in a class on trauma that abuse is a cultural construct. I created my own definition based on what I had read: a person abuses another when they use a repeated pattern of violence to annihilate someone’s interiority.

Check.

My dad told me I was the spawn of Satan (lol). He squeezed my nose and told me to “go wash your face you big nosed ugly pimply girl.” He screamed that I was horrible, incorrigible. And over the years I believed his version. Even though the reality of abuse was right in front of me, I had spent those years questioning my perspective.

…It had been shrouded by doubt and self blame.

Today the memories sometimes rehash in my mind. They are triggered by incidents such as bumping into a table, dropping papers, receiving criticism. His voice will crowd out my thoughts, “Hold the fork properly. Don’t slouch. Wipe your hair from your face. Why can’t you be nice and comb your hair? Be on good behavior!”

But when I start to tense and tear up, I know it is real.

I know it is real when I remember using as much will and energy as possible to control my movements, placing napkins on the table, sitting upright, apologizing for every stray movement while I teemed inside with extreme emotion.

I’d spent more of myself trying, and failing, to please him and my mother those years instead of moving forward in my own life: the dysfunction thrived on maintaining appearances — the appearance of status, of normalcy, of everything being okay.

These are the times I feel the silence forced upon me — the silence that allowed the abuse and its wounds to fester.

The silence that annihilated my self.

And when I think of that stupid fucking bastard now, my pity for him wrenches my heart.

Ashes

Overtime, I think he learned how to love, at least parts of me, even though he couldn’t express it. Even when I was not speaking regularly to him, my mother and my sister told me he mentioned me frequently, usually with concern. They said he would leave the room during phone calls so he wouldn’t say anything to unintentionally hurt me, which always seemed to happen. If that is not evidence that he cared, I do not know what is. He must have cared. At least it makes sense that he did, in retrospect, even though I did not know it at the time.

As I got older, he started to show more love. It must have been when I went on medication for bipolar disorder after college and my old personality started to resurface that things got better. Medication had allowed a space to emerge between us, protecting myself from him and insults. Before, he would attack me and I would react. He would take the reaction as an insult and attack more. Once I received treatment, I learned to hold my tongue, instead of launching into a reaction every time I was triggered. In other words, it must have been the medication that also made me less scary in his mind.

Or maybe it was the fact that in treating my mental illness, the medication revealed that I had had an illness all along. My mood swings subsided and were no longer there for him to internally justify the abuse. I could think clearly once more and wasn’t crying all the time. I could see his frustration from interacting with me gradually fade and give way to his seeking my acceptance and love. And because I was more “normal,” I think he became more cognizant of the terrible way he had been treating me when I was unwell. Or, that was my hope. As I began to learn real coping skills and started to build my life, he started to compliment my physical beauty. He bought me presents out of nowhere. At times I would pace in the living room, anxious about what my next step in life would be, and he would listen and counsel me to the best of his abilities, looking out for my “best interests,” the way “only family can.”

But it was the end of his life, after a life of injuring me. In other words, it was too late, and it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t there when I needed him. I sometimes tried to resign the beatings to a “misunderstanding.” My parents didn’t know I was bipolar when I was growing up. They just thought I was talking back more, becoming more “American,” less obedient, out of control.

Yet it hurts to know that the people who were supposed to protect me — my parents — did not have my back. I had to learn later in life that it was my parent’s responsibility to get me help for bipolar, not to “treat it” themselves by trying to “beat it out of me,” beat me out of me.

Growing up, it did not occur to me that it is a parent’s responsibility to notice a child’s emotional health and seek medical treatment if necessary. Even when two teachers called my parents and suggested I see a doctor. And I knew what that cold, hard fact meant: I had had no one to open up to about my struggles. They weren’t there for me. They weren’t there for me when I needed them more than anything.

So I held onto my grudges. I felt that I was damaged because of him. Despite all the love that he showed me later in life, I winced at his guidance. No matter his actual tone, I experienced it as harsh and forceful, like control. It seemed as though he only wanted me to be successful so he could brag about me to prop himself up. When he began to sign each text to me with “Love, Daddy,” the salutation registered as well-intentioned but lacking in effect, like a scripted action, something that you’re supposed to say as protocol, but without the warmth. I could not trust that he cared about my happiness for the sake of my happiness. After years of being torn down by him, I could not trust that he could be rooting for me, for me.

