Shifting "Lakshmi"-Abandoned on 1.1.1970

I was born a girl in India in the 70s—a healthy 7-pound “Lakshmi” in the making,to my parents-a banker and a housewife until I wasn’t.. My mother had gone to her mother’s house to birth me, a little town called Garh,some thirty miles away from the big town,Delhi where my banker father lived. My mother waited for days, weeks, and a whole month after my birth for my father in her mother’s house. Neither did he call nor did he write any letters-no letters of love, no letters of anger, no letters of tears-just the icy silence of indifference from a man who had already decided I should have been born a golden boy, and not a girl for which dowry should be accumulated.Abandoned on 1.1.1970 for belonging to a gender that India called Devi and worshipped in temples as Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, but I was abandoned.

After a month of staying with her mother, my mother decided to travel to Delhi to my father’s place. The methi laddus packed in her steel dabba, clothes from her mother for my father their son-in-law, fresh ghee from the milk of the four cows that lived with my grandmother, and me in her arms, she took the first bus to Delhi. I like to think my infant skin memorized her grip: the way she held me like something precious, but braced for battle.If body always remembers, then my body remembers my mom’s strong but feathery embrace. Her eyes had the resolve that I was her daughter and she would protect me.

When she reached my father’s home in Delhi, my father had already left for the bank. She knocked on Sonu Aunty’s blue door with her arms that were tired of holding me and the laddus and the luggage. Kumkum, ghanti, and the golden diya welcomed her. “Lakshmi aayi hai ghar mein” -chants were said first by Sonu Aunty and then repeated by one more neighbor, then the next neighbor, and pretty much the whole neighborhood knew that I had arrived. I was passed around from one set of green bangled arms to the next set of red bangled arms, their voices stitching me into the family tapestry with every "Lakshmi aayi hai!" and by the time my father came back from work, “lakshmi aayi hai” chant had rewritten my story.

My father held the infant me in his arms, and the “girl” that he had abandoned became “Lakshmi” in his arms. I was not a disappointment;I was a blessing.

Out of the four siblings, I had, I was prized. I got the first dibs at everything. I was treated like a lakshmi-I could do nothing wrong, say nothing wrong, my wishes were my dad’s command, I was my dad’s pride, until I wasn’t.

In the India of 90s, in the longing ambitious eyes of parents, there were only two lucrative career paths-either the child would join the noble medical profession and become a doctor-so parents could introduce their children as Dr. so and so to their kin and clan, or a child could become an engineer and have a stable job. My father was proud that his older son dreamt the same things for himself as he did for him. The mother that raised me also gave fire to my independent spirit. I wanted to be a doctor -this is where my father and I connected-and a chasm as deep as the River Ganga that flowed near my big city was created when I told my dad, “I want to be a doctor for animals.”

My heart leapt with joy when there was a black cat near my house. Sonu Aunty and the neighbors would tell me that black cat brings bad luck-their words encouraged me to hold the cat. The teen me believed that the street dogs were hungry when they barked. I hid my roti from my steel plate,nested it in my fist, waited till my mother got busy with her never ending chores of brooming,cooking,cleaning, and shouting after my brothers to get them to study. I would sneak out of the house,tip toeing, gently opening our iron gate to give the roti to the waiting dogs in front of the house. They had started to wait for me.I could have a conversation with them.

“What will I tell my friends, that my daughter is an animal doctor?” My dad thundered,his words piercing my heart like thousand needles.

Father’s pride of “Lakshmi” gone in seconds buried because the daughter voiced her free will. If my father behaved like a thundering lion, my mother again got her bangled hands on to my cheeks, wiping off each tear, holding my palpitating chest, and rubbing some ice on my pimpled forehead.

“How will you become an animal doctor? Do you know the process?"Tell me how it works. This… veterinary college."”

Her words were a soothing Tiger Balm; she smuggled brochures into my room between saree folds. She took me to far off cities for my GRE and TOEFL exams-the journey from an Indian college to an American university began wrapped in her winter shawl protected from the frosty words of my father.

On a certain summer day when the sun was as bright as it could be, in one of the year in the 90s I was awarded the P.H.D and my parents traveled three thousand miles to see me become a doctor. I was the first person from the hundreds of relatives to get an American degree and in a second which had felt like eternity,my father’s pride returned in gold-plated diya that lit our pooja ghar in Delhi.I was the one month old “Lakshmi” again. Congratulations from everyone that my father knew came pouring for him and I was feeling like “lakshmi” again. He paraded me through relatives’ homes, my degree a shield against their whispers. "My daughter, the American doctor," he said, as if the for animals part had dissolved somewhere over the Atlantic.I was my dad’s pride-until I wasn’t.

India is a country that is united despite the multiple languages, the multiple food habits, the multiple cultural traditions-yet completely divided. My father from Delhi would eat the same Tur Dal and enjoy it daily,but if he found curry leaves in the dal, he would not eat it. And yet again-I like my dal with curry leaves, a necessary ingredient for Tur Dal if the dal is cooked in Chennai. I fell in love with the curry-leaves-eating-man from Chennai, whom I met in America. I called my dad from America to tell him that I was planning to marry the man from the region that ate curry leaves.

“What will I tell my family? How will I tell my family that my “lakshmi” will marry not one of our own. You disappoint me!”My father’s voice crackled through the phone line, a live wire of betrayal.

Once again the adult child of my father had brought disgrace to him by expressing free will. This time I hung up. Immediately, barely after a few tense seconds,the phone rang. My mother’s laughter fizzed through the receiver, bright as soda pop.Her soft laughter and loud questions about my guy filled the sage green walls of my American apartment. She wanted to meet my guy and was overjoyed that I found someone with whom I could share my life story.

Somewhere in Delhi, my father’s Lakshmi had fallen from her pedestal again. From three thousand miles away, my father inadvertently had built me, in his abandonment had shown me that I could and will give all the chances to myself, for curry leaves, for dogs and dinosaurs, and I will be anti-fragile.