A Visit to Madam Bedi: A Personal History by Tara Westover

My friend Sukrit invited me to India.

His mother lived in Delhi. He said I should get out of England and give my eyes something new to look at. He wouldn’t be there—he was trapped in a biology lab at Stanford—but his mother would look after me. I could stay as long as I liked.

The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother. I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it. I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me.

I don’t know where the hope lived or what it lived on. I had been estranged from my father for a year by then, but I was still telling myself that the estrangement was temporary, that the breach would heal. My mother was key. I thought she would convince my father, soften his heart. That’s how it happens in the Bible, when two souls fall out of kinship. God softens a heart. I wasn’t religious, not the way my father had raised me to be, but I believed in the softening of hearts. So I waited. For a letter. A phone call. I imagined my father saying, “Come home.” Of course I could not go to India. When my father called, I had to be ready.

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Months passed. The seasons changed. I wrote my mother every few weeks and she answered. She wrote as if everything were all right, as if we were not estranged. She told me about her days, her shopping trips with my sister, the steady expansion of her herbal business. From these lines of text, I extracted the sensation of being a daughter.

Then another year had passed with silence from my father. It was difficult, then, to keep believing that we would reconcile, but equally difficult to give up that belief. I did not know how to live with the loss of my parents, or the bitterness that the loss was introducing into my life.

I must have seemed bewildered. Somehow my friends knew. It must have been present in the tone of my voice, its vinegary flavor, because one night, when I was speaking on the phone with Sukrit, who was settled in California, whom I had not seen in the whole of that year, the conversation faltered and into the gap he repeated his strange invitation. He said I should go to India. And this time when he said it, without knowing the reason, I said that I would go.

I had met Sukrit three years before, at the University of Cambridge, where we were both graduate students. He was a biologist. I was a historian. It would be difficult to contrive two people with less in common. Sukrit was from Delhi, the eldest son of a grand Sikh family, with a royal lineage on his mother’s side. His grandfather was an inspector general. His mother was a high-powered government official. Sukrit had grown up with guards and servants, and he carried himself like someone who had. Like someone who belonged at that school.

If Sukrit’s presence at Cambridge had a whiff of inevitability, my own presence there was nearly absurd. I was out of context, a hayseed blowing among the Gothic spires and ornate marble statuary.

I had been born in Idaho, the youngest of seven children, and raised at the base of a mountain called Buck’s Peak. It was a lonely upbringing. My father said that those who follow the Lord will be shunned. He said that it was our privilege to be shunned by the world.

He was an ideologue, a sectarian, wholly devoted to his singular religion. The government was corrupt. Public education was brainwashing, a satanic instrument of a fallen world. Modern medicine—doctors and hospitals and pharmaceuticals, what he termed the “medical establishment”—was profane and godless. People of faith relied on herbalism, Dad said, so my mother brewed tinctures of black cohosh and blue vervain, oat straw and blessed thistle, what Dad called “God’s pharmacy.” He was opposed to antibiotics. Once, when I was seven or so, my father told me that if I swallowed a single tablet of aspirin, my children’s children would be deformed in the womb. “God visits the sins of the fathers on the children,” he said.

I don’t know what the source of my father’s paranoia was, only that it seemed to touch everything. Like most of my siblings, I was never put in school. I was educated at home, according to my father’s beliefs. I was also born at home, delivered by a midwife, and my birth was not registered. When I was nine, I was issued a delayed certificate of birth, but the birth date that ended up on the form was an approximation. We did not know my birthday. I still don’t know it.

When I was seventeen, I left the mountain and enrolled at Brigham Young University. It was the first time that I had set foot in a classroom, and immediately I dedicated myself to education. For the next decade I clawed at the world, trying to take from it what I needed to remake myself, to reverse the ignorance and vulnerability of my early years. My philosophy back then, my whole posture relative to the world, was one of discipline and self-sovereignty. I was a rationalist. I thought any problem could be solved by the application of will.

I climbed. I climbed from that mountain in Idaho to the University of Cambridge, where, one afternoon in my second year of graduate work, I met Sukrit, a princely Indian biologist who drank whiskey neat and laughed at his own jokes. We formed a kinship, us two. The bond was instant. Sometimes it happens like that. You meet someone, and for no obvious reason you both recognize something in the other, something beyond gender or nationality or class or race or religion. Within a month, Sukrit and I were spending every evening together, with our small circle of friends, drinking whiskey and mangling philosophy and singing sea chanteys at three in the morning outside the resplendent Great Gate of Trinity College.

I don’t remember telling Sukrit about the mountain, about my father or the estrangement. I don’t remember telling him that my own mother had refused to see me. Back then I kept my secrets or thought I did. Still, it is apparent to me now that he knew, and that probably this was the reason he told me to go to India. I had lost my own mother. Perhaps he thought he could lend me his.

The carpet at the Indira Gandhi International Airport was varicolored and vaguely modern, an intricate pattern of quadrilaterals, shades of mustard yellow and marmalade. The arrivals hall was wide and packed with travellers. I moved through immigration and saw a man clutching a sheet of white paper on which a name was scrawled. I stepped forward and nodded at the paper.

“Madam Bedi?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Satbir Bedi.”

He dipped his head, then lurched forward and claimed my case. A moment later, he was charging through the busy airport. I tried to speak with him, but he merely shook his head and said, “Hindi.”

He deposited me near the entrance, with the driver of a white car. Then Delhi was outside my window. Horns blared—squeaks from mopeds and guttural blasts from black S.U.V.s. Rickshaws, lime green and banana yellow, weaved and jinked, inserting themselves into impossibly slender gaps. I stared out at the heaving city and felt far from myself.

I knew from Sukrit that his mother was important in India, a senior government officer. As a young woman, she had risen swiftly through the ranks, and was now one of only a handful of women in the country working at her level. A decade earlier, the United Nations had sent her to Afghanistan, to Kapisa Province, to oversee the first legislative election in three decades. When she returned home, she was appointed the chief electoral officer in Delhi, one of the most prominent posts in the capital. I imagined her and felt a nervous tremor.