This is a letter to my brown parents: The parents of a queer child who makes for the unhappiest of adults. The closet is but a shard of glass, yet if I were to even dare speak those words out aloud, I fear it would be the final dagger in my parents’ dream.
As a child of immigrants, I studied hard, befriended my teachers, achieved top grades, and made it to what many argue to be the world’s best university. For me it is a dream come true, not solely for academic purposes but because in Oxford I am exactly who I am, to my core. There is no hiding, no shame,no looking over my shoulder to behave a certain way. To put it short, there is no acting in Oxford. I get to play the most important role in my life, myself.
Yet, when I am home, I am trapped. This house is a gilded cage where I often struggle for air. The only time I get a stab at freedom or Sbādhīnatā (shadinatha in Bengali) is when I close my door and I am left to my own devices. However, the first thing to note about Asian parents is no matter how old you get, privacy is not something you possess–nor is it something you can earn. Thus, I am forced to self-implode over the heady days of the summer until I am reunited with my home away from home.
My parents’ idea of success and their vision for me are intertwined. By straight brown children’s standards my parents are fairly liberal. If I had a dime for every time my parents tell me that I am to marry after graduation, give them a daughter in law (so long as she’s Muslim and willing to provide them with a house full of grandchildren) who is kind and will look after them by my side, I’d be writing this from the French Riviera or in a chic Parisian penthouse. Be that as it may, I can’t help but feel sick to my stomach at the very thought of their dream.
I’ve come to a point where I sit in my room, which my parents so generously redid for me over my gap year, and cannot help but feel like a trespasser. This is my room. It is filled with my books, my clothes, everyone and everything I have been for 21 years and yet this is not my room. This room belongs to someone else: someone who can live up to their dreams, “living” the lives others may not have lived because they followed the paths laid out to them by their parents. But make no mistake, this is not my room. This is the room for the boy that’s supposed to marry a girl, a boy that’s not supposed to wear makeup or dance the night away till the early hours of the morning with other queer people; a boy that dreams of their wedding and sees two grooms driving off into the sunset. A boy that isn’t me.
I spent the summer after Trinity attending wedding after wedding, mostly familial, thinking that when it comes down to my own wedding, it will be my party and I’ll cry if I want to, because there isn’t a single member of my family that will overcome their prejudice and pay the price of my happiness.
So, we come back to the question at hand. What is the price of happiness? In my case the price of happiness is a life without mum and dad. That’s not because they’ve passed away, but because if I utter those three words, they’ll stop knowing me.