An Unwanted Inheritance: A Fractured Love
“Mumma says: We. Are. In. The. Hospital.” My Tesla announces in its flat, mechanical voice as I turn onto El Camino Real after school
Again?
She calls before I can gather my thoughts, launching straight into the rundown: My dad is in the ICU. His left leg is turning black, the calf muscle stiff with blood clots. It hurts when he rests but not when he walks.
Last week’s surgery cleared the biggest clots, but smaller ones remain — too many, too scattered to operate. The doctors want to give him heparin, but the risk is a brain bleed. She doesn’t know what to do.
As I pull into the driveway, she’s still talking.
Inside, I type “SFO to Delhi” into Google. Before the list of options populates, I close the tab.
I tell her to wait it out. See what the doctors say in the morning.
“Try to get some sleep,” I say, knowing she won’t.
I don’t want to go.
I just need him to be okay so I don’t have to go.
My husband — who just had back surgery and still can’t sit — offers to make the 23-hour journey. “I’ll manage,” he says when I question him. “They need someone to be there for them and it’s not you.”
He’s done this before. Fulfilled the role of the son they never had. Over and over in the ten years since our daughter was born.
My heart pounds. It feels like drowning — the suffocating helplessness of being a child again — I’d rather be drowning.
***
My mom has always maintained he was a terrible husband. But, for the most part, I didn’t think of him as a terrible father.
As an only child of working middle-class parents, I was used to being alone.
I raised myself in all the small ways. Lunches, homework, bedtime stories. But in the big moments, he was always there. Not my mom — as was culturally expected in those time. My dad.
He waited at every finish line. He was always at parent-teacher meetings. He attended every debate, concert, elocution contest.
He glowed with pride at awards functions. He showed up, he clapped, he beamed.
He knew all my friends — their names and quirks. The way I now know my daughter’s friends — the ones who bite their nails, those who sing when they’re scared, the ones who are Sabrina Carpenter devotees and those who loathe her.
I still have the black-and-white photos from before I turned five. Each one bears his careful handwriting on the back — precise dates, locations, little notes about what I was doing.
“First day of school with Mrs. Potters.”
“Birthday party, age 4, Hotel Clarks Awadh.”
“Learning to cycle — yellow tricycle, Mansi’s favorite color.”
He was sentimental that way. Still is.
When we FaceTime, I see his pale, unshaven face, his tired, puffy eyes still trying to project strength. He coughs as he reminisces about the dragonfruit smoothies we made the last time he visited three years ago. I hear him trying hard to be strong for all of us, but mostly for me, so I don’t worry — because he knows, despite everything, I will.
***
I was in fifth grade when I first saw it — my dad feeding her from his own plate. She was wearing a maroon silk sari with a print my mom would’ve called “gaudy.” I’d met her once before, a year ago, at his office. She had kind eyes.
The air was thick with the scent of soy sauce mixed with coriander and fried garlic, the hiss of woks punctuated by servers shouting orders. My shoes — black Mary Janes, polished that morning — clacked against the tiled floor as I froze mid-step.
We had had an early dismissal, so my friends and I had bicycled over from school, pocket money in hand, to indulge in a leisurely adult-free lunch at the hottest Indo-Chinese restaurant in Lucknow.
Through the restaurant’s dim lighting, I watched the shimmer of her gold bangles as she flicked her hair. He leaned in and whispered something that made her laugh. A laugh I can still hear, echoing three decades later.
I had never heard him make my mother laugh like that.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Then the realization: I couldn’t let them see.
“Let’s go to the snack shack and get burgers instead,” I said, already walking away. “They’re faster and cheaper.” No one questioned me.
He came home that evening, business as usual.
The doors, the drawers, the metal pots — everything banged, everything echoed. My sanctuary of silence disrupted by two adults who never learned how to cohabitate in peace.
Saturday evening, we went there for dinner. Our weekly family tradition. The manager greeted us warmly, “Mr. Bhatia, your table of three is ready.”
He was complicit. As were the servers. As was I.
But before shame could wash over me, before I could feel anger on behalf of my mom, before I could even comprehend the complexity of this closed ecosystem, my dad said: “Mansi’s favorite appetizers first.”
How could I hate this man?
