Written by Meghna Rao
Illustrations by Hana Iqbal

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Here is the hero’s story. She is 18, living in Mangalore, arranged to a man who works in America, in Manhattan. She moves first to Flushing, to an apartment thick with cockroaches, then eastwards to Queens Village, an old suburban experiment where Dutch Colonial homes squeeze tight like a fist, where neighbors pass along rat infestations and chutney soca music.

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Their $40,000 home fills fast with relations. Parents, three of them, arrive from Mangalore and Abu Dhabi, a dodamma, an ajja, an ammamma. Brothers, cousins, sisters, carry into the home. Visitors sleep in the living room for days at a time. The hero sees all of this as easy to accommodate. She dyes the parents’ hair, buys them knock-off Nike hoodies and Chinese slippers from the cheap stores on Jamaica Ave. She is the first in their community to have children in America. And the others join the home’s domestic labor ranks, bathing and oiling and patting dry their bodies.

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But the hero is not happy to just be the manager of the home. She wants growth. She wants to transform. She wants to help her family out of their single-income rut. After her second child, she returns to school. The dining table crowds with textbooks. When she graduates, the university puts her on the brochure, Moms Who Inspire Us. Her whole family shows up for graduation. Even her children, ten and five, clap until their palms tingle, moved to see a woman of their kind doing things that feel impossible.

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Impossible, because a certain class of immigrant parent must only sacrifice. Scoop out chunks of themselves until their lineage goes somewhere. This has been true for so long it’s almost left a wrinkle in the immigrant dream. This wrinkle sits furrowed alongside another truth: Childcare is near-impossible to come by.

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Private forms of childcare are not reliable; what the market has wrought are whole widths of neighborhoods with no childcare facilities, prices that skyscrape endlessly, and household expenses that vapor and rise. There is a fork that depends on where a budget can be allocated, whether one decides it’s more prudent to stay at home and save on childcare, or go to work and spend on childcare. In-between are solutions like the $10-a-child illegal daycare that takes place in the home next door, out of which dozens of children dart whenever there is a rumor that a government auditor will show up. 

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But the government can not be relied on either, and children are a tug-of-war rope pulled left and right. Another story as old as time. In 1971, the Comprehensive Childhood Development Act is proposed, a multibillion-dollar national daycare system with an income-based sliding scale. It’s rejected by then-president Richard Nixon, criticized as “communal" and a threat to the nuclear family. In 2021, a similar thing happens with Joe Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better Act, which includes mention of universal and free kindergarten—it is not allowed to pass until the radical act of widely-available childcare is stripped out.

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So the daughter’s memory of her childhood is like a sudden chink of light that appears underneath the heavy weight of a midnight bedroom door. It should never have happened, it was a miracle. 

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It is her ajja, her mother’s father, who teaches her about how the world is structured; her grandmother, her ammamma, who shows her the dark moustache of a robin, the glassy tail of a blue-jay. And it is the far-away place that her dodamma—her father's mother—stares at, that far-away place that she tries to see too, that teaches her about the distance and the invisibility of grief. Then in the evenings, her father in a suit, the city in his eyes. And now and then, on the days that feel the most alive, her mother.

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The daughter eventually encounters a fork; she must decide whether or not she wants to gestate for nine months, create a small organic intelligence, become the hero. There is a tender, umbilical part of her that remembers how her younger brother wrapped his hand around her pointer, how his eyes puddled with happiness.

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But she also remembers the chaos, the stress. The closed bedroom door under which there was only a thin spine of light let in. She finds a well-known theory that every woman seems to have already read, of the “good-enough mother,” coined in 1953 by British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott. 

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Winnicott says something like this: No mother can meet every need; in fact, neither can life. One must be disappointed to understand. One must be let down to live. A good mother must be imperfect. “The gradual process of disillusionment,” writes Winnicott, “is part of the parent’s task.”

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But the daughter gristles at this. What was the point of all of this—the immigration, the return-to-school, the selves scooped out of the body? Was it so she could disappoint? 

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It is not until a few years later that she is reminded of her ajja, her ammamma, her dodamma. Of the minor characters. She is an adult, helping a child who is not her own with his math homework. The child's mother is undocumented, his father is not around. He tells her that of late he's been feeling anxious, that even though he understands proportional numbers and decimals, he finds himself forgetting when he gets to the test. And she tells him to keep her in his mind next time, to remember that she believes in him.

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When he smiles, it clicks. The story was never about the hero. It was never about her disappointments, her victories. All along, the story was about everyone, the minor characters, the ones never-named, each a pearl in a long string of temporary heroes.

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Meghna Rao is a writer and editor from Queens. She's also the EIC of Veena!

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