Why did I have to interpret his behavior this way? Why couldn’t I put all the hurt aside and open my heart to him? I treated him with such contempt, yet he continued to “guide” me, unwelcome.

Why couldn’t we just be, side by side, sharing experiences together? He was always criticizing “out of love.” I feel so broken from it.

There are still good parts that play in my head, the parts of my father I have grown to love. The road trips. The museums. Long lectures about history and science. Now that he is gone, I catch myself smiling when I think about his strange mannerisms, how he danced whenever my mom started to yell at him about something, how he would fart and burp out loud in restaurants — a behavior I hated when he was alive but can laugh about now– his funny, confused expression with one of his eyes scrunched up, his mouth opened sideways, as he said, “Huh?” It feels weird to smile when I think about him. Yet I feel like I have reached a place of peace….

….It is a place of hard won peace.

My mother always pointed out how similar my father and I were: in her perspective, we were both awkward, sloppy, bookish and disorganized.

Her face scrunches when she makes these comparisons. But she was not wrong in that we were similar. He, too, saw elements of himself in me, mostly in academic promise. When bipolar struck and I began to falter, he projected his feelings about his failures onto me. My worth in his eyes, and in mine, was held precariously in place: on one hand, I had potential; on the other, I was so unfixably flawed that I brought “nothing but shame upon the family.”

I took on the shame he projected onto me as my own for many years. I lost so much time in the dark, unable to find my way. And yet, even though it takes all I have, I still want to forgive him. The anger of having lost years to pain is too hard to bear.

I’m here today, torn and tattered, wanting the pain to be purposeful…

******

It was unsettling to hold his ashes, the smoky gray dust that had once been a person, not just any person, but my dad, the man who raised me, albeit imperfectly. My mom held up the bag and screamed at it, “This life is such bull shit.” The anger in her voice pierced through me and made me at once sad for her and repelled by her self-pity. She was mad at my dad the same way she was mad at him when he was alive, so disappointed and disgusted, as if he were still here, fucking up all her plans on purpose.

I try to mentally hold onto the last time I saw him, but I have blocked it out. As he lay motionless in the coffin, the man who had so often been threatening was now powerless to hurt me. As per Indian tradition, as the oldest child, I was the one who had to press the button on the cremator. My sister helped. As we pressed it, my senses bled together, and my outer awareness began to fade. Even my mother’s hysterical screaming in the background faded into silence. Only my dread, captured by the infinite blackness of the button, stands out in bas relief.

Now he is resting peacefully in the ocean, in Halfmoon Bay, his favorite beach. I placed my feet in the frigid, brackish water to disperse the ashes. It rushed upward all the way to my thighs, the cold engulfing my legs, the way it engulfed him. The water moved back and forth, immersing me in the ashes. Our final shared experience.

Since then, I have learned to reframe my history. I know the truth and am no longer powerless. In my mental war between anger and understanding, I have learned to lean toward empathy. It softens the sting.

My father’s limited worldview had warped his love for me, his very own daughter, into psychological and physical violence. In his effort to isolate me, he was trying to shield me from a foreign world he saw as scary and full of threat. When he unrelentingly pushed me, he was trying to equip me to survive in a world in which you had to be the best, because if you weren’t, you were condemned to a life of hardship and poverty. When he criticized me, he was trying to show me “the proper way,” so I wouldn’t make mistakes. So I wouldn’t be harmed. It was his version of protection. He raised me the best way he knew how.

And the reality is he did not know how to be there for me, because no one was there for him.

Now that he can’t hurt me, the warmth of his unexpressed love is safe enough to let in. I can acknowledge this love and hold the truth of my abuse in simultaneous awareness. I know he hurt me and that what happened to me was wrong. I also know that good people get hurt and become broken and then go on to hurt others. I know that parents aren’t perfect. And yet, even though I understand his limitations, I still have the scars.

My feelings surrounding his death stir inside of me, mixing and mingling, undulating between relief and grief, like the cold ocean waves that carry his ashes.