In 1990s India, a man’s infidelity existed in a peculiar visibility — acknowledged yet unspoken. The servants knew, the society aunties knew, trading whispers at kitty parties over dainty cups of chai and plates of fried snacks. I think my mom knew, too. But it was just another item on the balance sheet of compromise. Even among professional women, divorce remained shameful — evidence of her failure, not his.
I ate my gobhi manchurian in silence while my parents looked around the room, nary a word exchanged. We were all just going through the motions. The box for family outing on a weekend, checked. Social status, unharmed.
It was survival. It was how things worked. And so, I learned to pretend nothing was wrong.
When I talk to them now, I want to say “I love you. Thank you for everything you did for me.”
But the words catch in my throat. It’s hard for me to be grateful — I don’t owe them anything. Not my presence. Not my forgiveness. Not my grief.
And yet — I owe them my life. This life with my husband, my daughter, our pup.
***
I was eleven when I told my parents what my grandfather had done to me.
My dad’s response, “Oh, he must have been joking.”
My mom asked: “Are you sure?”
As if molestation was a prank. As if the violation of my body was a misunderstanding. As if his father’s honor was more important than my truth.
It was.
Despite their constant bickering, they were united in this silence — almost as if their non-acknowledgment meant it never happened.
I sat on my bed afterward, knees pulled to my chest, my grey cotton t-shirt damp with a steady stream of tears. The white ceiling fan whirred overhead, the same rhythmic sound that had accompanied my grandfather’s visits to my room.
I wanted to scream, to break things, to shatter the silence they had wrapped around me, encasing me like a mummy. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Because even as a pre-teen, I understood that in our world, certain things remained unspoken. Sexual abuse existed in a vacuum of language — untranslatable into the vocabulary of our family.
My grandfather died a saint, with a lavish ceremony I didn’t attend. His photo still hangs in my father’s office, garlanded with fresh flowers. That face — those eyes — stare at me during every FaceTime call. Revered. Protected. Preserved.
While I learned to carry my pain alone, my truth erased.
My mom was always careful with her silences, her face unreadable. But for my dad to react that way? I didn’t understand it. I felt cheated. He was supposed to have my back. He had always been there in my big moments…not anymore.
Maybe it was too painful for him to imagine. That it had happened inside our home, in the room next to his. That his own father had done this to me. Maybe accepting my reality would have collapsed his own?
And so he chose silence over me.
I knew then that there would be no protection. My grandmother had known, had seen, had heard — and done nothing. Now my dad, too, chose denial.
I never told them about the other relatives, the cousins, the uncles that followed.
Now, decades later, I understand this wasn’t just my dad’s personal failure. It was cultural inheritance. In a society where family honor superseded individual trauma, where collective appearance mattered more than private pain, denial wasn’t just convenient — it was necessary.
I look at the flight schedules again. But I can’t make myself go through with it. Because going to Lucknow means returning to a place where my body was never fully my own.
Where I always felt unsafe. Where I still feel shunned.
***
When I was in high school, I had him followed. By a friend’s cousin. Someone he wouldn’t recognize. Every time he said he was at a conference, a work meeting, a business trip — he was at her house. The memory that’s burned into my head is my parents’ 20th anniversary. He spent it watching a cricket match at her place.
It infuriated me. But I said nothing.
I was quietly collecting proof of his betrayal. Ammunition. For what? I don’t know. I never told on him. Maybe I just wanted confirmation of the truth.
When he picked up his mistress’s daughter on our way to the hotel management institute where I had dreamed of getting a seat, I was surprised. There was no conversation. And before he introduced me to his friend — the institute’s director — he introduced her. I never asked him why. I didn’t need to. I already knew his justification.
That daughter needed it more.
That daughter wasn’t as bright.
That daughter didn’t have her own father.
I did.
He’d help me find “another passion.” One that didn’t compete with hers. Because I had a safety net. Because I had access to resources she didn’t. Because, all said and done, he was my dad.
And so it continued.
Right after my graduation, when we moved to the condo my parents had spent years saving for, the mistress came to our old place — the only home I’d ever known.
He gave her everything. Big things and small.
The brown velvet couch where I sprawled with my books. The dining table where he had once sketched out Pythagoras’ theorem for me. The fuchsia vase he had brought back for me from Nainital — on a trip I now suspect wasn’t just for work.
