In her evocative new memoir, Midnight’s Daughter, Sarita Sarvate explores the intricate bonds of family, culture, identity, and belonging. Sarvate discusses deeply personal issues including mental health, divorce, and complex family relationships with honesty and vulnerability. With a keen eye for the tensions between tradition and modernity, she brings to life her experiences of navigating the complexities of Indian heritage and the wider world.
In this conversation, we discuss the inspiration behind her book, the personal and cultural questions at its heart, and the stories that continue to influence her understanding of home, memory, and identity.
Saila Kariat: What compelled you to write this book?
Sarita Sarvate: It’s been brewing inside me for a long time, because of my mother’s illness and the situation in which I grew up. When I came to the U.S. all those years ago, people asked me questions about my life in India. I wanted to write a book to tell people what I experienced.
SK: One of the things that struck me most about your memoir was your fearlessness to experiment, take risks, broaden your horizons. Your journey takes you from Nagpur to Berkeley to New Zealand. Where do you think your curiosity and courage come from?
SS: My father had tuberculosis at a time when it was hardly curable. And so, he was ill, and he moved with my mother and me to Nagpur. When I was four years old he would send me to the store. I’d go to the nearby shops to buy things; I would take the laundry to the dhobi. From the beginning, he gave me the message that I had to be very bold, that I was to be a courageous person.
SK: You chose to open your memoir with you checking into what you call a “vacation in the insane asylum.” From there, the narrative moves back and forth across six decades. How did you decide where to begin and how to move through the different periods of your life?
SS: Well, I didn’t know for a long time where to start. I would begin with the breakdown of my mother. That was the seminal event that affected my life and changed everything. Before that, I was a carefree child. I was talking to a writing professor, and she asked me, “What is the gist of your story?” That’s when it came to me. I was trying to figure out how I ended up in the same state as my mother. I was in that hospital, and I sought help because I was clinically depressed. That’s the connection between me and my mother.
SK: Memoir inevitably involves telling other people’s stories. How did you negotiate the responsibility of telling your family’s story while also telling your own truth?
SS: I don’t think I’ve said anything bad about anybody. I’ve tried to tell the truth. When I got an award and realized that my memoir was going to be published, I decided to change people’s names and let the chips fall where they may. I decided not to worry about it anymore; I can’t do anything about it now.
SK: Like many Indian families, your parents seem to have embodied both progressive and traditional values. How did those sometimes-conflicting influences shape you, and how did you navigate the tension between them?
SS: My father was progressive for his time, and so was my mother. Neither of them believed in religion, which was very unusual for people of their generation. They didn’t have idols in our house. My father would lecture to us at dinner time that God didn’t exist. I grew up believing that, but I was exposed to religion all around me, so I learned from an early age to have two conflicting ideas in my brain. Later, I experienced the conflict in a very personal way when I fell in love with a guy at IIT and my father became very traditional and judgmental, partly because he was fearful of what society would do to me.
However, later, my parents let me divorce my Indian husband. Also, when I brought my Caucasian partner to India, they didn’t mind. This issue is complicated.
SK: As a young child, you found yourself allying with your father even when he treated your mother unfairly. It was not until later in your life that you felt compassion for your mother. What brought about this change?
SS: I realized, to some extent, the pressure she was under once I experienced my father’s domineering personality as he was trying to arrange my marriage. He didn’t handle that well at all. That was when I understood my mother better. But I must be honest, all my life I thought that my mother behaved this way because she didn’t love me. She neglected me so fundamentally, like she wouldn’t tell me what a period was; I was bleeding all over and nobody helped me. That had a very traumatic impact on me. I felt humiliated in school. I really resented her for a long time.
She just really loved my brother.
SK: That’s very traditional – Indian mothers favoring the sons.
SS: Here she was, a liberal feminist, yet when it came to me and my brother, she had a very traditional attitude. So did my father. He wanted my brother to stay at home because he was the only son, but he didn’t care if I went abroad because he wouldn’t have to pay my dowry. (Laughing)
SK: How did your views and behavior about your mother’s mental health change throughout your life?
SS: From the time she had the breakdown until my marriage to my first husband, the Indian husband, my views did not change much. During that period, my mother and her sister stayed with me for a few weeks. For the first time, I had an opportunity to spend time alone with her. She was doing well, spending quality time, and getting out from under my father’s domineering rule. Then one day eunuchs came begging for money when I was at work. They came to the garden, surrounded my mother, and danced and sang, harassing her. They terrified her; she thought they were attacking her. She regressed, and I had to send her home to Nagpur. This incident made me more compassionate about my mother’s plight.
