Read an excerpt from This American Woman, a powerful memoir by Zarna Garg that traces her journey from a controlled girlhood in India to a life of self-determination in America.
ONCE UPON A TIME, BEFORE I RAN AWAY, I WAS THE YOUNGEST OF four happy kids growing up on Nepean Sea Road, the Park Avenue of Mumbai. We lived in a sprawling, 5,000- square- foot apartment in a beautiful limestone building, smack in the middle of bustling shops, big shady trees, and, of course, riotous traffic of every shape and size. We were not the richest of the rich, but we were rich enough to live very, very well in India: servants, drivers, cooks, nice cars, and air- conditioning (the ultimate status symbol). My friends were the children of business moguls and movie stars.
But unlike my friends’ dads, my dad had not been installed as some princely heir to the family business. My father had clawed his way out of the Mumbai chawls, put himself through law school,
and started an innovative— and lucrative— import- export business that took him all over the world. He brought back wild tales and rare objets d’art from exotic locales like Tokyo, Milan, and New Jersey! We, the subjects of my father’s lush new kingdom, were expected to obey his unquestionable worldly authority. In practical terms, this usually just meant staying out of his way. That came naturally. While he never laid a finger on us, my dad’s domineering aura was repellent for servants and children. If he was in the room, no one said anything, because we never knew what might trigger him. Since he always sat in the massive living room, that meant all four of us kids were heaped in one of our tiny bedrooms giggling and talking about movies and food and music.
The servants even fed us our dinners in our bedrooms because they themselves were trying to keep out of his way. My dad was the only member of his family who had finished high school. Afterward, he’d found law professors and begged to attend their lectures. He even offered to clean their homes if he could sleep there at night. And yet it wasn’t my father’s law degree that opened the door to his stunning success. It was something he had that his classmates didn’t: grit.
“All these people with big degrees will sign away their whole life of freedom for an ounce of security,” my dad would say.
“But taking risks— now that is where real money is made.” My dad eventually concluded with disgust that too much education actually ruined people: It made them too proud and too scared to do real work. “Everyone should be a work- alcoholic,” he would say— years before the term “workaholic” became commonplace!
So my dad only educated us to the extent that it would help us thrive in the universe he inhabited. From an early age, we learned “the language of success”— English. And we were to be married off to the heirs of other successful entrepreneurs, ideally before we hit twenty years old.
But even though it was actively discouraged, especially for a girl, I loved to read.
And I couldn’t understand why my dad couldn’t understand, because I thought everything you could read was riveting. Every bit of pocket money I had, I spent on novels, film magazines, comic books. Fortune, Forbes, Inc., Adweek. “How the rich live!” “How the frazzled simplify their lives!” “How film stars fight!” I would even read cookbooks to see what types of dishes were in season. Anything I could get my hands on. I especially adored reading The Times of India first thing in the morning, and I still do to this day. But my dad hated that I would touch it and shuffle the pages around. He wanted the copy to be fresh and crisp when he was ready to read it.
The only way I could get hold of it was if I woke up early, waited in bed until I could hear the newspaper plopped outside our apartment door around 5 a.m., and rush to read through it all as fast as I could. Then I would put the newspaper under the sofa cushions and bounce on it with my bum so that it was neatly pressed back into position. When my dad finally emerged from his room at 6 a.m., the newspaper would be lying outside the apartment front door, perfectly flat.
If there was any suspicion that I had touched the paper, my dad would summon the servants and scream at them, since he knew this exercise was far more excruciating to me than being screamed at myself.
I played this song and dance with him from the age of seven up until the day I ran away. I can only imagine how my mother must have felt, trapped between two iron- willed contrarians with the collective maturity of Bart Simpson. My mother had not been a young bride. The oldest of nine siblings, she had been tasked by her parents to raise her brothers and sisters and marry them off before she could even dream about embarking upon her own life.
Once she finally married my dad, when she was thirty and he was a thirty- seven- year- old widower with three toddlers, she wholeheartedly embraced the role of the self- sacrificing Indian woman. Frankly, it would have been understandable if she went the route of the evil Indian stepmother, trying to wedge her own bloodline into my dad’s wealth and inheritance ahead of his older kids. But my mom had just raised eight people and was now raising three more. She had no interest in generating even more children for the sake of a bloodline. Instead, she threw herself into becoming the perfect stepmother. She doted on my three older half siblings, making sure they had strong relationships with their late biological mother’s family, with plentiful visits back and forth every week. My siblings adored my mom, and she them.
My older sister, Sunita, and my mom were inseparable. Fashion, dinner parties, temple visits, charitable events— they loved it all.
In an effort to be the perfect stepmother, my mom forgot that she was also a mother. By the time I came along ten years later (the proverbial “oops” baby), my mom was tired. Everything I did exhausted her, not least my love of reading and outspoken ambitions. My sister had to intervene sometimes if my mom’s burnout got the upper hand. Like whenever my mom requested from the
hairdresser that I get a very ugly, very low- maintenance haircut called “a boy cut,” so she wouldn’t have to deal with brushing long hair, Sunita would work out a concession for bangs.