Pieces of our life, packed up and sent to hers.
“She’s a widow,” he explained to my mother after the introductions.
Charity is a virtue. Kindness to widows is a social obligation. What could my mother say?
We both knew what this was. He wasn’t just being generous. He was building a parallel universe. A home with our furniture. A family at our dining table. A life with the kind of devotion my mother and I no longer offered.
“They need these things more than we do,” he told my mother, noting she was his colleague and he felt obliged to help a single mom. “You’ll redecorate anyway.”
As if generosity could mask betrayal.
As if our home — our lives — were disposable.
I noticed how he never called her by her first name — always Mrs., followed by her last name.
As if honoring her dead husband somehow absolved him of moral guilt.
It’s been 23 years since I moved to the States. Every night, as I drift into sleep, their day is just beginning. Every morning, when I wake, they are ending theirs.
I wake up sometimes at 2:30 am, his mistress’s voice echoing in my ears: “Beta, how are you?” Addressing me with a familiarity I hate and a tenderness my mother never had.
***
I heard him crying once when I was in senior year. Late at night.
“Do you even love me anymore?” he asked my mother, between sobs.
I pressed my ear against their heavy wooden door. This wasn’t a question I had ever imagined him asking.
He was the one who fed another woman from his plate.
He was the one who built a life outside our home.
He was the villain. She was the victim.
That was the story. And yet — here he was. Crying.
“You are spineless! Stop touching me!” she spat. More sobbing.
I went back to my room, sitting on the same bed in which I had been molested for years, wondering if she was referring to that day. The day they found out about my grandfather.
Did they ever talk about it? Did she turn away from him then, disgusted, unable to bear the sight of his face? Did she stay in the marriage for me — because she didn’t want me to grow up fatherless like she did?
When I look at myself in the mirror, I see him. Growing up, I was told by just about everyone that I looked exactly like my dad. Nothing like my mother.
I wonder if that’s what she saw too. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t love me. Maybe that’s why she held it back — because every time she looked at me, she saw him.
The man who betrayed her. The man she resented. The man who ruined her life.
How could she allow herself to soften when the thing she hated most stared back at her through my face?
She couldn’t separate me from him. The same way she could never separate her identity from his. Always “Mrs. Bhatia,” even her name subsumed into his.
She was a bank manager — a nine-to-five job with steady pay. He was an insurance consultant whose earnings depended on commissions, unpredictable as the seasons.
This gave her a chutzpah many women of her generation never possessed. She had broken the glass ceiling when women were still expected to remain subservient to their husbands. Those who reported to her at work didn’t know how to address her. They called her “sir.”
She had options. She could have left.
“I’d never let my mother lose face by failing at my marriage,” she said once, when I was brave enough to ask why she stayed.
This excuse died with my grandmother in 2016. But my mother has remained wedded to the idea of marriage.
“I cannot leave him because he is dependent on me,” she told me after his first heart attack. “I can’t just pick up and leave everything I’ve built. I have a social status. You don’t understand.”
I didn’t. All I saw was obligation, duty, and occasionally, martyrdom.
When enraged she would shout: “You know that the entire society will totally support me if I left you!” But then in the next breath: “I’m not that hard-hearted.”
There’s a sainthood syndrome there. Maybe narcissism. I’m not sure. Rage is a kind of purpose, too. Without it, what would be left?
Perhaps after two decades, the marriage — sham as it was — had become comfortable. When we moved to the new condo in 1999, she retired. She had her savings, her routines, her identity as the wronged wife.
Starting over in late-forties would have meant more than leaving a man. It would have meant rewriting a narrative where she was the sole victim, the one who endured. Indian society supported that story. It provided no script for a woman who chose herself instead.
Maybe it’s easier to live in heartbreak than to heal. Easier to settle into “it is what it is” than to admit she could have built something else.
***
In 2007, when my dad had a heart attack, she came to the hospital with his favorite dishes. She didn’t know my mother was keeping vigil.
A confrontation erupted in the hallway. Public. Brazen. Unapologetic.
I wasn’t there. I just heard about it years later. By then, I had built a life an ocean away from their choices.
The affair had been going on for almost twenty years. Two decades of parallel lives. Of knowing and not knowing. Of seeing and pretending not to see.
