Writer-At-Large – The Modern Family and The Marital Adversity

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On Sunday at 4am along the south east coast of India, a woman sleeping next to her 9 month old infant sat up on the berth of a moving train, collapsed on the floor, frothed at the mouth and died. Her husband of 3 years sought help in the next station the train had stopped 3 hours after she had collapsed. The last thing she told her mom as she boarded the train to leave her parent’s town was that she didn’t want to go back to her home which she shared with her husband and his parents. The post-mortem report was inconclusive and when pressed by her parents, the doctor reported the possibility of a massive stroke as the cause of her death. She would have turned 30 this year.

As an Indian American there is something that I juggle with almost every waking minute of my life. Should I lament on how teenagers in America are wasting away their potential as they glue their eye balls to their phones or get worked up about the crisis that is exploding in India that is threatening the essential building blocks of its cultural fabric, the family unit. To be a family in India when I was growing up was to be an unbroken, unshattered, and a single cluster of a set of parents and two children. We didn’t have pets like how in America 48% of households own at least one pet. Sometimes, we lived among families who had only one kid or those who had 3 kids mostly because of religious reasons, like restrictions on artificial contraception for Muslims and Catholics.

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When I got married and came to the States in 2002, I started working at Subway which was owned by a friend and met customers with whom I had limited interactions with and employees with whom I ate leisurely lunches and had long conversations with. (This was the age of no smart phones). I met men who would come in for lunch every single day and ask me to pack their sandwiches to-go. I would see them go out and sit in their cars while they ate. I wanted to ask them if they had families and if they believed how great and uniting the concept can be. My coworkers who were like me, in their early 20’s, would talk about their parents as if they were the worst of humanity. In my head, I wound understand these as symptoms of the individualistic society of the Western world, freedom of speech and all.

After all, I had come from a culture which was known to show overt reverence to its older generations. Our manners so subservient to our elders that one would suspect if there were huge monies of inheritance at stake. You simply follow orders even sporting fake loyalty if you had to. You belong to a family and are a part of it, not an individual capable of making independent decisions.

Of course, people had affairs and we have had our share of UPS men and desperate housewives over there too, but the delivery guy must be replaced with the milk man in narratives until the late 1990’s. Of course, with the onset of online shopping services like Amazon going mainstream in India, this urban “myth” might as well be Westernized too.

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A few years ago, a coworker told me that her husband was a lazy asshole and that she was struggling to inspire him on a daily basis to help her out with kids and chores. I told her to meditate during that fateful lunch date to which she rolled her eyes and never confessed anything else. Well, what I was thinking and my subsequent defense will make for another story. Then, as I was pregnant with my first child in Pittsburgh, I went to volunteer for the Allegheny regional hospital where my volunteer coordinator wished me good luck with the whole parenting thing, and called her children lucky entitled pricks.

Most times, before I knew any better, I would rationalize that the structure of the American family was created out of selfish individualistic traits but attributed the familial settings in India to cultural norms. Women were encouraged to stay silent and compromise and contribute to the family’s well-being without questioning their afflictions. “Stay, don’t divorce” was the unspoken rule that women who were married were brainwashed into. Cases of domestic abuse almost always went unpunished and infant kids roamed around in their homes while their desperate mothers hung from the ceiling fans until they were discovered. Women would be rushed to the hospitals after being doused by kerosene and set aflame for not bringing more dowry, sometimes years after the marriage. Again like most times, the mother-in-law and the husband would go unpunished, mostly after bribing their way through the legal system. A widower sometimes would promptly get remarried especially if he had small children to take care of. A widow might end up unmarried for the rest of her life, or if there were progressive thinkers in her family, she would be lucky enough to marry into the company of a divorcee or a widower. Although, women have come a long way since my childhood, I simply cannot act like these things happened in a bygone era and don’t happen now. Take for instance the case of an Indian American, Neha Rastogi, the battered wife of a Silicon Valley CEO who has been offered a plea deal of less than 30 days in jail. Secret video recordings of her being berated and hit by her husband, which were later submitted to the court, are circulating among the outraged Indian American public for a couple of months now. We have signed many petitions on the matter.

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The Indian American Life

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