When I was six years old, I would hide under the bed in our house in Cyprus, waiting for Appa to come home from work. It was our daily game of hide and seek — he would walk into the house with a loud “helloooo!” and I would quietly giggle in my hiding place until he could find me. Sometimes I would fall asleep waiting, and Appa would pick me up and tuck me into bed without waking me.
Amma always says that when I was a baby, Appa was so concerned with my safety that he would temperature-test my milk. At times he would even taste it, an act simultaneously laughable and disgusting to my mother, to make sure I could drink it.
My earliest memories of my father are happy. They are filled with the sunshine of Cyprus, of playing on seesaws and learning to tie my shoes.
When I was sixteen, long after we left Cyprus and moved to the United States, I co-organized a protest against rape and sexual violence. It was following the 2012 gang rape in Delhi, which received attention in both the Indian media and diasporic circles. Structural gender-based violence, particularly against Dalit, Muslim and trans women, is an issue that is still not acknowledged in mainstream Indian media or international networks. The attention and outrage the 2012 case received was thus unique, and informed by many factors including the brutality of violence and the caste, religious, and class positionalities of both the victim and the perpetrators. In my own journey of coming into my feminism as a teenager, the 2012 incident marked the first time in my life that I saw, in the South Asian-American communities that surrounded me specifically, an acknowledgement of sexual violence.
But these discussions were incomplete at best, and oppressive at worst. Among other things, there was an “othering” of the violence, an assumption that sexual violence existed far away in South Asia and not in our very own diaspora. As if brown children in our communities or brown relatives in our homes were never capable of being perpetrators. It was in this context that a small group of high school South Asian-American girls, including myself, decided to hold a vigil and protest.
Amma was extremely supportive from the moment I discussed the idea with her. I had run into her room with a great urgency, knocking so rapidly that she opened her door with a towel hastily wrapped around her, hair dripping and face fresh from the shower. “Whatever you need, I’m here,” she said. “Let me know how I can support you.”
In contrast, Appa posed questions. “Do you need to do this? Do you need to organize a protest on this issue of all?” He was not pleased. I requested he attend, if not to support the cause, at least to support me, although supporting the cause meant supporting me and supporting me meant supporting the cause. But we did not discuss this.
How could the same father, who wouldn’t even let his child drink milk without testing it, become apathetic when it came to the issue of patriarchy, an issue that so deeply affects my existence on a daily basis? This is a question that puzzled me back then, in the weeks following the event.
After school ended and as I prepared to leave for college, Appa sat me down for a chat, to tell me that I could always call home. “We would rather you call us if you need something. Even if you think you did something wrong, you can tell us,” he told me. “You can always tell us anything.”
Last fall, I watched as the name “Kavanaugh” became a news headline. I watched my world burn with rage from survivors, with their trauma, with compassion and pain and grief all mixed together. It was a world that I had known existed for a very long time. A club I too was, and am a part of. It came alive in a way I had never seen before, and I watched on with both trepidation and relief. A world that I had known existed, that many people had known existed, revealed itself for the first time to the larger, outside, privileged world that was ignorant of it. Many of the men in my life, including Appa, were a part of this privileged world.
Sitting on a plane to Colombo that week, where I now live as part of a 9-month fellowship, I came across an article on my newsfeed about survivors who disclosed sexual assault to various people around them long before they considered disclosing to their own fathers. It was a way that children carry a sense of responsibility towards fathers, the article claimed, protecting them from their own children’s experiences with patriarchy.
I sent Appa the article before the plane took off. “I have been watching the news…” he replied back, almost immediately. “But is there anything I need to worry about?”
“Nope, nothing to worry about” I told him. “Let’s talk later, maybe.”
But we didn’t talk about it again.
I love my dad. He loves me. He remains one of my biggest supporters — he reinforces my work and my choices, and encourages me to look at the bright side. He always, always tries to give me access to things he never had growing up. But that doesn’t mean he has been the best ally or shown up for “the movement” in ways I had hoped he would. In fact, he has been far from it, more than I care to and am able to admit.
The complexity of loving my father but feeling like he is a bad ally is hard to vocalize, especially as a brown woman in the diaspora. South Asian experiences of gender are diverse and in no way a monolith, varying across caste, class and religion. But in my personal experiences of South Asian culture, we are not meant to name our experiences with violence or the shortcomings of our own parents.
My father comes from a family that erased our names off of the family tree after my parents had only a daughter and no sons. A family that believes women taking a cab alone at night invites sexual violence. As much as he may try, I fear that deep down Appa’s notions of gender are still rooted in these narratives.
Additionally, as the diasporic daughter of immigrant parents, I carry a constant expectation to embody gratitude for their sacrifices. And when our South Asian community is already marginalized by white supremacy, would I be adding another burden for my parents to carry by exposing them, not to things they didn’t imagine existed, but perhaps things they never thought I would experience? Would I be disappointing them, because the promised safe haven they thought they would find for themselves and their child, is actually nonexistent? Because even after all of that struggle and sacrifice, their daughter still somehow experienced violence.
But perhaps the most frightening part of having this conversation is not only cultural but also personal. When I think back to organizing my first protest at 16, I was really doing it for myself, because I was already a survivor at that time. If I were to disclose this experience to Appa, would he be supportive of me? If he didn’t even want to come to a vigil for a survivor of violence, how would he respond to my having experienced it? Could he even take a perspective sympathetic to my perpetrator — because as a man, at the end of the day, that would be easier for him? Even the thought of this, in addition to an already difficult and painful experience, is one that I do not have the strength to endure.
What does it mean for a parent to love their child, but not be an ally? For families to profess love for their children while simultaneously rejecting our politics and struggles? Can a bad ally still be a good parent?
These are questions that I grapple with constantly. Part of me is still like my six year old self, waiting for Appa to find this side of me, to hold me and comfort me about what was undoubtedly one of the most difficult experiences of my life. But unlike my six year old self, that was so incredibly sure that Appa would come home and find me, I am not so sure this truth that has shaped a majority of my life is something he would take so gently into his arms.