“Dear Swati, We have great news. We have fixed the marriage of your sister. The engagement is on 3rd August and wedding shall be on Feb 6th 2026. I request both you and Mark to come to India and attend the wedding to bless your younger sister. Your Papa”
The message arrived in my WhatsApp chat a few months ago – a seemingly short, straightforward & simple message from a father living in India to his daughter living in America, with an invite to attend the wedding of his younger daughter, her younger sister.
Well, short it was, but it was as straightforward as a pretzel tangled in a plate of spaghetti. And as simple as solving a Rubik’s Cube in 4D – which is how my relationship with my father and by extension with, India has felt to me for a very long time.
To help you understand one face of this cube, I want to take you with me to India, during my last visit in Feb 2020 when I was there to attend another Indian wedding – that one of my cousin, my father’s niece on his brother’s side. I am the eldest sister in my extended family and have a close relationship with most of my younger siblings. So it wasn’t a surprise when my cousin texted me in summer 2019 with a similar message asking me to plan my trip to India to attend her wedding in February 2020. “There is no way you can miss my wedding didi” – meaning elder sister – “please say you will come?” she had insisted.
I wanted to say Yes – for several reasons – first – my cousin was calling me with such affection, second despite the fact that I am Indian, Mark had never experienced the mythologized “Indian wedding” – ours was what the West would call an elopement wedding in Venice – so it was high time he attended one, and my third reason was personal – I am an immigrant to the US, the only one from my entire extended family who lives in America. I, and by extension, Mark never get to experience family get-togethers or festivals and the closeness, the affection that come with it, we are always left on the outside. My cousin’s wedding seemed like a perfect opportunity for both Mark and me to spend time with everyone and fill our own cups.
The problem was – my father and his brother – the bride’s dad – had fallen out; their disagreements adding up over the years into a family feud with no end in sight. I was not interested in perpetuating inter-generational trauma and neither were my cousins, so we had decided to stay out of the whole affair. I wasn’t sure how my father would react if I went to India to attend my cousin’s wedding when our two fathers were feuding.
So the daughters of the family – I and my cousins – tried to encourage our respective fathers to bury their hatchets and come together for this occasion. I told my father my aforementioned reasons to come to India. He remained silent. I took his silence as a sort of begrudging acquiesce.
I was wrong. I landed in Delhi in Feb 2020 to find my Whatsapp messages to my father and my half-sister Aprajita (the much younger daughter of my father and my step-mother) going unanswered. I tried to call – same result. Finally Mark was able to reach my father to get this answer – “Swati has come to attend the wedding of my enemy’s daughter thus I shall not meet her.”
To my British husband’s ears, it sounded like pure melodrama. But I heard something far worse in those words, something that cut much deeper. I heard an utter lack of need to see his daughter who lives 14,000 kilometers away and comes home once every three years, if that. It felt like another punishment in a long history of them.
Prior to this, the last time I had seen my father was in 2017, during my previous trip to India. He had been distant then too. The reason at that time was different, but similarly painful: I had refused to have a big Indian wedding in India and instead chose an elopement wedding in Venice. For my traditionalist father, that was a kick below the belt. For me, it was the result of his refusal to honor my one fervent request—that my late mother be acknowledged at any Indian wedding he organized. When he told me that my stepmother would be the only “mother” named, I withdrew completely. I would not marry in India. In doing so, I deprived him of the pleasure of marrying off another daughter.
My sister – his first daughter – had passed away before she ever had the chance to marry.
You thought I was kidding when I said it was a pretzel tangled in a plate of spaghetti!
I returned from India in 2020 without ever seeing my father. Then Covid hit and the world spun. Then I got seriously ill and my world spun another time. I had no reason or motivation to go back. But here I am 6 years later, India calling again.
My father and I have buried too much – and broken too much – between us. I don’t know about him but I have come to realize that continuing the cycle of hurts would only deepen the damage we both carry, that adding another wound to that history would not heal either of us. So I wrote back:
”Dear Papa this is very good news. A BIG congrats to all of you. We will certainly plan to attend Aprajita’s wedding in February. Let us know what help we can offer from here. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy every bit of her wedding preparation, it is a precious moment for our family, and especially for you. Your daughter, Swati”.
Swati Srivastava is an immigrant and a multi award-winning writer, director, and voiceover artist. A filmmaker & storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also a trained facilitator for Crossing Party Lines moderating conversations that bring people together across their political divides. Swati is also an environmentalist and lives in a Net Zero Energy home with her husband. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com