It ended in 2009. I think.
That’s the thing about deception — you never know when, or if, it truly ends.
My parents came to visit us for three months in California. We bought him an international calling card so he could keep tabs on insurance collections, ensure there were no lapses.
Instead, he used it to call her. Late at night. After we had all gone to bed.
My husband overheard one of them. Not just a phone call. A murmur. A hush. Sweet nothings. He knew the stories. He had heard them all. But he had never witnessed it.
He was stunned. He refused to play along. Barging into the guest bedroom, he confronted my dad. It was ugly, the way truth often is. He asked my dad to leave, encouraging my mother to stay. She chose to go with dad.
Tickets were booked within minutes — premium paid for a hasty departure — their bags packed, a door closed.
For a year, each time my dad called from India my husband refused to answer. For a year, I watched my dad crumble under the weight of a consequence he had never before faced.
That was what broke him. Not my mother’s silence. Not my quiet compliance. But losing the son he never had. That was what finally made him stop.
I think.
Because corroded trust never truly rebuilds. But in our family, honesty was never welcomed. It was easier to pretend things never happened. It was less disruptive. Labeled as compromise. Filed under “this is what family does.” A 47-year-marriage of lies.
***
18 months after the confrontation, my dad used the newly launched FaceTime feature — one my husband had helped build — to ask for forgiveness. His hands were folded. His eyes downcast. His voice low.
“Please forgive me, beta. I have made terrible mistakes. I am ashamed. I know I have hurt you, but I am not ready to lose you. I have ended it. I am sorry.”
My husband, who had held firm for over a year, softened at the sight of this proud man humbled. But I had seen this before.
I had seen apologies followed by resumed behavior. I had seen regret without change. But my husband is a forgiving man who believes in redemption.
And so, he let my dad back in.
Since then, my husband has stepped into the space I cannot bring myself to. He visits them every six months when he’s on work trips. He replaces their broken faucets, helps them buy new dishes, fixes their toaster oven. He talks to them about their finances, their pain points, their desires.
Between my husband and my parents, repair is simple. He is the son they never had.
I, on the other hand, remain a complication. A reminder of a past that cannot be erased.
When my mother fell and broke her pelvic bone three years ago, I booked a flight with trepidation — I hadn’t been home in twelve years. But I went.
Not for her. For my dad.
He didn’t know how to cook. Didn’t know how to manage a household. Had never been in the position of being a caretaker. He was helpless in a way he had never been before.
So I went. To help him.
“How could you leave your seven-year-old behind to fend for herself?” — these were the words my bedridden mother welcomed me with.
Not gratitude.
Not relief.
An accusation. A verdict.
I was told I had failed as a mother and a wife. My presence was “unnecessary and unasked for.” I stayed for five days then flew back vowing never to make this mistake again.
She isn’t asking me to come now. And I am not waiting for her to ask.
***
The California sun spills across my desk while rain lashes the hospital windows in Lucknow. Eight thousand miles between us — a geographical distance that never feels far enough from the familial obligation that still pulls at me.
I’ve crafted a life defined by speech rather than silence. My husband and I have created a home where our daughter learns that her voice matters, her body is her own, her truth is sacred.
Yet for all my determination to break the cycle, I still find myself slipping into inherited patterns.
Three weeks ago, my husband and I argued over something trivial — the proper way to load the dishwasher. I heard myself dictating exactly how the glasses should be arranged, where the spatula belonged, why his way was all wrong.
Suddenly, I saw his face fall in a way I recognized from childhood — the look of someone whose agency has been stripped away, who has been reduced to a child without choices.
In that moment, I saw not my mother’s cold detachment, but her rigid control. Different manifestation, same inheritance.
“I’m sorry,” I said, stopping mid-sentence.
Later that night, we talked about it — an uncomfortable conversation but one layered with truth. An honest look at who we were becoming as a couple. It was not about the dishwasher. It was about how his work was pulling him away from us. How my small but constant corrections were piling up as his failures. How and what we needed to shift.
Because our marriage means more to us than an obligation, a social farce, or a mirage.
Our conversation was a rupture in the pattern. A rebellion against inheritance.