SK: You entered a loveless arranged marriage that did not end well. Was divorce primarily an act of courage, desperation, self-preservation, or all three? How did this affect the remainder of your journey?
SS: It affected my journey tremendously. I think it was more about courage – me reaching for my dream. Once I came to Berkeley, I felt things were going to be wonderful. I had silly ideas that once I got rid of my husband, I was going to fall in love, and everything was going to be like Hollywood. I really loved Berkeley; I loved the freedom that American women seemed to experience.
SK: Your name seems to have a lot of significance in the book. In fact, the title of the book comes from Nehru’s famous midnight speech. But you kept the name that your ex-husband gave you, Sarita, instead of your birthname Aruna, and kept both your first and last name.
SS: Yes, in the state of Maharashtra, it’s the tradition to change a bride’s first name as well as surname. At first, I hated being called Sarita instead of Aruna (I was named after the freedom fighter, Aruna Asif Ali). But after a while, I embraced the idea of taking on a new identity. I didn’t want my relatives in India to start scandals about me. The first time I went back to India, I just acted as if I was not married. My name was Sarvate, and unless I met somebody from my hometown, nobody knew who I was.
SK: You break many Indian cultural taboos, including writing explicitly about your sexual experiences. Did you find this uncomfortable or embarrassing? If so, how did you overcome that?
SS: Originally, when I was writing, I wasn’t thinking about anybody reading the book. Now I realize, of course, people are going to read it, and maybe they’ll judge me. I’m at such a stage of my life where I think, ” What’s going to happen now? Who’s going to care what I do? I don’t feel bothered by it. I also see the narrative as a story – as though it is happening to someone else.
SK: Your book deals with patriarchy as well as racism. Were there moments when you realized that escaping one form of limitation could expose you to another?
SS: At first, I didn’t realize about racism in America because everybody was so nice in Berkeley and I was living the student life. But in the mainstream, there is a lot of racism, particularly where I worked in the city; I think it’s a hard bargain that you must make. But patriarchy is here in America, too; you don’t escape it by leaving India. I faced a lot of male expectations and demands in America, in the Western world.
SK: Did America give you the freedom you were looking for, or did you discover that freedom comes with its own form of exclusion and prejudice?
SS: That’s why I wrote about seeking my own continent. At first, I felt like my graduate school friends in Berkeley were my cohort. But then, later, I discovered that was not the case. They were Americans, and they had certain privileges they were born with. Then I became involved with an Englishman, Stuart.
SK: It was interesting how you describe slipping back into the colonial mentality because your husband was English and your stepdaughters were white, and you felt somehow superior.
SS: That was also emblematic of my parents’ generation. A lot of people in India were for independence, but they were also Anglophiles. My father worshipped the English people, and so did my mother. She worked in Mumbai with Anglo-Indian women, which was very unusual at that time in her generation. She said that Christians were the best people. I grew up with that, and I had that bias built into me.
SK: The book is ultimately about reclaiming your own identity. When in your life did you first feel you were no longer simply fulfilling somebody else’s idea of who you should be?
SS: It was a slow process, an evolution. As I began to write, as I started to express my perspectives and opinions, as my audience affirmed my feelings and thoughts, I began to feel more confident in reclaiming my identity. I stopped looking to society, parents, husbands, and kids for defining my happiness.
SK: The title of your book has the tagline “The country was free. Its daughters were not.” If you could define freedom today, what would you say it is?
SS: Freedom for me is the ability to express myself, to have a voice, to define for myself what happiness is. I don’t cater to the prevailing norms of success and fulfillment, be they in the mainstream or the South Asian community. This approach has freed me and my children from living up to societal expectations.
SK: If 13-year-old Aruna could meet the Sarita of today who wrote this book what would she think?
SS: She would be shocked. I don’t think she ever thought she would do any of the things I did. She used to think that she would end up in England or somewhere cold, alone. That was the extent of her imagination. She would be very pleased that I did all these things. All of them were not pleasant or safe or convenient. I think she’d be very impressed.
SK: What do you hope stays with readers after reading your book?
SS: I want them to resonate with me, to feel some compassion for me. I want them to be moved by my story, because it moves me. Most of all, I want them to like me as a writer. It’s important to be able to put the human experience into words. And they should be beautiful words making a meaningful story.