The only alone time I got with my mom was when she took me to the pool with her. In India, “swimming” usually just means hanging on to the edge of the pool and enjoying the cold water. My mother would dive. One time she dived so hard she burst her eardrums.
My brothers and sister were teenagers by the time I started walking and talking. This meant I grew up cherished and spoiled, like an American baby— but not by my parents. It was my siblings who doted on me while my parents were generally checked out. My oldest brother, Suresh, was my dad’s favorite, who could do no wrong. I, in turn, was Suresh’s favorite, and that meant I
could get away with anything. “Why are you in the office?” our dad would ask me. “You’re in the way.”
“She’s helping me,” Suresh would say, and our dad would back off. I was four. My office job was to try to draw lines on a piece of paper. I loved working in the office!
“Why are you buying ice cream for Zarna?” our dad would say. “That’s too much ice cream. She’ll catch a cold.” “She’s just holding the ice cream for me,” Suresh would respond.
“I will eat it all.” And I guess my dad was fine with my brother eating two giant cones of ice cream. He would leave us alone, and Suresh and I would eat until we were sick. Just like our dad, Suresh was a workaholic who didn’t want or need friends. As the firstborn son and heir, Suresh started working full- time, eight hours a day, for our dad’s business at age fourteen— and that was after a full day of school. Suresh did need a pet, however, which is how our dad described our relationship when I was little. As a deeply experienced former pet, let me tell you that being a pet is one of the happiest lives you can live on this earth.
Suresh took me with him everywhere, like one of those dogs that fits in a purse— to friends’ parties, cricket games in the park, long drives bopping along to music. I was his “date” to every movie he went to. “Child- appropriate” is not a thing in India. I watched rape movies, slasher flicks, extremely emotional trauma sagas as soon as I opened my eyes. My happiest memory is of Suresh taking me to see Saturday Night Fever over and over when I was three years old. He even bought a disco ball! The four of us kids loved to dance around it in our enormous living room, music blaring, lights off, so my mom’s crystal cabinets would sparkle disco light reflections all over the room.
But this was only if our dad was not home. Whenever our dad’s driver, Thakur Rajendra Prasad Singh (he insisted we call him by his full name), was pulling in from the street, he would give us a warning honk so we could hide the disco ball. He knew that if our dad saw us having fun, or even just out of breath from giggling, it would trigger a fit of rage. Hearing that honk made us scream, half with the goofy adrenaline of kids rushing to hide their mischief and half in real panic of being caught by our dad. I was terrified of my dad, not from anything he’d ever done to me, but because of how scared everyone else was of him. But no matter what fearsome things my dad might start to say to me, Suresh would always invent some nonsense that magically evaporated
my dad’s ire. “Why are you always reading?” my dad would demand, making me shake all over. I was five.
“I asked Zarna to summarize this comic book for me,” Suresh, then eighteen, would say. “I don’t have time to read it.” And just like that, my dad would nod and walk away. To a little kid, an older brother with the superpower to ward off a terrifying adult is no different from a deity. For me, in his hundreds of skillful little deflections and misdirections that kept me protected and safe, Suresh became my true father figure.
WHEN I WAS SEVEN and my sister, Sunita, was nineteen, she was arranged to a young doctor bound for America. My dad had scored big on the groom, Deepak: a gold- medalist resident at the famed KEM Hospital (the Mayo Clinic of India), and from a Gujarati family! From then on, my mother and I would spend summers with Sunita in Ohio. Sunita was pleased with her match and her comfortable new life, and was also full of unbelievable stories about Americana. Every house had its own swing set, an amenity that in India required waiting in line for an hour to get two minutes on it. “You could come here and swing all day!” she told me.
Or bowling alleys: “People just pay money to pick up a ball and roll it over and over again. And it’s not going anywhere. It just keeps coming back.” We used to die laughing imagining our dad trying to go bowling— surely he would yell at his servants to do it for him. Next up to be married off was Suresh, then aged twenty. “I don’t want to get married,” Suresh said. “I’m working all day. How can I have a wife and children?”
“What are you talking about?” said my dad. “You go to work and the wife has the children.”
“No, that’s not how I want to have a family,” said Suresh.
“I’m still making a name for myself. I want to be successful and have more time and money before I become a husband and a father.”
And so my dad nodded gravely at his beloved son, perfectly crafted in his own image, and went back to work. I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the job Suresh had given me that day— creating an inventory of all the different insects I could find in the office.
That peace was shattered one night when Suresh and Thakur Rajendra Prasad Singh came home severely beaten up. They had blood and bruises all over their faces; their clothes were torn and dirty. Suresh was crying. Then everyone started crying because Suresh was crying— my mom, my seventeen- year- old brother Nimesh, the servants, and me. “What happened?” my mom and I kept trying to ask them. Thakur Rajendra Prasad Singh remained silent.
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