By asking, instead of assuming. By listening, instead of shutting down. By making sure incomplete sentences get a moment to be said — fully, honestly. By holding space for disappointment without weaponizing it against each other.
***
Now, my dad is in the ICU.
And my mother is keeping vigil. Like she did in 2007.
But this time, there are no confrontations in hallways. No mistress showing up with his favorite dishes.
Just mom.
She spent years watching him — the suits he packed for “work trips,” the browser history that vanished before he let her use his iPad, the abrupt change in his tone as she walked in on a hushed phone conversation.
Now she watches his left leg darken, his circulation constrict, his body fail.
For the first time in decades, she is watching not to catch him in a lie, but to see if he will keep breathing.
My dad has apologized to me and my husband many times since the confrontation over the phone card. We’ve talked about his infidelity, his repentance, his wanting a do-over. But he’s also said, “Your mother doesn’t make it easy.”
And I get it. She doesn’t.
Over FaceTime, my mother fills in medical details in that efficient way of hers — just the facts. But this time, her voice is shaky. Unsure.
Our pup bounds into the room, his red squeaky “hot sauce” toy in mouth, tail spinning wildly in circles. He drops it at my feet and paws my knees, announcing his presence to everyone.
“Does he want to play?” my dad asks, his face brightening for the first time. My mother leans in, adjusts her glasses.
I lift him up to the camera. He sniffs at the screen, then smothers my face in licks.
My mother laughs — a sound I haven’t heard in weeks.
“He’s gotten so big,” my dad says.
For a moment, we are just a family talking about a dog.
Not an unwilling daughter.
Not a wronged wife.
Not a husband and dad fighting to live.
I bid them goodnight with a promise to check in the next morning. I throw the toy down the hallway and watch our three-year-old Labradoodle scramble after it, his nails clicking against the hardwood floors.
I can’t forget what I saw in that restaurant when I was 10. I can’t unsee the furniture from our home disappearing to fill another woman’s void. I can’t unfeel the betrayal of watching him champion another girl’s future while mine took second place. I can’t forgive his dismissal of my abuse.
And yet, as an adult, I see complexities that eluded me as a child.
I understand now why my dad might have been drawn to her — this helpless woman who was everything my mother wasn’t: demure, long-haired, feminine, quiet. With her, he could be the protector, the provider, the man. Not the husband whose salary fell short, whose masculinity was threatened by his wife’s success.
I see how my mother’s resentment became a weapon — how she wielded her pain to ensure he would suffer too. “Ours was a love marriage,” she would shriek through the bedroom door flinging whatever hard objects she could find. “It was your choice. You chose me.”
She made sure he carried the full weight of his betrayal. Maybe staying in the marriage was her ultimate punishment. His ultimate redemption.
In the quiet spaces between his shallow breaths, I hear it — the longing for something we lost decades ago. The undoing of years. The erasing of distance. The desperate wish to go back to before.
Before I was 11. Before I told him what his father had done to me. Before he chose his own father’s honor over mine. Before I learned that he would never protect me. Before I had to carry that knowing.
But time doesn’t move backward.
Now I see that if he had confronted my grandfather, it would have dismantled his understanding of patriarchal protection. It would have meant accepting he had failed as a father — how could he cope with this after already failing as a husband?
I’ve realized that parents — though placed on pedestals in Indian culture, almost deified — are simply people. Flawed, frightened, fumbling through life like the rest of us.
This understanding doesn’t erase the hurt. It doesn’t make forgiveness any easier.
I do love them. In a complicated, fractured way. I love the father who drove me to school. I love the father who beamed with pride at my achievements. I love the father who, despite his failings, never abandoned me entirely. And I think I love my mother, too. I just haven’t figured out which parts of her.
His leg blackens from the blood clots — tissue dying from lack of circulation. Like a relationship starved of truth. Like a family suffocated by silence. I wonder if there’s a way to stop the spread, perhaps some amputations are inevitable.
I wonder when he’ll be discharged, if he’ll recover, if he’ll heal enough to visit us again — to spend the summer on our deck with his only grandchild.
There is so much left unspoken, so much I don’t know how to unravel, so much pain that has no place to go.
I don’t want to board that plane. But I don’t want to hold onto this forever, either.
***
I type “SFO to Delhi” into Google.
A list of flights appears.
I close the tab.
